You can aid the happiness of your brain by taking on activities that generate key experiences and chemicals:
- Dopamine for motivation, learning and pleasure.
- Oxytocin for trust and building relationships.
- Serotonin for significance and importance.
- Endorphins for euphoria and elation.
Without serotonin, you can feel unstable and find your mood changing rapidly. It's a chemical that helps us with routines where we accept ourselves and find calm. With low serotonin, it is hard to feel confident in who we are. This can mean that we worry more and find it harder to learn and remember things.
Along with getting outside for exercise, eating well and nurturing conversations, video games can also help. Games that generate serotonin are those that give regular simple activities you can complete each day. Games that help build routines are helpful. We may not play these games for long, but they help structure other things around them. Fitness games also complement this, particularly those games that give us a reason to get outside.
This list includes 49 games from the last 18 years, with 1,481 likes. They come from a range of different genres and play-styles and are all good games if you want to generate serotonin.