Why dopamine is crucial to a healthy mind and body

Dopamine is a hormone that plays several important roles in the brain and body. Your body makes it and uses it to send messages between you brain and body that suggest you are feeling happiness. Photo: Pixabay

You know that euphoric emotion you’re overwhelmed with when you do something that either challenges you or makes you feel content? It could be taking your dog for a lengthy run, going shopping, or perhaps playing video games with friends?

Regardless of the activity, you feel invincible after it: as though you’re on top of the world, right? That’s because your brain has released dopamine, the feel-good transmitter that’s waiting to be cognitively tapped into your bloodstream, with a little push.

Dopamine is sometimes called a nerve messenger because the nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells. Photo: Pixabay

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that’s created in your brain and acts as a chemical messenger between neurons. Most of the time, it’s dormant, because it’s only released when your brain is expecting a reward. When your mind associates certain activities with enjoyment, just thinking about those activities can be enough to raise your dopamine count.

For instance, imagine your go-to home cooked food is spicy prawns: your brain will increase the dopamine count in your body the instant the prawns begin to sizzle and you can smell them cooking. Thereafter, whilst eating your favourite comfort food, the dopamine flow in your body continues, which reinforces the craving and ensures a focus on satisfying it in the future. It’s a continuous cycle of motivation, reward, and reinforcement.

Dopamine helps us helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting. Photo: Association for Psychological Science

Aside from making you feel elated, dopamine can also contribute to a feeling of alertness, motivation, and bursts of happiness. It’s also positively involved in plenty of internal bodily functions, including blood flow, digestion, heart and kidney function, memory, pain processing, pancreatic function, insulin regulation, sleep, and even stress response.

Simply put, it’s imperative that your body gets a steady stream of dopamine in its system - not just for pleasure, but also for its heavy involvement in promoting positive health. Dopamine holds the key to a healthy mind and body: so ensure your body gets its neurological fix!