Why Serotonin, Not Dopamine, Builds Long-Term Wellbeing
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
Executive Summary
In a world dominated by dopamine-driven productivity and quick fixes, long-term well-being requires a different kind of chemistry. This essay explores serotonin as the molecule of the long game, examining how it supports rhythm, regulation, and identity over time. Grounded in research by Crockett and Miyazaki, and enriched by Dacher Keltner's work on awe, the piece outlines how serotonin enables qualities of patience, emotional stability, and nervous system integrity that are often overlooked in traditional success models.
Through the practices of awe, future self-journalling, and savouring, the essay maps out how to rewire the brain’s predictive machinery, shifting from reactivity to rhythm. It argues that sustainable leadership and legacy aren’t built in the highs of achievement, but in the ability to stay present, regulated, and grounded as life evolves. This is not about abandoning ambition, but about building the inner architecture required to hold it without collapsing. Serotonin, in this light, becomes not just a mood stabiliser but a foundation for a more meaningful and manageable life.
The Dopamine Delusion: Why Our Culture Prioritises the Quick Hit
We live in a time defined by pursuit. In a world where pace is mistaken for progress, and novelty is confused with meaning, our brains have been rewired to crave the immediate. Dopamine, the neurochemical often associated with motivation, reward, and anticipation, has become the unofficial mascot of modern self-optimisation. Whether it’s the thrill of ticking off a to-do list, the transient hit of social media likes, or the race to biohack our way to “better,” much of our daily life is structured around the promise of dopamine-driven highs. But what’s less discussed is the toll this takes on our inner architecture.
The problem isn’t dopamine itself. Dopamine is essential to life it fuels learning, motivates action, and sharpens focus. But when we build systems, habits, and identities around chasing dopamine, we reinforce neural pathways that favour short-term gains over long-term wisdom. A culture of productivity, performance, and perpetual stimulation has left many of us dysregulated, exhausted, and confused as to why success doesn’t feel like fulfilment. We become experts in achieving, but amateurs in being. Instead of inhabiting our lives, we scroll past them. Instead of staying with the moment, we outsource our attention to the next thing, and the next.
This is not a personal failing. It is a nervous system trained by the world it lives in. When external environments prioritise immediacy, internal systems adapt. However, the human brain, which has evolved over millennia for rhythm, regulation, and relationship, is not designed to thrive in constant acceleration. What emerges is a mismatch: between ancient neurobiology and modern life, between what we’re wired for and what we’re subjected to. It is here that we begin to see that dopamine, while necessary, may not be sufficient. The chemical of chase cannot hold the full weight of a meaningful life.
What we need is a counterbalance. A neurochemical that doesn’t spike, but stabilises. One that anchors us in the long game. One that helps us pause, stay, and find peace. That molecule is serotonin and it changes everything when we start to build a life that honours it.
Read: Why Nervous System Wellbeing Is the Missing Link in Sustainable Success
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✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
The Serotonin System: What the Science Tells Us
If dopamine is the spark, serotonin is the soil. It doesn’t chase, it anchors. Unlike dopamine, which operates in the circuitry of “wanting,” serotonin helps modulate mood, regulate emotion, and cultivate a sense of internal stability. It is quieter, slower, and far less glamorous. But it is the very thing that allows us to feel at peace with the present moment and to wait for what is not yet here. In a culture obsessed with momentum, serotonin is the molecule of staying.
While dopamine shouts, serotonin listens. It influences everything from mood and social bonding to impulse control and moral decision-making. In a series of groundbreaking studies, Molly Crockett and colleagues (2010, 2012) showed that serotonin depletion significantly alters the way people respond to social dilemmas. With lower serotonin levels, individuals were more likely to act out of retaliation, more sensitive to unfairness, and less capable of emotional restraint. These aren’t simply mood shifts; they are moral shifts. Serotonin, in other words, helps regulate not just how we feel, but how we choose to behave in the presence of others. It holds a central role in our ability to pause, perspective-take, and move beyond self-protection.
