For those of you who have perhaps had the experience of falling in love very quickly it’s worth consider the actual stages of love that you might be experiencing.
Is it the true spending the rest of your life with somebody kind of love or is a more obsessive compulsion, the more infatuated kind of love? Or is it just lust? If you know that this is just a state of chemical reaction that you’re having and that it’s a particular stage in a love feeling, then you can know if it really is love. If ultimately what it is that you really want to be seeking out is that deep long lasting almost parental in strength love (the kind of love where you’re going to be looking at spending the rest of your lives together and nurturing perhaps some other life form between the two of you) then you can give yourself an opportunity to reevaluate before you become too invested.
For all those of you who are currently in the situation of having lost love, let’s take a look now at what can be done to help to lessen the bad feeling that happens as a result of that.
What needs to happen in that scenario to get you feeling better is to re-increase the levels of serotonin in your brain. When we’re in love there are high levels of serotonin so the feel-good chemicals and when were out of love, then there is a drop in those levels of chemicals.
Here is a non-medicated way of increasing those chemicals: The first step is to generally be happier. Positive psychology can be useful in increasing levels of serotonin. Now you might be thinking ‘well, I’m not going to be feeling happy because I’ve just lost the love of my life and the world is ending.’ But there are other ways to be happy without having to have that person interacting in your life. You can simply do stuff that makes you feel good.
Go to the places that you like to go to. Spend time with the friends and family that you have that make you feel good about yourself. Another thing is to ensure that you have adequate exposure to bright light. Bright light is a second possible approach to increase in serotonin without drugs. Bright light is of course a standard treatment for seasonal depression. It’s called sad seasonal affective disorder. But a few such studies also suggest that it’s an effective treatment for non-seasonal depression.
You get better access to light if you spend more time outside. So even if it’s a cloudy day you’ll still likely to get more light input into your system than you would from being inside and having the lights on.
A fair strategy that may raise brain serotonin is exercise. A comprehensive review of the relationship between exercise and mood concluded that antidepressants effects have clearly been demonstrated.
The fourth factor that could play a role in raising brain serotonin is diet. Having a good balanced healthy diet. There are some foods that contain certain chemicals that can increase levels of serotonin in the brain. Some of them however are not able to cross the blood brain barrier.
Bananas for example, are supposed to be kind of feel good foods but it is shown that the chemicals in bananas can be in your blood but won’t necessarily pass the barrier into your brain. However generally having a healthy balanced diet is going to be a great way of maintaining serotonin levels in your body.
Learning NLP strategies such as anchoring, is a great way to learn to manage and regulate your emotional state. Anchoring is taught on our NLP Practitioner training in Hemel Hempstead, North London. Contact People Building NLP training to find out more.
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
