Unlikely Happy Drug

I was obsessed with suicidal thoughts for a year when I was 19. For at least half my life I’ve been doing an emotional balancing act, trying, sometimes desperately, to find a reason to stay alive.

A couple of years ago I discovered this thing, an idea which seemed somewhat magical at first but which also gave me hope that maybe I could step off the emotional tightrope and have a bit of a rest.

I was travelling around in my camper van and I ended up on this little five acre farm where a woman called Magie had built a mud and stone house. Flowers and succulents grew on the roof. I did some work in the veggie garden, weeding, planting seeds, digging potatoes out of the ground, picking tomatoes and basil and feeding the goats.

At night time we sat around a fire just outside the door of the hut and cooked our dinner.

I’d been feeling relaxed and relatively content since I’d been staying on the farm. The food was fresh and delicious and I loved the goat cheese that Magie made. Staring into the fire every night was mesmerising - somehow it made up for not have any cell phone reception and it was sort of nice not to be constantly checking my phone. I felt less agitated.

I was curious about why I was feeling so unusually contented. I didn't really believe it was going to last. I wondered if Magie might have some clues?

‘Mags,’ I said.

‘Hmmm,’ she answered, looking up from the flames, ‘yep?’

‘Well I was wondering why I’m feeling so good at the moment. Usually I’m swinging pretty wildly between feeling really flat and then sometimes O.K. I’m wondered if you have any ideas about why I’ve been feeling relatively good for a number of days now? It’s such a new experience for me.’

‘Hard to say really,’ she answered, ‘you usually work in an office right?’

‘Yep.’

‘And I’m guessing you live most of your time inside your flat after you get home for work?’

‘Well, yeah, mostly. I try and get out for a run a few times a week, if I’m not feeling too flat.’

‘Well there’s this thing, see,’ she said, ‘where we all need a sense of connectedness through out our life, something most of us had we we were babies and being breast fed. There’s a hormone released in both the mum and the bub during breast feeding called, oxytocin.’

‘What if you weren’t breast fed?’ I asked.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she shook her head, ‘whilst oxytocin is a bonding hormone which makes us feel safe and connected, it also gets released through cuddling and other things too. So it’s not exclusive to breast feeding.’

‘Yeah but what’s that got to do with how I’m feeling now? I haven’t hugged anyone for ages.’

‘Mmm,’ Magie nodded, ‘but there’s another way that oxytocin is stimulated in the human brain and you’ve been involved with a lot of that lately. You see, over the last 7 million years, hominids, which includes us, homo-sapiens, have been getting their food directly by hunting and gathering which always involves a lot of direct contact with earth, with soil and healthy soil bacteria.’

‘But I’m not a hunter gatherer,’ I argued.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but you've had your hands in the soil digging those potatoes and planting seeds in the ground. It’s healthy soil, teeming with beneficial bacteria. All you have to do is smell those bacteria and oxytocin gets released in your brain. It makes you happy. We’re hard wired to associate the smell of good soil bacteria with food, with sustenance, with being safe. So your brain is flooded with that feel good hormone. You feel connected, perhaps even loved...’

I sat with that for a moment and considered how I’d been feeling since I started gardening on the farm. I really did feel relaxed and safe and sometimes even happy. If I thought about it, yeah, although I wasn’t breast fed, it was a similar feeling to being hugged by my mum.

Wow, who would have thought that those tiny invisible creatures, in the earth, could have such a awesome effect on my brain and even make me feel happy!