But serotonin does more than calm reactivity. It also expands our capacity to hold uncertainty and delay gratification. In a 2014 study, Miyazaki et al. identified serotonin-producing neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus that fired consistently when mice waited for a delayed reward. These neurons weren’t involved in the act of receiving the reward but in the act of waiting for it. Serotonin, in this light, emerges as the neurochemical signature of patience. Not passive resignation, but the active capacity to stay with discomfort in service of something greater. The future. The vision. The deeper truth has not yet been realised.
This kind of patience isn’t just nice to have. It is foundational for leadership, parenting, healing, and any form of meaningful life design. It is what allows us to make decisions that honour the whole story, not just the current chapter. It is what helps us hold space for the future self we are becoming, even when the present feels uncertain. And it is precisely what modern life erodes. From 24-hour news cycles to app-based gratification loops, our nervous systems are rarely invited to wait. They are trained to react.
But what if we could train them differently? What if we could intentionally work with our biology, not against it, to increase our serotonin baseline and anchor ourselves in a life built on rhythm rather than reaction? That is the invitation. And in the next section, we explore three tools: awe, future self-journalling, and nervous system-based savouring that do just that.
Read: Why ‘Just Relax’ Advice Fails – How to Destress Using Your Nervous System
Redefining Productivity: Why Overworking Is a Nervous System Response, Not Virtue
Successful But Unfulfilled? Neuroscience Reveals What’s Missing
Nervous System Practices That Anchor Serotonin
1. Awe as a Serotonin State
Awe is often mistaken for something ornamental, an emotional luxury best reserved for mountaintops, galaxies, or spiritual retreats. But the science tells a different story. Awe is a biologically potent state that expands our perceptual field, softens our sense of separateness, and recalibrates the nervous system toward regulation. In contrast to dopamine-driven stimulation, which narrows attention toward goals and energises pursuit, awe slows time and opens us to context, connectedness, and calm. It is one of the few human states that can simultaneously reduce inflammation, shift our default narratives, and deepen our capacity to belong.
Psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder (2023), defines awe as the feeling we experience in the presence of something vast that transcends our existing frames of reference. His global research spanning over 2,600 awe narratives across 26 countries shows that awe dampens activity in the default mode network (DMN), the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thought, and activates pathways that promote social bonding, humility, and cooperation. Physiologically, awe engages the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering inflammation and inducing a sense of grounded expansiveness. Keltner’s findings suggest that awe isn't a rare or elite experience it’s a biological reset, accessible in daily life, and deeply tied to our nervous system’s capacity for balance.
This is not just emotional poetry, it’s neurochemical. Awe appears to activate the dorsal raphe nucleus, a major site of serotonin production in the brainstem. While research is still emerging, the psychological effects of awe calm alertness, tolerance for uncertainty, and prosocial behaviour mirror the functions of serotonin. Where dopamine says “Go,” serotonin says “Stay.” Awe invites us not to chase the moment, but to be claimed by it. And in that surrender, the nervous system can stop rehearsing threat and begin restoring capacity.
Most importantly, awe displaces us from the centre of our own striving. It dissolves urgency. The drive to produce or perform gives way to the experience of simply being in relationship to nature, to others, to something larger than the self. Keltner’s research shows that people most commonly report feeling awe not during grand achievements, but in everyday moments: watching a child sleep, standing under trees, hearing music that stirs memory. These micro-moments are not trivial. They are updates. They inform the brain’s prediction machinery that the world is not always dangerous. They show the nervous system that we can inhabit slowness and still be safe.
In this way, awe becomes more than a feeling. It becomes a practice, a way of restoring rhythm, relationality, and reverence in a world that pushes us toward constant motion. When engaged deliberately, awe builds the very conditions that support serotonin stability: quiet, coherence, and internal spaciousness. It teaches the body that peace is not a finish line, but a frequency. And it is precisely this frequency that long-term wellbeing, leadership, and inner architecture are built upon.
Read: The Transformative Power of Awe: How Wonder Rewires Your Brain and Expands Your Life
How Emotions Are Constructed - Neuroscience Meets Human Design
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
2. Future Self Journalling as a Regulatory Anchor
In a dopamine-driven culture, journaling is often marketed as a productivity tool, another checkbox in the morning routine, another way to optimise the day. But when practised intentionally, journalling can become something far deeper: a serotonin-building ritual of self-regulation, identity anchoring, and time integration. Future self-journalling, in particular, is not about fantasising or manifesting. It’s about constructing the neural scaffolding that allows us to tolerate the gap between who we are and who we are becoming.
