Thank you to the TRP mod team for being reasonable and restoring this post. Annoyed as I was you're still one of the least obnoxious mod teams on reddit and I doubt I'd have been allowed a reasonable appeal elsewhere. And in acquiescence to that fact...

DISCLAIMER NUMBER ONE: I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU TAKE ILLEGAL DRUGS. THANK YOU. ANY DISCUSSION OF MDMA IN THIS ARTICLE IS HYPOTHETICAL.

SECOND DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT WRITTEN THIS FOR BIOSCIENTISTS. IF YOU HAVE A MOLECULAR BIOLOGY DEGREE AND YOU FEEL THAT I AM "MISSING A LOT OF DEPTH", OR "SIMPLIFYING THINGS", PLEASE REMEMBER THAT I WROTE THIS FOR A LAYMAN AUDIENCE AND HELP ME CONTRIBUTE TO SPREADING SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE RATHER THAN ACTIVELY FIGHTING AGAINST THE DISTRIBUTION OF ACADEMIC INFORMATION BECAUSE YOU FEEL IT'S IMPERFECT. IF YOU CAN PROVIDE A SOURCE SHOWING THAT A FACT HERE IS WRONG, I WILL EDIT THE POST. THANK YOU.

Summary: I explain the role of the neurotransmitter Serotonin in the day-to-day workings of your brain, and give tips on understanding and self-regulating your own Serotonergic biochemistry to maximise your quality of life. While this is moving slightly away from standard RP fare, I believe that understanding your own neurochemistry gives you a distinct competitive advantage in all areas of life - especially the sexual marketplace. This isn't a post about how to go out and get laid today - this is a post about psychologically grooming yourself to maintain your frame and state of mind over time. This is also not a hard-science post aimed at those of you with Biochemistry degrees - I'll be keeping this very soft and 'in practice'.

So, I was once, in a different life and a different frame, a neuroscience researcher. I dropped out of science in disgust at the modern academic environment, because it's a pyramid scheme, but one thing it left me with is an extremely unusual degree of knowledge about my own wiring. Very few neuroscientists have any social skills at all, and so the potentially vast powers of literally understanding how other human beings minds work at a molecular level are restrained only to the occasional non-autists. Complementing this is the fact that I am also an ex-drug fiend, which is a pretty powerful combo when it comes to insight into your own brain chemistry.

I've seen an awful lot of posts on TRP discussing the role of Dopamine (DA) and Testosterone on the brain, but you guys don't seem at all aware (in general) of the rest. DA is a member of a group known as the Monoamines. This group includes Histamine, Adrenaline, Dopamine, Noradrenaline and Serotonin (5-HT) as well as Melatonin and a fuckload of rarer trace amines. So, what are these things? These little chemicals regulate your arousal, focus, mood, social dominance, aggression, concentration, and sex drive through interaction with a vast set of neurotransmitter receptors in your brain. It's entirely possible to learn to 'sense' your own neurotransmitter levels over time by paying attention to their effects and the symptoms of peaks and troughs - understanding this produces a sort of self-awareness that's the biopsychological equivalent of learning to open your own debug menu. So, read on.^[1]

Today's guest will be the lovely Serotonin(5-HT, or '5-Hydroxytryptamine'), with potential articles to follow on the rest of the group if people find this one useful. If people are still interested, I may also move on to some of the non-monoaminergic neurotransmitters.

Serotonin

Serotonin is the feeling of warmth you get when you're sitting outside on a sunny day without a care on the world. It's the fuzzy glow you feel when you give your ex-beta friend the RP and he accepts it with open arms. It's responsible for what is bluntly called 'feelings of warmth and happiness', and you'll be very familiar with Serotonin if you've ever taken Ecstasy as MDMA causes a COLOSSAL chain reaction that essentially releases most of the Serotonin stored in your brain over a couple hours. It also has a more... well, mysterious effect on your psychology - virtually every hallucinogenic drug (and I mean hallucinogenic here rather than dissociative or deliriant) works by throwing some sort of spanner into your Serotonin systems.

There was once a school of thought that argued that Serotonin deficiency was responsible for depression, but this hasn't been proven. What we DO know is that a lack of Serotonin tends to create that feeling that "the world isn't worth living in" - it, as it were, governs your feelings of positivity or negativity towards the external world and other people.^[2] If you've read up on Dopamine, you'll by now know that it largely governs your feelings of positivity or negativity towards yourself - and so in a way, 5-HT is the yin to DA's yang. If you feel like life ain't worth anything, you're probably low on 5-HT. If you feel like you ain't worth anything, you're probably low on DA.

On top of this, Serotonin - along with DA - also controls your attention span and ability to delay gratification. Want to be a hardcore self-improving RP man who works like a cross between an oxen and Da Vinci? Watch your monoamines. It goes without saying that these things along with your general level of positivity are going to have a huge effect on how you interact with other hum- sorry, your game, so you've a lot to gain from learning to sense your own serotonin levels over time.

