Got Serotonin?

Peer-reviewed permission to become someone new

identity renovation in progress. please excuse the dust!!! 🧹🧠

Turns out being “stuck” is a chemistry problem.

Published in Nature Mental Health earlier this month, a Brown University study found that serotonin reduces “belief stickiness”—the tendency to get stuck on an old idea despite new contradicting evidence—by improving cognitive flexibility.

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know cognitive flexibility is your brain’s ability to drop an old story and truly install a new one, instead of just intellectually agreeing the new one sounds better. It’s what allows you to recognize that this work works and update your beliefs accordingly. Mastering it comes down to the difference between knowing you should think differently and actually being able to.

I stumbled across this earthly development on the Reddit r/science town square earlier this week and screenshotted it immediately—which, as your existential flight attendant, I feel obligated to note is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you spend six to eight hours a day writing about reality creation. I’m in the final weeks of my last editing round, which means my Reticular Activating System is currently seeing ALL DATA through a manifestation lens even more than usual. Everything is a receipt right now!!! 🧾🪐

Nature Mental Health, but make it FutureYou™ propaganda 😏🌱💅

The manifestation implications are significant: belief stickiness is literally the biological mechanism behind the Gargoyles shaming you for not being able to feel differently for long. It’s the chemistry of why you can’t method act FutureYou™ even when you consciously know she’s worth becoming. It’s also why you understand, cerebrally, that updating your Identity File would change everything and then default back to the old you almost involuntarily, like a browser refreshing to a cached page.

Serotonin is the biological lubricant that lets your system update, which means anything that naturally boosts it is chemically supporting your ability to install FutureYou™. If you’re optimizing for ROI (and you should be!), serotonin is moving all the needles simultaneously.

The Faster You Feel Good, The Faster It Comes

Neville taught that feeling is the secret of creation. The emotional state you inhabit is the signal your subconscious uses to build your reality, which means serotonin is a transmission quality issue. Low serotonin makes Current You's beliefs stickier—harder to release, and easier to recycle. Higher serotonin makes it easier to update your identity to actually feel worthy, capable, and inevitable, without the asterisk. The signal is cleaner so the broadcast reaches further. Your Emotional WiFi starts consistently running on something your manifestations can actually find.

There are two kinds of people who find this work: the ones who feel the resonance and install it, and the ones who feel the resonance and talk themselves out of it by Tuesday. The difference comes down to whether your brain can actually release the cached version of you long enough to run the Future You update.

Your serotonin determines which one you are. And unlike your childhood, mercury retrograde, or your landlord, this one you can actually DO something about. 🥰🎢🛼🏄‍♀️🌊🌴🌞👒

Dr. Planet Delulu™ Will See You Now

Indicated For: Chronic Identity Calcification

she’s reading the Serotonin Menu, but all it says is she IS the prescription. HARUMPH!!!!!!!! 😤

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a chemical your brain uses to communicate between cells. You know it as the mood chemical, the one your therapist mentions when she’s suggesting you might want to reconsider your stance on SSRIs—but the aforementioned study found it does something more specific and more interesting: it determines how quickly your brain detects that the world has changed and lets go of the old story accordingly.

They tested it with a game where participants had to collect shells. Some shells gave pearls and some gave dirt, but the seasons kept shifting: a shell that used to give pearls would start giving dirt. Higher serotonin meant you noticed the season had changed and adjusted soon after. Lower serotonin meant you kept playing the old game, collecting the same shell, and expecting different results, which is also a description of what it feels like to hit a manifestation plateau. Or even an existential one.

The researchers also found that the optimal window for installing new beliefs is immediately after serotonin is elevated, when the brain is most receptive to updating. Your serotonin is determining whether the identity work lands or just bounces off the current version of you like it was never there, which feels to me like a scientific explanation for why emotional reinforcement works so well for updating the subconscious—you have to feel the win like it’s already here, like Conor McGregor does before he steps out onto the octagon.

Before anyone outside Ireland knew his name, he was already calling himself champion. By the time he stepped into the octagon to fight José Aldo for the featherweight title, the whole world was watching—and he’d already predicted a first-round knockout with surgical precision. Thirteen seconds later, Aldo was on the canvas in the fastest title finish in UFC history.

McGregor’s process is: visualize the fight frame by frame, feel the win in your cells, and inhabit the identity of champion so completely that the physical fight is just reality catching up to what he’s already decided is true. I’d argue all of that was boosting his serotonin. How could it not? Calling yourself who you want to be, predicting the victories you actually want, living from hopeful expectancy rather than bracing for disappointment, permitting yourself to experience the future emotions in the mundane present—that’s what feeling good on purpose looks like in practice. And feeling good on purpose, as the study confirms, is exactly what primes the brain to update. The identity work lands when the serotonin is there to receive it.

What follows is a non-pharmaceutical treatment plan. Some of these are literal serotonin boosters backed by research. Others are metaphorical. All of them are on Planet Delulu™ formulary and covered by your self-permission plan.