At its core, journaling is an act of self-referencing. It allows us to observe our inner world in the present, while shaping a coherent narrative across time. This is central to both mental well-being and nervous system regulation. When we write from the perspective of our future self, grounded in values, not just goals, we create a psychologically safe bridge between now and next. That bridge becomes a stabiliser. It gives form to what is currently intangible, and that sense of structure is a key ingredient in serotonin production.
From a neuroscience perspective, this practice engages autobiographical memory, episodic future thinking, and interoceptive awareness. The medial prefrontal cortex (involved in self-reflection), the hippocampus (involved in memory integration), and the anterior cingulate cortex (involved in conflict resolution and emotional regulation) all play a role. These brain regions are heavily modulated by serotonin. When we regularly access this contemplative, integrative state through writing, we reinforce a sense of self that is capable of waiting, trusting, and holding emotional complexity.
Crucially, future self-journalling is not about scripting a perfect future; it’s about building the internal architecture to meet life with sturdiness. It invites the nervous system to practise patience, not perfection. To sit with uncertainty while still moving forward. To build the capacity to say, “I don’t know exactly how this will unfold, but I know who I’m becoming in the process.” That capacity is serotonin’s domain.
This is especially important when navigating change. When the future is unknown or unstable, the brain defaults to the past it clings to old identities, old stories, and old survival patterns. Future self journalling offers a repatterning opportunity: a place to rehearse self-leadership, to explore new possibilities without pressure, and to encode the felt sense of becoming. Over time, the nervous system learns that the future isn’t inherently unsafe; it’s simply unfamiliar. And with enough repetition, unfamiliar becomes familiar. The serotonin system begins to stabilise.
In this way, journalling becomes more than insight; it becomes integration. A practice of coherence. A daily act of choosing rhythm over reactivity, patience over urgency, and identity over performance. It teaches the brain and body how to hold steady in the in-between, and that is where true transformation lives.
Read: Repair, Rewire, Remember, Return: A Nervous System-Led Framework for Real Transformation
The Invisible Forces Shaping Your Identity: How Environment, Neuroscience, and Human Design Impact You
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
3. Savouring: Updating the Nervous System’s Prediction Machinery
In a world conditioned to scan for threat, savouring is a radical act. It asks us to pause not just in the absence of danger, but in the presence of goodness. It teaches the nervous system to stretch toward safety, to linger in pleasure, and to imprint moments of well-being into long-term memory. While dopamine may alert us to a reward, it is serotonin that allows us to stay with it to feel the fullness of the moment without rushing past it in search of the next high.
Neuroscientifically, savouring is the process of encoding positive experiences into the brain’s predictive model. The nervous system doesn’t respond to reality; it responds to what it expects. If our past experiences have taught us that calm never lasts, or that joy always precedes disappointment, the brain will unconsciously prepare for contraction even in moments of expansion. Savouring interrupts this. It elongates positive affect, strengthens the associative memory circuits in the hippocampus, and helps rewire the nervous system’s priors. Over time, this becomes a new baseline, not because life becomes perfect, but because the system has learned to tolerate and retain goodness.
From a biochemical perspective, this has direct implications for serotonin. Studies show that positive affect, secure relational connection, and present-moment awareness all increase serotonin availability. When we consciously stretch into a moment of gratitude, beauty, connection, or accomplishment and then stay with it we activate serotonin pathways that stabilise mood and signal internal safety. This is especially important for those who live in systems of chronic stress, trauma, or hypervigilance. In these systems, even joy can feel dysregulating. Savouring helps rebuild the neurobiological tolerance for peace.
This is not about toxic positivity or bypassing pain. It is about nervous system retraining. When we intentionally savour a moment breathing it in, feeling it in the body, mentally narrating it to ourselves we signal to the brain that safety is not only possible, but familiar. This is a form of emotional learning. It’s not enough to think differently; we must feel differently, again and again, until the body no longer flinches when it encounters calm.
