Klaudia Mitura: Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia. Welcome to part two of this month's happiness challenge on how to kickstart your feel-good chemicals. So do you sometimes feel blah and simply not feeling it? Yes, we all do. Some of us for shorter or longer period of time. And there is a scientific term for that feeling of 'blah', 'meh'. And it is Anhedonia.
In the previous episode, 76, my podcast guest, British journalist and the author of the book Feeling 'Blah', Tanith Carey, explains that the term Anhedonia derives from the Greek words 'without pleasure'. And it is a state in which you get on with life, but without that feeling of zest, joy and true enjoyment.
Tanith advocates that anhedonia is actually a missing word in the mental health because we talk about joy and happiness on one end, and we talk about depression and despair at the other. But in daily grind of life, a lot of us are often in that grey space in between. But in order to understand anhedonia, we need to first understand how is happiness actually created in our brain.
So in order to feel zest, joy and true enjoyment when engaging in life activities, our brain needs to produce dopamine, a chemical which in turn has to travel smoothly via the brain reward circuit, which is associated with motivation and reward. The circuit connects very important parts of the brain so that you feel happy and joyful. You remember the positive experiences and are more likely to repeat the pleasurable behaviour in the future. But in anhedonia, this process and the flow of dopamine within the brain's reward circuit is not working as well as it should be resulting in us feeling just 'meh'.
So what can we do to regain that feeling of zest of life. In this month's happiness challenge, I'm exploring two methods to kickstart my feel-good chemicals, music and cold showers. Listening to music that you love makes our brain release more dopamine. It has been found that dopamine can even increase by 9 percent when listening to music that we enjoy, and especially one that brings those positive memories back to us.
So I'll be kickstarting my dopamine first thing in the morning by listening to music that I love whilst showering. The second way to kickstart our dopamine is cold showers and this one I'm much less excited about because I truly hate feeling cold, but research reveals that cold showers result in significant increase in dopamine concentrations.
There is so many past research studies showing that submerging our body in a cold water increase our dopamine concentration by 250%. I mean, a second ago I was speaking about music, which was increasing it by 9%. Cold shower 250%, and this is because our body responds to that cold water by upregulating feel good molecules like dopamine as a way to compensate for the fact that we are experiencing some displeasure because of the cold.
Now, my next question instantly about the cold shower was how long should the cold shower last? And thankfully that has been measured too. In one study, researchers assign participants to three different time groups, 30, 60 and 90 seconds. And while common sense may lead to think that, well, the longer the better, the research actually showed that those participants in the 30 second group received benefits equal to those in 60 and 90 second groups.
So actually it takes only 30 seconds to reap the benefits of a cold shower or having that dopamine boost.
So this month I'm definitely will be taking my usual hot shower followed by 30 seconds cold shower whilst, listening to my favourite tunes. So wish me luck. Remember to keep in touch and join my newsletter on LinkedIn. I see you at the end of the month to share what I have learned through this challenge.
In meantime, I dare you to be happy. Bye.
