Chem & Love

By: Ana sofia Padilla 10C

Have you ever wondered what happens in your organism when you fall in love? Why, when you see someone you like, your palms start sweating, your heart starts beating faster and you feel butterflies in your stomach? Well, it is all related to the chemistry inside your head. When you fall in love there are a bunch of chemicals running around from your head to your body. These chemicals, from the class of “neurochemicals”, are the ones responsible for our behavior in relationships. The first feeling of attraction we get and then, falling in love is caused by three neurochemicals combined: phenylethylamine, norepinephrine and dopamine. Later stages of relationships are guided by another two: oxytocin and serotonin. Estrogen and testosterone also play a role in love, especially in the sexual area. Moreover, romantic love can be broken down into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Each category is characterized by its own set of hormones. Testosterone and estrogen are the ones that characterize lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment.

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                Norepinephrine, also called Noradrenaline, plays a large role in the fight or flight response, which kicks into high gear when we’re stressed and keeps us alert. Also, it stimulates the production of adrenaline, which is what makes our heart race, and our palms sweat when we are nervous or when we look at the person we like. Norepinephrine is released from neurons, or nerve cells in the brain, called noradrenergic neurons. This neurons form a system, named the norepinephrine system, which affects large areas in our brain. This system consists of just 1500 neurons on each side of the brain, which is tiny compared to the total amount of more than 100 billion neurons in the brain, but when those neuron activate, they have a huge impact on us. Norepinephrine targets cells and performs its actions on them by activating its adrenergic receptors. The main targets of the norepinephrine system are usually receptors in the spinal cord, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus, among others. High levels of norepinephrine in the brain cause an overwhelming feeling of joy, liveliness, and enormous jitters; they can even deactivate our feeling of hunger or ability to fall asleep.

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                Dopamine, is a neurochemical produced by the hypothalamus that gets released by our brain when we feel good. It is the precursor of Norepinephrine, and has a similar structure. There would be no adrenaline produced, no sweating or heart racing if the brain couldn’t produce enough dopamine. It is considered to be the most mysterious of these three neurochemicals, as it is not just a precursor of norepinephrine but also a neurotransmitter. This means that there is also a dopamine neurotransmitter system, causing it to have a dual role in our organism: it can act as a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. This chemical affects brain processes that control emotional response, movement, ability to express pleasure, but also pain. Additionally, dopamine makes us feel giddy, energetic, and euphoric by activating five different types of receptors in the brain, which are called "dopamine receptors". Most of them are associated with the pleasure system of the brain, providing feelings joy and reinforcement to motivate a person to perform certain activities. Sociability is also tied to dopamine neurotransmission. Low dopamine receptor-binding is found in people with social anxiety, and a state of becoming “hypersocial”, is also attributed to an increase in dopamine. Dopamine is also responsible for the vast majority of the brain’s reward pathway and that means controlling both the good and the bad. We experience surges of dopamine for our virtues and our vices. Studies have shown that the same regions that light up when we’re feeling attraction light up when drug addicts take cocaine and when we binge eat sweets. In this way we could say attraction is much like an addiction to another human being. While dopamine is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships, if we push the dopamine pathway too far we may become addicted to food or drugs, or become emotionally dependent on our partners. Falling in love makes us selective. It’s dopamine that forces us to focus “our whole world” around that specific someone. Even to the point of obsession. We know that a person loves us because they create a roller-coaster of chaotic, intense, contradictory, and sometimes even uncontrollable feelings.

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                The third main neurochemical is phenylethylamine (PEA), which acts as a releasing agent of norepinephrine and dopamine. As the word itself shows us, this element shares a lot of similarities with amphetamines. And combined with dopamine and serotonin, it makes the perfect recipe for a love straight from the movies. Large quantities of PEA increase both physical and emotional energy and at the same time release more dopamine making everything fell more intense. PEA is famous for being found in chocolate. It’s extremely common that people say that eating chocolate will make you feel good or even “in love”. And mostly it is because chocolate contains PEA; however, Phenethylamine from chocolate is rapidly metabolized by the enzymes of gastrointestinal tract, preventing significant concentrations from reaching the brain. So, when you eat chocolate, you feel good from a sweet taste, and not the concentration of PEA in it. In fact, phenylethylamine levels are higher in cheese and sausages, which are not associated with chemistry of love. Compare to the other two, PEA acts more as a neuromodulator rather than a neurotransmitter. While increasing the extracellular levels of dopamine, it also modulates noradrenergic transmission. In other words, PEA is more of a "helper" to the previous two chemicals. But don’t underestimate phenylethylamine, as it’s mainly what causes the real chemistry of love, making us feel happy, fulfilled, and incredibly motivated.

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Now, advancing to the further stages of love, we have oxytocin. Like dopamine, oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus and released in large quantities during sex, breastfeeding, and childbirth. These may seem like activities that have nothing alike but the common factor here is that all of them are precursors to bonding. It appears to help reinforce and maintain healthy interpersonal relationships and healthy psychological boundaries with other people, especially the ones we love. That is, as we become more attached to our families, friends, and significant others, oxytocin is working in the background, reminding us why we like these people and increasing our affection for them. It also makes it pretty clear why having separate areas for attachment, lust, and attraction is important. However, Oxytocin can also be a double-edged sword; while healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice. Recent studies on some drugs show that oxytocin may be the hormone behind the feel-good, sociable effects these chemicals produce; though, in these cases, these positive feelings are taken to an extreme. On the other hand, oxytocin has also been suggested to play a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established cultural groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign.

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Last but not least we have serotonin, a hormone that’s known to be involved in appetite and mood. It can be summed up with one single word: happiness. It leads to a phase where we realize that being with that specific person means experiencing more intense happiness. So we have to invest effort and commitment in that relationship to keep up that positive emotional state. When things are running smoothly, serotonin brings us well-being. It gives us optimism, a good mood, and satisfaction. But when we start feeling that the other person is distancing, that the relationship is getting cold, or that it doesn’t go beyond the sexual level; serotonin levels may plummet. This may bring us to a state of very intense defenselessness and anxiety, or, in some cases, depression.

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To wrap it up, the chemistry of love orchestrates our behaviors and whether we like it or not, we can’t deny it. This is as true with falling in love as with the later stages, the ones in which commitment and stability are built. And while it might be true that defining this universal emotion in only chemical terms isn’t very romantic, it does give us a much clearer understanding of what happens to our body and brain when we fall in love. Knowing this, we can stop seeing love as just a mystery that makes us dumb and clumsy, but as a process that involves more than just feelings.