Practically, savouring can take many forms: pausing after a meaningful conversation, holding eye contact for one extra second, noticing the weight of a warm mug in the hand, or simply naming a small win at the end of the day. These practices may seem subtle, but they are structurally significant. They reinforce to the nervous system that not all stimulus requires defence that some moments are safe enough to let in, and long enough to stay.
In the context of serotonin and long-term wellbeing, savouring is not indulgence. It is integration. A way to consolidate growth, solidify identity, and reorient the nervous system toward rhythm and receptivity. It teaches the brain that goodness is not a glitch, but a pattern it can begin to trust.
Read: You’re Not Supposed to Know It All: How Collective Intelligence Redefines Success, Ideas, and Decision-Making
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Rhythm and Responding Over Reactivity
These practices do more than soothe the system in the moment; they retrain it to trust rhythm over reactivity. They reshape what the nervous system comes to expect from life: not just survival, but stability. And this shift, quiet, slow, and foundational, changes how we relate to everything.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much but from never being fully with what we’re doing. A quiet depletion that builds when the nervous system is constantly scanning, shifting, chasing, caught in micro-survival cycles without pause. This is the hidden cost of reactivity. It’s not just about burnout. It’s about erosion: of presence, of clarity, of self. When our lives are governed by dopamine loops, urgency, and overstimulation, the capacity for long-term wellbeing begins to unravel.
Reactivity is fast. It feels urgent, instinctive, and often righteous. But it is rarely rooted. It bypasses the deeper centres of reflection and runs on the well-worn grooves of habit and threat. Serotonin offers an alternative. It supports the conditions for response, measured, grounded, and strategic. Unlike dopamine, which prepares the system to pursue, serotonin stabilises it. It holds emotion without tipping. It increases tolerance for ambiguity. It helps the body feel safe enough to pause, and in that pause, a new choice becomes available.
To live from rhythm is to develop a different relationship with time. Rhythm is not about slowness for its own sake; it’s about right pacing. The ability to move with life, rather than against it. And rhythm is what makes responding possible. It is what enables us to meet challenges with discernment, not defensiveness. To hold steady when others are spiralling. To act from alignment rather than compulsion. In leadership, parenting, relationships, and identity work, this shift is foundational. Without rhythm, the nervous system can only react. With rhythm, it can respond.
This is not a conceptual shift; it is a physiological one. Practices like awe, future self-journalling, and savouring work precisely because they teach the body how to dwell in the space between stimulus and response. That space is where serotonin lives. It is also where the agency lives. Each time we pause to savour a moment of peace, each time we write from the version of ourselves we’re becoming, each time we allow ourselves to be awed rather than overwhelmed, we strengthen the pathways that make rhythm and response available.
Over time, these choices become an internal cadence. The world may not slow down, but our relationship to it does. And that changes everything. We begin to trust stillness. We stop fearing the absence of noise. We learn that stability is not the opposite of success, but its foundation. This is how nervous system integrity is built, not through force, but through frequency. And that frequency is the one serotonin knows best.
Read: The Future Self as a Mental Model: How to Transform Your Life
Stuck in Survival Mode: How to Understand It and Break Free for a Fulfilling Life
The Power of Neuroscience, Spirituality, and Strategy: A Guide to Purposeful Living
✍️ Ready to take this further?
If this spoke to you, it’s because you’re ready to stop living by default and start living by design. The next step is choosing how you want to strengthen your inner architecture:
👉 Explore the 30-Day Journal - neuroscience-backed daily prompts to rewire patterns, build the brain for the life you want to live, and connect with your future self
👉 Book Office Hours - bring the knot and we’ll untangle it together in a focused 1:1 session designed to bring clarity, strategy, and momentum where you need it most
Conclusion: Serotonin and the Soul of Sustainable Success
We are not lacking tools; we are lacking rhythm. In a culture that glorifies acceleration, optimisation, and visibility, serotonin offers something more radical than reward: regulation. It reminds us that our deepest human capacities, patience, connection, compassion, and foresight, are not the by-products of hustle, but the hallmarks of nervous system safety. Where dopamine initiates the chase, serotonin sustains the course. It does not demand that we prove ourselves; it asks only that we stay. And in staying, we begin to access a more sustainable form of success: one that is steady rather than spiky, relational rather than performative, and grounded rather than grasping.