To start, you need to see first-hand, in a controlled environment, what massive swings in Serotonin do. Honestly, the easiest way to do this, if you had no morals of any kind and were a very bad person indeed, would probably be to just take a small dose of MDMA once and then pay attention to how it affects you - IE, don't go out raving, stay alone and solo and think. It's an almost entirely Serotonergic drug and it would be a great way to feel what a huge Serotonin rush feels like in isolation, if it wasn't a drug which are bad and illegal. However, you should never do this as drugs are bad and this is presented here only as a hypothetical thing that a degenerate monster might do if experimenting with his own Serotonin. If you don't want to take a potentially neurotoxic rave drug in the name of self-improvement^[3] then I'd suggest dosing yourself with 5-HTP every day for a week, and then going a week without taking them. You WILL gain a qualitative, gnostic understanding of how your own brain responds to Serotonin that I cannot convey through writing - everyone is slightly different here. Incidentally, 5-HTP can be used to remove the effects of an MDMA hangover as long as you take it AFTERWARDS.^[4]

After this is done, sit down and meditate every day for 5 minutes, focusing purely on the 'serotonergic' aspects of your mood. Do I feel content? Do I feel happy? Do I feel that the world is a good place? This is especially noticeable in the early mornings - if you're one of those people who wakes up in an awful mood every day, you very possibly have messed up 5-HT. As you do this for a while, along with a bit of individual reading, you'll eventually learn to spot what influences your serotonergic 'mood' - foods, weather, light levels. Taking advantage of this is essentially a biohack that allows you to maintain a fucking awesome mood all the time. You'd need more than a lifetime to perfect this, but as with a lot of things you get 80% of the results from the first 20% of the effort.

Learn to observe and regulate your own 5-HT and you WILL have an unusual effect on other people. People will be drawn to you as you emanate a field of calm and contentment, and if you combine this with a solid dopamine level you're gonna be alpha as fuck with a biologically unshakeable frame. You'll also have one more advantage, in that you'll be able to spot - to some degree - the influence of Serotonin on others. If you can learn to do this, then you can pull some disconcerting mindreading shit by reading subtle tells in body language/posture/style of speech to work out what sort of mood someone is in.

This is especially important as Serotonin is - oh, did I forget to mention this bit till last? - to some degree involved in sexual arousal and feelings of attraction. This will be obvious to anyone who's ever seen a slut on MDMA, but at the same time creating a 'serotonergically positive' environment in terms of lighting/food choices/environment/cadence of speech/body language can, completely subconsciously, boost the sexuality or intimacy of a situation very fast. This works with both girls and clients. And guess what? 99% of people have no fucking idea that this is possible, and no idea what 5-HT is, so they will absolutely, never, ever consider what you're doing. If you want to pull shit like this then you're going to need to do your own reading, but it's both a borderline superpower and a Borderline superpower. If you've ever met a BPD and thought she was your soulmate after 20 minutes, yo' ass just got Serotonin jacked - I'm convinced they're instinctively able to do this shit to others virtually from birth. Something in the childlike voice and mannerisms. This is also why BPDs are most potent against slightly depressed men - you get addicted to their serotonergic siren song.

Anyway - I'm curious to see what sort of response this post gets, as I suspect it'll be quite polarizing. Learning to pay attention to this stuff is one more way to get ahead in what should, by now, be a rapidly growing psychological toolbox.

Lessons Learned: This entire article is a lesson. This section is pretty inapplicable here as this isn't a FR, but I'm still adding it in to show basic respect for due process.

Footnotes

[1] - Unless you're the dude who is going to immediately comment something utterly vapid full of verbal abuse whilst totally misunderstanding the post 5 minutes after I submit it. There's always one. I will come to your house and make disconcerting eye contact until you have a panic attack, fuck off. Edit: Thanks to /u/mrbumby for confirming that this will happen 100% of the time, and thank you to you all for downvoting him into Oblivion. Second edit: I'd like to take this chance to publicly shame /u/mrbumby, who claimed to have a PhD in this area that he would be posting yesterday along with a detailed rebuttal of this article, despite completely failing to display any knowledge when asked. He has since failed to post his PhD as promised and completely disappeared, failing to respond to any of my PMs. This guy is a fake-ass narcissist with no integrity, qualifications, or knowledge. Thank you.

[2] - Well-read degenerates may by now have noticed the similarity between the names of dimethyltryptamine (DMT, the 'Spirit Molecule' so loved by hippies everywhere) and 5-hydroxytryptamine; this is because they are almost identical chemicals with a single area tweaked around. That's right, the most powerful hallucinogenic drug in the world is only a tiny molecular change away from a chemical found in your brain all the time. Spooky. As a result, it's very like that the 'feelings of positivity about the world' that Serotonin induces are very heavily involved with religious experience, but that's a story for another time.

[3] - You should not do this because it is a bad thing.

[4] - IF YOU PRELOAD WITH 5-HTP BEFORE TAKING MDMA YOU STAND A SIGNIFICANT CHANCE OF DEATH. THANK YOU. I've seen a SJW tranny do this and literally die in front of me; the indignity, to slice off your own penis in the name of female approval only to die a month later. RIP sweet prince. You gave me the greatest Ketamine I shoved up my nose. Still one of the funniest club deaths I've ever seen though, as watching a shitload of tumblrinas all have panic attacks simultaneously was amazing, and 'comforting' them got me a threesome.

EDIT: Here's a cool TED Talk on how serotonin influences leadership, courtesy of /u/slay_it_forward. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y