Posted 25 May 2012 - 04:20 AM
Even though you're not depressed, some antidepressants can increase your extraversion. Long-term SSRI treatment appears to do this, and I'll personally vouch for MAOIs doing it too.
That said, developing your comedic ability is a much more specific way to get exactly what you asked for (more funny moments) without side effects. There isn't a drug out there that helps you do a specific behavior more/less frequently without changing other, unrelated things in the brain.
If you're wanting to improve general mood, there's once again the option to use an antidepressant. Your friends here are MAOIs, bupropion, tianeptine, and low-dose SSRIs. Tricyclics have too many side effects to improve general mood, as do the other atypicals.
As above, it's better advice if I suggest that you change your lifestyle to improve your happiness. I like Seligman's acronym PERMA, denoting 5 elements of a happy life: Pleasure, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Achievement. Laughter is a form of pleasure, and pleasure is pretty cool. It's also one of the harder elements of happiness to sustainably increase, and it gives very little return on investment for all the time you spend on it. Don't get me wrong -- you can sustainably increase pleasure, just like you can successfully day-trade on the stock market. But it takes lots of time and effort, and there's a learning curve involved. Also, if you don't have other strategies to be happy, you'll be left high and dry when you're having an unpleasant day.
Increasing the other elements of happiness gives you more bang for your buck, so I'll discuss them.
Engagement means Flow -- that state where you're so concentrated on what you're doing that you forget about everything else. No thoughts of the past or future or what people think of you or how you feel right now, in fact, often there are no verbal thoughts at all -- only the task at hand. To be clear, zoning out in front of a tv show or while driving is not flow. With Flow, you're totally zoned in. Your mind is very awake and aware; it's just only aware of action. Personally, I tend to encounter flow when singing, exercising, and sometimes when writing or socializing. It only happens in things that you really care about, and a good way to increase happiness is to make sure you're doing several different things that you really care about, every single day. Of course, flow does not always happen when you do something engaging, but you'll be happier if you give yourself several chances to experience flow every day.
Relationships is exactly what it sounds like -- friends, romantic partners, family. The more good interactions you have with these people, the better you feel. Focusing on developing close relationships with people (or if necessary, finding people who you want to get close to) is a major investment in your ability to laugh so hard you can't breathe. After all, inside jokes are some of the funniest ones, and things that happen in real life -- stuff comedians can't write -- is usually what makes you laugh that hard. There are plenty of ways to increase closeness and harmony in your relationships, some of which are obvious and some have to be learned. One simple technique is to genuinely thank people at least 3 times a day. (Polite-but-emotionally-empty "thank you"s don't count. It has to be heartfelt.)
Meaning has to do with character, values, what you feel like you're on the Earth to do, God's plan for you, what needs to be done, your life's calling... There are so many ways to describe it, and specific terminology varies by subculture. The common thread to all these disparate ideas is "participating in something bigger than myself," whether you conceive of it as "God" or "the greater good" or "improving people's lives" or "Truth"... whatever means something to you.
You can be much happier by doing things every day that feel meaningful to you, and also doing less of those things that go against your values. This is one of the most important elements of a happy life -- if you don't have antisocial personality disorder, you will be happier if you make your life more meaningful!
A for Achievement, or Accomplishment, or self-Actualizing. I probably don't need to explain what these things are. You might do them because they're meaningful, or because they're fun, or because they make money, or for any reason really. The point is that you practice something and you get better and better at it. At various points, you encounter milestones that clearly indicate that you've gotten something important done -- you get a promotion in a job you love, you sing the hardest song you've ever performed live and the audience gives you a standing ovation, or you cross the finish line at your first marathon... That moment of "Yes! I did it!" You start out as a beginner, and go uphill from there. Some of these things are on your bucket list. Some are on your long-term to-do list. They won't necessarily give you Pleasure every day -- frustration may be more common in the beginning. But every time you practice at it, you feel proud of yourself for working towards the goal. If you move even an inch closer to your life-long goals every single day, you will be much happier before you even reach the first goal.
Yes, Martin Seligman invented that acronym in his most recent book, Flourish. But I'm not talking about it because it's from his book, I'm talking about it because it worked for me. After recovering from major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder NOS, I still wasn't happy. I certainly wasn't unhappy -- it's almost impossible to be depressed with all that exercise and therapy and bright light and activities I was doing. And it's hard to be anxious when you learn a classically conditioned behavior of taking deep breaths every time you start to tense up and worry. But where was the satisfaction and the occasional euphoria that I used to have? I wasn't getting it by chasing pleasure. I mean, I got it on friday and saturday nights when partying with my friends... as long as we were all in mostly good moods. But what about the rest of the week? Therapy was great for going from miserable to neutral. But going from neutral to happy requires the stuff I talked about above.
So, what do you think of that? Still interested in tweaking those neurotransmitters? I won't discourage you from doing it -- I stayed on my antidepressant for months after I'd already recovered from MDD and the anxiety disorder. I still have a 2-month supply in my room, just in case. And I still take a stimulant for ADHD, since ADHD doesn't go away.
But you know that a pill isn't going to give you that unmistakeable "my-life-is-going-great" feeling more often, right? You know you have to actually make your life better in order to get that feeling more often?
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