All of your feelings and emotions are a result of chemical reactions taking place in your body. These reactions are responsible for making you feel negative emotions, like anger and sadness, as well as positive emotions, like love and happiness. Read on to find out what your happy hormones are and how you can increase them.

Endorphins
Endorphins are your body’s natural painkillers, since they block pain. Most people are aware of the fact that exercise releases endorphins, but they don’t realise the reason for this. Way back in the stone ages, endorphins were important to our ancestors because they enabled them to keep running through the pain and escape predators. Today, we don’t need to escape predators anymore, so we only produce endorphins when we perform anaerobic exercise, since endorphins help us to keep going even after we deplete our oxygen stores.

Ways to increase your endorphin levels: 

• Exercise to cope with chronic pain.
• Eat spicy food, since your tongue has receptors that react to spice by sending messages to your brain that are similar to pain signals, causing your brain to trigger the release of endorphins.

Serotonin
Serotonin is the key hormone of happiness, since it regulates mood, prevents depression, thwarts irritation and makes you happy and sociable.

Ways to increase your serotonin levels: 

• Spend time in the sun, since sunlight causes your body to produce Vitamin D, which triggers the release of serotonin.
• Think happy thoughts, since your brain produces serotonin when you remember happy memories or think about things that make you happy.
• Consume foods like milk and corn, since they contain tryptophan, a substance that your body converts to serotonin. Other carbohydrates also contain tryptophan.
• Do a low-intensity workout, since your body produces serotonin when it is performing aerobic exercise, as opposed to the endorphins it produces during anaerobic exercise.

Dopamine
Dopamine is a pleasure hormone that is released when you strive towards a goal. Dopamine motivates you to work hard so that you can achieve the satisfaction of reaching that goal. It also keeps you mentally alert and helps you focus.

Ways to increase your dopamine levels: 
• Set daily or monthly goals, since they give you something to strive towards.
• Set exercise goals, since dopamine increases in tandem with serotonin and endorphins when you exercise. Setting goals will increase the production of dopamine even more.
• Eat foods that are rich in protein.

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Article courtesy: http://healthmeup.com/