How to Boost Your Brain’s Feel-Good Neurotransmitters

The premise of this article is to demonstrate that implementing a regimen to boost certain key brain chemicals can be highly beneficial to overall wellness.

Have you heard of them? These “happiness” brain chemicals? The four main feel-good chemicals are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins.

The following chemicals act as neurotransmitters and hormones (sometimes also referred to as neuromodulators), influencing our mood, pleasure, and feelings of connection, and include dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin.

Happiness comes from these four chemicals, often referred to as DOSE – dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

Dopamine: the reward and pleasure neurotransmitter that motivates you to accomplish a goal, promotes creativity, and rewards you with each step you take toward that goal. It is also crucial for movement, motivation, learning, and memory.

Oxytocin: known to many as the “love hormone,” this chemical is about building and sustaining relationships by helping promote love, trust, empathy, and bonding in relationships.

Serotonin: the “feel-good” chemical that comes from being accepted, recognized, and seen as valuable, and which is crucial for mood, appetite, digestion, learning, bone health, wound healing, and sleep.

Endorphins: natural painkillers (often resulting in a “natural” high) that the body produces in response to stress or discomfort, and are released during exercise and movement, resulting in a feeling of euphoria.

Please note that certain diets, lifestyles, medical conditions, and medications can impact any attempt at boosting these brain chemicals.

Techniques for Boosting Your Brain’s Feel-Good Neurotransmitters

Dopamine: the key is focusing on the healthiest ways to increase this chemical, including:

• Listening (singing, dancing) to favorite music

• Basking in morning or evening sunlight

• Time spent quietly in nature

• Meditating

• Deep conversations

• Working out, exercising (moving your body releases dopamine along with endorphins and serotonin)

• Touch, hugging, and massages

• Taking short walks

• Cooking a healthy meal

• Trying or creating something new

• Getting good, consistent sleep

• Cold showers or ice plunges

• Vagus nerve stimulation

• Eating foods rich in tyrosine (an amino acid critical for dopamine production), including turkey, grassfed beef, pastured eggs, organic dairy, seeds, nuts, and legumes.

Note: Be wary of dopamine traps, such as social media, video games, and binge-watching shows.

Oxytocin: the key is building healthy, supportive, and loving relationships and spending quality and happy times with these people is critical. Examples include:

• Spending time with favorite people

• Showing gratitude and appreciation to others

• Sharing your love and feelings with others

• Hugging, touching, and safe physical connection (cuddling, hugging, and intimacy)

• Serving others, whether a neighbor, friend, or through volunteering

• Smiling at a stranger

• Writing a kind note or email

• Offering a compliment to a friend or co-worker

• Loving on one or more pets

• Experiencing a healing massage

• Partaking in loving-kindness meditation

Serotonin: the key is working on consistent and nature-related lifestyle changes. Examples include:

• Get out in nature, including daily sun exposure (but only very early or late afternoon, when the sun is not as dangerous), especially in winter months when serotonin drops for many people

• Spend time looking at the sky and clouds

• Listen to the birds

• Try light therapy in the darker winter months

• Another amino acid, tryptophan, helps increase serotonin levels. Find it in these foods: chicken, turkey, beef, fish, beans, dairy, nuts, seeds, tofu, and eggs

• Daily physical movement and exercise

• Short cold showers or ice plunges

• Prioritize good, consistent, quality sleep

• Reduce chronic stress

Endorphins: the key is daily activities that activate our natural reward system, including:

• Making exercise a daily priority, with some of it high-intensity. Examples include swimming, dancing, biking, or walking

• Sniffing certain essential oils via aromatherapy (especially euphoric essential oils such as lavender, citrus, rosemary, frankincense)

• Dancing to a favorite song(s)

• Performing random acts of kindness

• Eating your favorite healthy foods, especially by adding certain spices (such as peppers, ginger)

• Celebrating and laughing over funny, humorous moments

• Meditating/praying

• Emotionally connecting to great storytelling (whether comedy or drama)

Final Thoughts About Boosting Your Brain’s Feel-Good Neurotransmitters

Hopefully, this article provides you with many positive ideas for boosting your brain’s DOSE chemicals.

More importantly, there are daily things you can do that have the potential to boost several of these important chemicals, including:

• Eating a diet of healthy, real foods

• Moving daily

• Having bits of fun and laughter

• Reducing chronic stress

• Achieving consistent, quality sleep

• Helping and serving others

• Having a daily meditation/prayer practice

• Making time for nature and safe sun exposure

Additional Brain Happiness Resources

• Boosting Brain Happiness as Part of a Healing Journey

• Happy Chemicals: Understanding Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins

• How to Boost Neurotransmitters (In-Depth Guide)

• Happiness Chemicals: How to Hack Your Brain’s Feel-Good Neurotransmitters

• Natural Hacks for a Happier Brain

• Happy Chemicals: How To Get Your Daily D.O.S.E of Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Endorphins

• The DOSE Challenge - How to Boost Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin & Endorphins Naturally

• Simple Ways to Trigger Your Brain’s Happy Chemicals (Without Doing Something Illegal)