How to Naturally Boost Dopamine, Serotonin & Melatonin Levels
What does it take to boost your mood, naturally?
Turns out, not much.
If you’re dealing with low mood, it probably means either your dopamine or serotonin levels or low...and likely, they both are.
Let’s get into these important neurotransmitters and how you can easily make sure you’ve got enough of each of them to boost your daily mood!
What are dopamine and serotonin?
Often referred to as the “happy hormones,” dopamine and serotonin are compounds in the body known as neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters are, by definition, chemical messengers in the body.
And these two in particular have very fun effects.
Dopamine interacts with the emotions in a fun way by being one of the main ways we experience pleasure.
Dopamine also plays a role in:
• Learning
• Heart function
• Kidney health
• Movement
• Pain processing
• Motivation
...yeah, it affects a lot.
Meanwhile, serotonin is our main mood regulating neurotransmitter.
It directly affects our ability to feel happy and a lack of serotonin is the main reason for depression, anxiety, and/or eating disorder diagnoses.
Serotonin also gives us the ability to regulate our mood in general, too.
Some other things serotonin helps with include:
• Sleep
• Bone health
• Blood clotting
• Digestion
Between these two neurotransmitters, you can make or break your mood and wellbeing.
So, how can we hack into the body’s natural processes to make sure we have great levels of each of them?
Nutrients to boost dopamine and serotonin naturally
You’re probably going to laugh when you read about how simple it is to hack your mood with these nutrients.
Why?
Because we’re only going to discuss two very specific nutrients you need to focus on when you start this journey.
Those ingredients are:
1. SAM-e
2. TMG
Now, SAM-e and TMG aren’t your typical household vitamin nutrients. We don’t hear about them much.
But they’re pretty easy to get a hold of...just not together.
That’s because it’s slightly difficult for supplement companies to keep the two of them stable and in safely-packaged form.
Until we figured ours out….but we’ll dive into that later.
For now, here’s the breakdown of SAM-e and TMG.
SAM-e and the production of dopamine & serotonin
SAM-e is short for S-adenosylmethionine, and it’s found naturally in the body as a derivative of methionine.
Methionine is an amino acid that’s necessary for many functions in the body, but none more important than DNA methylation.
We won’t get too far into that for this article, but just know that methylation is basically why our cells function at all.
Most of the studies on the function of SAM-e in the body involve liver function and depression - both of which show improvements when SAM-e is supplemented.
When it comes to dopamine and serotonin production, SAM-e does two things:
1. It speeds up the creation of new dopamine and serotonin molecules
2. It slows down the breakdown of molecules that already exist in the body & brain
Not too shabby, if you ask us.
TMG and the production of dopamine & serotonin
Now, for the other piece of the puzzle.
SAM-e is great for helping to boost the amount of molecules in the body of both dopamine and serotonin, but there’s one little problem.
It can sometimes go down a different pathway in the methylation cycle to become homocysteine instead.
And homocysteine is an inflammatory compound that can cause all sorts of problems in the body, especially long-term.
So, that’s where TMG comes in.
If the SAM-e begins to go down the inflammatory pathway, TMG swoops in to add another methyl group to the compound and turn it into methionine...which then gets converted back into SAM-e.
Essentially, the TMG blocks the possibility of an inflammatory reaction to SAM-e, ensuring that we only get the dopamine and serotonin boost we’re looking for.
How to supplement for dopamine & serotonin with Bliss
Now, how do you use our supplement now that you know the benefits it can yield?
Our sour powdered supplement that combines SAM-e and TMG is called Bliss, and it’s a sublingual.
This means it works best when placed under the tongue for about 20-30 seconds before washing it down.
You might make a face because the taste is strong, but we promise it’s worth it!
Taking the powder under your tongue like that will help it get into your bloodstream much faster than just drinking it, so you could feel the effects in as little as 10 minutes.
Of course, you can mix the powder with water and drink it.
That just means it’ll take a little longer for your mood boost to kick in.
If you’d like to learn more about Bliss by MSW Nutrition and how it can help your mood, click here!