Serotonin vs. Dopamine - 7 Key Differences Between Pleasure and Happiness

dopamine is the learning neurotransmitter it is the positive reinforcement neurotransmitter it is the transmitter that says this feels good i want more now serotonin is the opposite it's the neurotransmitter that says this feels good i don't want or need any more those are clearly two different things and the problem is if you don't know the difference then you are basically subject to continuing to try to reward yourself ad nauseam now there's a third component to this pathway that is absolutely essential and it's called cortisol so cortisol is the stress hormone and what cortisol does which

is particularly important in this story is it works on this part of your brain right here the part right behind your forehead the part right above your eyes called the prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that keeps you from doing stupid things i call it the jiminy cricket part of your brain like for pinocchio bottom line if you have a dysfunctional prefrontal cortex [Music] you can't see the future you only live for the moment prefrontal cortical dysfunction is what turns a human into a lizard okay doesn't matter what happens in

the future i need my reward now and so there's no ability to cognitively inhibit that feeling of reward and that then drives the dopamine even faster and ultimately that's what leads to neuronal cell death so is the combination of dopamine and cortisol that leads to addiction so reward is good reward plus stress is not and that's what we all are now is chronically stressed and so chronic stress makes you want reward because of this lizard brain and so it sets you up for addiction now on the other side on the serotonin side chronic stress also

and cortisol has an uh an effect as well so serotonin does bind to its receptor to inhibit the next neuron the problem is that the serotonin receptor is down regulated by cortisol so less serotonin fewer receptors that's depression so addiction and depression both occur one due to dopamine one due to lack of serotonin but in the presence of cortisol in the presence of chronic stress so chronic stress is the what belies both of these two major afflictions of the human condition there is one reward system one now that reward system is pretty darn important if

you don't receive reward you don't get out of bed you actually lie in bed and die is what happens and that's been done in transgenic animals they've basically you know knocked out the reward system and those animals have no will to live okay you need reward to be able to get up in the morning go to work make a living you know bring home a paycheck eat food etc all right so reward is survival of the species you cannot do it without reward however reward and contentment are not the same thing reward and pleasure are

synonymous contentment and happiness are synonymous so people in our society have confused and conflated these two concepts pleasure and happiness so i find that there are seven differences between the two and people need to understand these differences in order to be able to make head or tail of number one the world and number two how they're being manipulated by the world in order to make them miserable so those seven things the seven differences one pleasure is short term like a meal happiness is long term like a lifetime two pleasure is visceral you feel it in

your body happiness is ethereal you feel it above the neck three pleasure is taking like from a casino happiness is giving but habitat for humanity number four pleasure is achieved alone like a chocolate cake happiness is achieved in social groups like a birthday party number five pleasure is achievable with substances like for instance cocaine heroin happiness is not achievable with substances number six pleasu the extremes of pleasure whether it be substances or behaviors so substances like cocaine heroin nicotine alcohol sugar or behaviors so shopping gambling social media internet gaming pornography okay in the extreme are

addictive there's an aholic after every one of those shopaholic sexaholic alcoholic chocoholic etc but there's no such thing as being addicted to too much happiness and number seven and perhaps the most important for this conversation pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonin so two different neurotransmitters two different areas of the brain two different regulatory pathways two different mechanisms of action two different drivers so you say like so what why do we care here's why we care dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter when dopamine binds to its receptor the next neuron gets excited okay postsynaptic receptor activation

now neurons like to be excited neurons like to be tickled but they don't like to be bludgeoned chronic overstimulation of any neuron in the body leads to neuronal cell death okay and the reason is because neurons are so metabolically active and neurotransmission is so metabolically taxing that if you just keep it up and keep it up and keep it up that neuron is basically going to exhaust and die and so the postsynaptic neuron that has the dopamine receptors on it it has a fail safe it has a protective mechanism in in order not to be

overwhelmed what it does is it down regulates the dopamine receptor so now that you know even though you have lots of ligands lots of dopamine molecules you have fewer receptors which means there's less chance that any molecule will find the receptor what that means in human terms is you need more and more to get less and less and that's the phenomenon we call tolerance so dopamine leads to tolerance and then when those neurons actually do start to die that's called addiction now serotonin this other neurotransmitter is not excitatory it's inhibitory now if you're inhibitory and

if you're inhibiting the next neuron do you need to down regulate the receptor no because you're not gonna the neuron's not gonna die because it's not being overexcited it's being if anything over inhibited right so there's no such thing as overdosing on too much happiness but there's one thing that down regulates serotonin dopamine so the more pleasure you seek the more unhappy you get and if you don't know the difference between reward and contentment if you don't know the difference between pleasure and happiness and you are led astray by say coca-cola open happiness or you

know it's five o'clock somewhere or you know any of these other you know sort of memes and mantras that have entered our you know collective lexicon about the fact that you want to quote get happy by taking this substance you are sadly mistaken and you know ultimately it will do a number on you and it's been doing a number on hundreds of millions of people in particular over the last 50 years as you know public relations and you know uh [Music] and now the internet have you know come into the fore [Music] you