Low Serotonin Symptoms and How to Naturally Boost Levels

What Does Serotonin Do In My Body?

Specific things that serotonin plays a role in include:

• Mood: The serotonin in your brain regulates your mood; you’ll sometimes hear it called your feel-good chemical. You will feel happier, calmer, more stable, and more focused if you have normal serotonin levels. When someone has low serotonin levels, it’s associated with depression. Many prescription medicines used for treating mood disorders like anxiety and depression target ways to increase serotonin in the brain.
• Digestion: Since the bulk of your serotonin supply is in your GI tract, it also affects your bowel function. Your gut releases its serotonin levels to speed up digestion, which can affect how you experience feelings of hunger and appetite.
• Nausea: If serotonin is released in your gut faster than you can digest, you experience nausea.
• Sleep: Serotonin and dopamine affect how long and well you sleep. To produce melatonin, you also need serotonin. Melatonin is a hormone controlling your sleep-wake cycle.
• Wound healing: Platelets release serotonin to help heal wounds.
• Sexual health: Paired with dopamine, serotonin plays a role in your desire for sex.
• Bone health: Serotonin levels may help your bones stay strong. However, too high levels in the gut can contribute to fractures and osteoporosis.

Some of the most interesting research on serotonin is the association between the gut-brain axis. While most estimates say around 90% of your serotonin is in your gut, other estimates put it as high as 95%, with just the other 5% being produced in the brain.

The gut-brain axis is the line of communication between your central and intestinal nervous systems.

Researchers are increasingly looking at how the serotonin produced in the GI tract moves through your body and regulates many important processes.

Symptoms of Low Serotonin

Some of the possible serotonin deficiency symptoms that a person might experience include the following:

• Depression and similar mental health conditions
• Sleep changes such as unusual sleep patterns or insomnia
• Irritability
• Chronic pain
• Problems with memory or learning
• Anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders
• Schizophrenia
• An altered internal clock
• Appetite problems including eating disorders like not eating enough, overeating, or alternating between the two
• Food cravings, especially for sugar
• Obsessiveness or repetitive thoughts
• Pessimism
• Phobias or shyness
• Social anxiety disorder
• Suicidal behavior
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Seasonal affective disorder
• Hyperactivity and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Dementia

While we often think about the mental symptoms of low serotonin, there are a lot of potential physical consequences of a deficiency of the neurotransmitter.

Serotonin deficiency is associated with the following:

• Fatigue
• Gastrointestinal issues and digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Osteoporosis
• Cardiovascular disease

If you think you have a serotonin deficiency, a doctor would rarely perform a test to check for it. There are serotonin blood tests, but these are usually only for checking tumors that produce serotonin.

A doctor won’t typically do a serotonin test because there are a lot of factors outside of your blood levels of the neurotransmitter that play a role in how you process and use it.

For example, your hormones, the behavior of your serotonin receptors, and your metabolism can all affect how your body processes and uses serotonin.

You could have normal blood levels but not much serotonin that’s accessible and usable.

Rather than checking your levels, a doctor will likely assess your symptoms and check those.

A lot of the medications most commonly prescribed for mental health disorders are believed to work by affecting how your brain uses serotonin, but this is becoming increasingly complex.

For example, there’s growing debate about the links between low serotonin and depression. It’s often very complicated when someone develops a mood disorder, and low serotonin levels may be one part of this.

Serotonin vs. Dopamine

We tend to talk about dopamine and serotonin because they work together but are very different neurotransmitters.

Dopamine is part of reward and motivation. If you experience, symptoms like helplessness or low motivation can be a sign of problems with your dopamine system.

Almost every pleasurable experience involves the release of dopamine.

Dopamine is unique from serotonin because it is produced mainly in the brain, while serotonin is primarily produced in the gut.

Dopamine affects pleasure and motivation, while serotonin serves as a stabilizer for your mood and anxiety.

Very few treatments and antidepressant medications target dopamine, it helps you feel more alert, while serotonin helps regulate your sleep and wakefulness cycles.

Unfortunately, some prescription medications for depression that target serotonin can negatively affect dopamine. In animal studies, SSRIs inhibit dopamine neurons, so some researchers theorize that taking these medications could suppress dopamine production.

The effects of SSRIs on dopamine may be why people experience sexual side effects and other side effects such as dulled emotions.