This is not a call to abandon ambition. It is a call to redefine it. Leadership, legacy, and long-term well-being do not arise from the nervous system’s stress response; they emerge from rhythm. To lead from serotonin is to recognise that urgency does not equal importance, and that speed is not the same as impact. It is to ask not only, “What am I building?” but also, “Can I hold it without collapsing?” Serotonin answers that question by building the internal scaffolding that allows us to hold success without burning out, to carry complexity without becoming rigid, and to move toward the future without losing the self.
The practices explored in this essay, experiencing awe, journaling from the future self, and savouring moments of safety, are not self-help tools in the conventional sense. They are nervous system recalibrations. They update the brain’s prediction models to expect rhythm instead of rupture. They deepen our tolerance for goodness and presence. And they rewire the identity from which we lead, not through force, but through frequency. This is the work of inner architecture: the deliberate construction of a self that can respond rather than react, that chooses coherence over control, and that lives from the inside out.
Ultimately, serotonin does not offer us the highs we’ve been taught to chase. It offers us something far rarer: a stable baseline from which to live well. In a world designed to pull us into the next thing, serotonin brings us back to what is here. And from that place anchored, regulated, and awake, we begin to lead lives that don’t just look successful, but feel truly, sustainably lived.
Where This Leads
This isn’t just theory. It’s architecture. And once the nervous system is seen for what it truly is, a prediction machine shaped by experience, relationship, and rhythm, it becomes clear that a life built on adrenaline cannot feel like home. Stability isn’t found through effort alone. It’s built through coherence, pacing, and internal scaffolding that can hold the weight of what’s being carried and what’s yet to come.
This is the moment many arrive at: externally accomplished, internally frayed. The rhythm is off. The nervous system is stretched. There’s a quiet knowing that something deeper needs to shift, not just in what’s done, but in how it’s held. The future can’t be built with the same strategies that created the past. And that’s not a failure. That’s an invitation.
When the nervous system begins to stabilise, everything else becomes possible. Decisions become clearer. Capacity expands. The future self stops feeling like a concept and starts feeling like a companion. Long-term wellbeing, leadership, and fulfilment are not outcomes to be chased; they are systems to be designed, lived, and embodied.
For those ready to design a different kind of life, one built on rhythm rather than reaction, sustainability rather than survival, there is support. Not in the form of more pressure, but in the form of structure, practice, and integration.
Next Steps
Begin the work that builds serotonin-based success:
→ Start with the 30-Day Journal – structure for nervous system-based change
→ Book a 2-Hour Office Hours Session – unravel what's keeping the system stuck
→ Apply for the 16-Week Coaching Programme – rebuild the architecture from within
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Recommended Reading
1. The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long. Why read it: This book breaks down dopamine’s role in motivation, reward, and pursuit—with nuance around how it drives cultural, romantic, and professional behaviour. It offers a perfect counterpoint to your essay’s serotonin thesis, helping readers understand what dopamine does, and why it’s not built for sustained wellbeing.
2. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. Why read it: This is the cornerstone reference for Section III.1. Keltner’s research is beautifully accessible and scientifically rigorous. It explores how awe shapes the nervous system, deepens social connection, downregulates the DMN, and anchors long-term meaning—central to serotonin-based integration.
3. The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb, PhD. Why read it: A neuroscience-based guide to building lasting emotional well-being through small, daily actions that increase serotonin, oxytocin, and self-directed neuroplasticity. Korb writes about how practices like reflection, gratitude, and movement contribute to stabilising mood and long-term change aligned directly with your essay’s core practices.
4. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Why read it: For readers wanting deeper insight into how the brain predicts and constructs experience, this book offers a paradigm-shifting framework. It supports your point that the nervous system responds to predictions, not reality, and reinforces how practices like journalling and savouring reshape emotional responses over time.
5. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Why read it:. While widely read, this remains one of the most important texts for understanding how trauma shapes nervous system architecture, emotional regulation, and one’s capacity to stay with experience. It strongly supports your argument that reactivity is not a weakness but biology and that rhythm must be deliberately restored.
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