In part one of this post I talk about Endorphin, Dopamine and Serotonin. Go check out that first if you haven’t already- here
I said that serotonin can be dangerous. But how? Well, it can make us want status so much that we forget to care about other humans. Which is not good. Corporations are sometimes on the victim side of this as their serotonin boosted Executives forget about employee’s well being.
If you feel like you need more confidence, what you need is a boost in serotonin. An easy way to get that is to by keeping good posture.
It’s time to talk about Oxytocin now. It’s often referred to as the ‘love chemical’ as it gives us sense of bond and fondness towards someone else. Oxytocin can make you want to do good for another person and feel good for it. It created comrade in armed forces and other organizations. Lack of Oxytocin and too much dopamine and serotonin in an organization may lead to too much competitiveness where everyone is trying to one up the other person. But boost oxytocin and people become cooperative and creativity flows.
There’s one more brain chemical that I want to talk about briefly. It’s called Cortisol.
Cortisol is anxiety, stress, feelings of threat. I makes our heart pump faster and our blood go quicker. It prepares us for fight or flight. It’s what pro’s call excitement before a performance and beginners call nervousness.
Cortisol is awesome for all this reasons and more. But sustained exposure to it all the time can cause from fatigue and headache to various diseases. It can generate bad mood which in turn ruins marriages and disturbs children’s mental health.
What causes a sustained overexposure?
Overly competitive workplace, low job security, anything that causes feelings of threat- like maybe comparing your humble life with the great life everyone else seem to have on display for Instagram etc.
All the other animals benefit immensely from these brain chemicals. For example, a herd deer will stop eating when they feel a Lion approaching, run for their lives with high doses of cortisol in their blood and then rest when safe. Their cortisol level will go down and they will start eating and chilling again.
But, we humans don;t live in an organic natural environment like that anymore. We are in a more advanced and sophisticated society.
We have excess of food and we can eat easily whenever we want. So there’s no need for us to be stuffing all the food at once as our dopamine tells us to. We abuse the good feelings of dopamine by watching excessive porn, gambling and staying an unusual amount of time in social media sites. All of these are harmful and should be avoided.
We live in a society where every workplace is highly competitive and there’s always backstabbers (read Lions) lurking around. For this, we are in a dangerously high dosage of cortisol- all the time! This chemical was not designed to fight in this new environment we created and now its ruining our mental and physical health and relationships.
That is why I say we humans are running on outdated softwares. Do we need an upgrade? Maybe! But also maybe not! As we can always make conscious changes in our actions. We can chose not to overeat and we can chose not to waste our lives in social media. We can refuse to work in a stressful workplace or instead we can meditate and learn how to control our own stress levels.
Socrates said, “know thyself”. This is more imperative now than ever. We need to learn about how we function so that we don’t become a victim of our own system.
See you in the next post 🙂
RaihanRiad 