You seek Serotonin, but Dopamine can't deliver.
Happiness comes from recognizing goodness that already exists in your environment
EDIT: it turns out i’m wrong on what serotonin does and how it works. Fortunately for you, my good reader, this article really isn’t about serotonin, it’s about how recognizing what’s good in my life makes me feel good in way that dopamine can’t. Commenters elsewhere seemed to agree that I understand dopamine, but not serotonin. I’ll leave neuroscience to the neuroscientists, since the only insight I had to share here was that believing the word “good” means something real seems to be letting me poke my brain in a way that feel good. I had an incorrect understanding that, physically, what was happening was serotonin based. I conclude that when I cultivate gratitude for what is good in my life, I don’t really know what’s going on inside my brain on a physical level, and that’s OK. I’ll leave the original article up mainly due to time constraints - i have young kids, my dad is dying in the hospital, a busy job, and writing about my feelings for strangers on the internet keeps me sane, it’s not you, it’s me - but I wanted to add this warning here. I’ll add a retrospective explaining why i made this mistake later.
Do you tell yourself you’ll be happier if you get more stuff done? I used to do that all the time. When I’m forgetting what I’ve learned, I still do. But does that actually work?
A recent post by ‘experimental history’ describes this pattern well and argues that it doesn’t work. I felt compelled to respond, in part because I managed to come out of this way of thinking, with a lot of help from an attitude coach. I want to share two different explanations of this phenomenon, which boil down to the same thing.
One of these explanations is neurotransmitter based, the other is religion based, since that’s how I roll.
Dopamine causes Drive, Serotonin causes Satisfaction
The drive to go out and pursue external rewards is moderated by dopamine1 . This same drive is what people reading up on productivity porn are ultimately reading about. But no amount of following the dopamine drive can make us consistently happier. Our brains only make so much dopamine! This means that a “get more things done” approach alone simply can’t change how we feel, overall.
So what’s they key to being content and satisfied with our lives? People have been asking this question for thousands of years. There’s a lot of variation between the answers people have come up with - i’ve studied many of them - but also a lot of overlap. There’s obviously a lot more to being satisfier with your life than just this one thing, but a common factor is that a lot of approaches will end up having the effect of boosting serotonin
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter associated with enjoying things in our immediate environment2. When you appreciate good food, good music and good company, your brain releases serotonin. Serotonin makes you feel calmer and happier.
In short, dopamine gives you drive to pursue goals, and serotonin gives you satisfaction from appreciating good things already present in your environment.
What all of us are looking for isn’t drive, though, it’s satisfaction. You can’t possibly obtain satisfaction as a result of exercising drives. Satisfaction only comes from recognizing good things you already have.
So why are so many of us following that busted recipe? Why can't more people generate serotonin reliably, leading to a sense of contentment and satisfaction with their lives? Why are so many people trying to use a 'pursue external rewards' mechanism to solve the problem created by the absence of internal contentment?
I think many of us don’t feel good because we haven’t learned to recognize good. And that good feeling we all want is like a solution to an NP complete problem - you can’t seek it, you have to recognize it.
You Cannot Recognize What You Don’t Believe In
I think a lot of people are suffering from serotonin deficiencies because they can’t recognize “good”, since they don’t think “good” means anything. Absent a stable concept of what ‘good’ is, a person can’t recognize good things in front of them. The inability to recognize goodness prevents dopaminergic exertion from ever leading to serotonergic satisfaction. Without a sense of what ‘good’ means and appreciation for it in our lives, we’re going to be exhausted and unsatisfied.
We’ve all heard the sayings, “happiness comes from inside,” “what you are seeking can already be found within, etc.” This is what I think these messages are really saying: seeking involves the dopamine system, but what you are seeking is serotonin, which you can only get by recognizing good things that you already have.
“What kinds of things?” you might be asking, “I can recognize all kinds of things around me, but what does ‘good’ mean?”
Well. Isn’t that the 21 million bitcoin question?
This is where I think religion comes in. Religiosity is correlated with serotonin, and if I had to guess, traditional religions acted, in part, like mechanisms for promoting serotonin release. I think the way religions promoted serotonin release is by consistently pointing at some concrete notion of 'good' and then saying, ‘this is important, pay attention to this.’
I spent a long while studying various religions, and one thing that came out of these studies was repeatedly encountering this idea that hey, if you took this stuff seriously, you’d always be thinking about it. When I first encountered these ideas, I just thought they were viral hooks. Every author has to sell themselves, right?
The thing is, the more I practice gratitude for the present, the calmer and more at peace I feel, and the more obvious it seems that I would always feel better if I were always appreciating what were happening around me.
If you have a stable notion of what good is, you can recognize the good things you have in life your life and give thanks for them. Feeling gratitude will help you generate serotonin which will make you feel better. If you believe ‘good’ is meaningful, you can recognize its presence in your life and thus experience regular satisfaction.
If you don't have a stable notion of what good means, you simply can't recognize its presence in your life. You can’t recognize something if you don’t think it really exists!
I was in this state for years. I was miserable. I think many people are still there. The path out was long, difficult, and heavily moderated by dopaminergic drives. It seemed like I was making progress, but for the most part I still felt just as anxious and tired and frustrated. The only moments where I didn’t feel this way were those moments where I remembered how bad things used to be for me, and then a feeling came over me - a calmness, an acceptance, a sense of gratitude for the present because it was obviously better than the past. Those were moments of serotonin, and thus moments of satisfaction.
It took a few years of working with a coach persistently before I came to stop thinking of 'good' in terms of 'I have to go out there and do that thing', and instead began to see good as something always present, that I could always recognize around me. 3
If you’d like to join me in this state of increasing contentment, I think the first step is asking yourself, “What does good mean to me? What things in my life are already good.
In the words of the poet philosopher Ludacris, “the grass is always greener on the other side.” You can only become a butterfly if you focus on enjoying the good things already present, right where you are.
See this excellent video explaining dopamine by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. His video series are full of detailed mechanics as well as actionable advice.
Again, Andrew Huberman explaining how serotonin corresponds promotes states that promote gratitude and appreciation.
For those versed in ‘predictive processing’, the way I’d phrase this is that I am consistently been gathering evidence for the proposition “this is good.” I am working on bumping that probability all the way up to 1, in the same way that my belief ‘external reality exists’ has probability 1. Increasing the ‘this is good’ prior has the effect of giving my valence manifold an absolute zero far below wherever I am in the present. I think if I can pull off and stabilize this consistently-high valence level, all my actions will be driven by the calm, gradual pursuit of marginal additional rewards, instead of anything remotely fear or greed based.
Good post!
Good stuff!