Serotonin is a neurotransmitter your body produces to assist in regulating your mood, appetite, and sleep patterns. Essentially, it’s a crucial hormone your body uses to maintenance your overall wellbeing. This “feel good” chemical can be found in your blood, brain, and bowels. Adequate serotonin production impacts the health of your bones, cognitive function, digestive system, and various physiological restoration processes. Contrastingly, inadequate serotonin levels contribute to conditions that negatively impact mental and physical health, such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, and more. While there are several ways to boost serotonin, this blog will focus on a few strategies for how to increase serotonin naturally, recommended by healthcare professionals.

How serotonin works

Here’s how serotonin works to impact the aforementioned areas of your mental and physical health:

• Mood: This naturally-occurring chemical promotes balance and happiness by stabilizing your emotions and keeping stress at bay.
• Cognition: Serotonin supports memory and mental agility, therefore improving your learning capability. It does this by sharpening your focus and paving the way for concentration.
• Appetite: By regulating your appetite and digestive functions, serotonin helps curb binge eating, unhealthy cravings, and other imbalances linked to various eating disorders.
• Sleep: Serotonin also paves the way for melatonin production, another hormone that regulates your sleep cycle and quality. When serotonin levels are functioning, this dynamic duo facilitates a healthy relationship with sleep- one of the most important aspects of your wellbeing.
• Bone Health: Serotonin helps maintain healthy bone density levels, reducing the risk of osteoporosis.

What can you do about low serotonin

The most common pharmaceutical prescriptions for low serotonin are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, also referred to as SSRIs, and hormone therapy (HRT). These antidepressants are typically effective, but have developed a notorious reputation for the host of side effects they often come with. In addition to the risk of long-term addiction, overdose, sexual dysfunction, nausea, and drowsiness, these medications are not guaranteed to address the root causes of serotonin deficiency.

Comparatively, natural solutions offer a safer way to increase serotonin while also contributing to other areas of your health and wellbeing. For example, regular exercise and a gut healthy diet not only increase serotonin, but also improve cardiovascular function and weight management. However, these lifestyle changes require a commitment to updating your daily routine.

How to increase serotonin naturally

There are several ways to boost serotonin levels without leaning on hormone therapy or antidepressants. These natural solutions are safe, effective, and easy to incorporate into your daily lifestyle.

Gut healthy foods

Tryptophan is an amino acid that converts into serotonin via a two-step process in your central nervous system. Foods that are rich in tryptophan include cheese, pineapple, eggs, tofu, salmon, seeds, and nuts. Additionally, you can add in certain probiotics and other healthy gut diet foods rich in fiber to support your gut health and produce higher serotonin levels.

Vitamin D

Sunlight exposure increases serotonin levels. A walk or sitting outside for 15-20 minutes every day is enough to do the trick. The best time to get outside is in the morning, but if that’s not accessible, afternoons will do!

Stress-reducing activities

Activities that reduce stress, such as physical exercise, therapy, acupuncture, mindfulness meditation, and spending time with people you love promote relaxation and increase serotonin by lowering cortisol, which is a stress hormone. If you can, getting regular massages is also a great way to manage and reduce stress.

Dietary supplements

Incorporating dietary supplements, such as Ladykind’s hormone-balancing tinctures, is one of the easiest ways to increase serotonin production. Ladykind products use high quality, and sustainably sourced organic ingredients and are recommended by doctors for their safety and efficacy in managing symptoms of hormone imbalance, such as low serotonin. We love these award-winning products for their purity, potency, and comprehensive contribution to women’s wellness.

Now that you’ve been armed with some simple strategies for how to increase serotonin naturally and understand how doing so impacts your health, we want to impart one more gift on you. Beyond incorporating healthy lifestyle changes into your daily routine such as diet and exercise, sunlight exposure, reducing stress, take 20% off Ladykind’s Rise & Rest Set, which contains two of the top-selling tinctures, the Rise Up Daily Mind Clearing tincture and Wind Down Nightly Mind Relaxing tincture, to support your serotonin production around the clock. Use discount code RISEANDREST20 at checkout. Enjoy!