Caroline Leaf explains how serotonin actually works in your body and mood. Physical activity changes how serotonin affects you. The conversation covers what serotonin does beyond just making you feel happy.
Serotonin, which is commonly known as the mood hormone, doesn't cross the blood brain barrier, so it has no effect on mood whatsoever. It has many other functions in the body and has an action to constrict or dilate the blood vessel. That changes how much nutrition and oxygen is pushed into the tissues of the body. And we believe that that's how trauma and all the intuition and wisdom that we've picked up in life that we don't consciously remember is stored in the body.
If we do things that activate serotonin, then we unleash more wisdom in our body.
If we do physical activity, it's more likely that serotonin will dilate the allowing a lot of nutrients and oxygen. When we are traumatized, or we have intuition stored in our body, it's held in certain patterns in the tissues. You're actually accessing those patterns. But what's held in your body, you can't articulate through words.
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