No prior authorization required. 👩‍⚕️💋🍒

Over-The-Counter Cognitive Flexibility

Welcome to the Planet Delulu™ Cosmic Pharmacy, where we dispense Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions For Belief Stickiness.

⚠️ WARNING: Side effects may include fatigued free will from engaging and re-engaging it every time you drift from the end state; increased resistance to the Gargoyles’ running commentary on your capabilities, charisma, and growth trajectory; a growing inability to take other people’s projections personally; an unshakeable compulsion to return to FutureYou™ even after you’ve talked yourself out of her seventeen times; and a baseline serotonin level that makes your old self-doubting, self-loathing identity increasingly uncomfortable to wear.

⚠️ Do not operate heavy machinery while your Identity File is mid-update. Disorientation and distraction urges are NORMAL. That’s the install happening. Breathe through it and keep your nervous system regulated, because as Brené Brown said in my last post, joy, pleasure, trust, and gratitude can be terrifying to feel when you don’t have practice feeling them. If your serotonin has been tracking downward for a while, once it starts coming back up, you’ll need to show yourself it’s safe. That actually, when you take a beat and let yourself settle into the present—it’s so much better.

10 Ways to Gaslight Your Nervous System into Thinking You're Safe

⚠️ If symptoms of FutureYou™ persist, do NOT discontinue treatment. If anything, double down. There is no recommended upper limit for how good you’re allowed to feel, how much fear you’re permitted to surrender, how much pleasure can be enjoyed in the present moment, or how much trust you can extend toward something not yet visible to the naked eye. This treatment has no ceiling dose. The better it gets, the better it gets—which you can only find out by letting it get better, and not clenching around every good feeling, or using your current 3D circumstances as a verdict on whether this is working.

⚠️ It’s working until you decide it’s not. And the decision to decide it’s not is the only thing that makes that true. That's why free will is included with every prescription. It’s the active ingredient infused into every dosage. Without it, nothing in this formulary works. With it, nothing can stop it.

⚠️ Manufactured by Planet Delulu™. Not currently evaluated by the FDA. The patent is pending but the people in Washington aren’t returning my calls. My planetary instruments are picking up spotty murmurings about a war, which is a concept that is moot from this altitude. We don’t have wars on Planet Delulu™, only existential turbulence, which is categorically different, and we brief you thoroughly for it. In the meantime, this pharmacy has been extensively evaluated by FutureYou™, who’s tired of watching you curb-stomp your own serotonin by refreshing the news like it’s going to say something different than, “Yep, still bad. Getting worse by the minute, actually. Tons of conflict. Eighty-nine compelling reasons to either be infuriated or privileged-with-the-cancellation-countdown-coming. Scientists are worried. Economists are worried. Health experts are talking about this Hantavirus, and now everyone is worried. Also here are fifteen things you should feel guilty about and a poll about whether you're a good person. By the way, you’re not gonna buy a home and your parents did better than you. Scroll down for more!!! Oh, and before we go, look at these Amber Alerts. Back at 6.”

Rx #1: Be More Like Bretman Rock

Dosage: Daily, as needed.

My toxic ex, also known as a man from Georgia with an oddly vested interest in alpha/beta dynamics (which, for the record, is itself the most beta thing imaginable), once told me his guilty pleasure social media binge vice was Bretman Rock. I filed that away immediately, because nothing tells you more about someone than what brings them genuine joy, particularly when alone.

So I looked him up. And then I fell in love. Kindly direct your attention to the three videos below and watch all three. This is part of the prescription, which I’m clarifying because I know the urge to skip is arriving right now. The urge to fast-forward through things that could make you feel good is itself the belief stickiness we’ve been talking about, because it’s harder to cultivate a good mood when you’re zooming out of the present moment. There’s a Zen saying that goes: if you don’t have time to meditate for twenty minutes, meditate for an hour. The resistance is the diagnosis. By the end of these three videos, you will have a new understanding of what we’re actually aiming for when we talk about serotonin cultivation. Trust me.

As you can see, Bretman Rock lives on a farm in Hawaii. He puts false eyelashes on his chickens. He gives himself elaborate, George Washington-esque blowouts on days he has absolutely nowhere to go. He cuts pineapple into skewers, adds li hing mui and Maldon sea salt, tries different combinations, and takes his time with it. He’s telling his subconscious: Bretman’s worth the extra mile, and the extra mile is NORMAL. He minds his own business, tends his varigated fruit plants, creates beauty, and posts the whole thing with the energy of someone who has never once asked whether they deserve to feel this good.

Being “extra” IS LITERAL ABUNDANCE. I’ve felt like “too much” all my life. I’m a maximalist in every sense of the word, minus my aesthetic preferences. We’re at a coffee shop? I want to get two beverages. We’re getting cookies? Wait, let me get three, PLUS an Oreo cheesecake. In my world, there’s no such thing as too many liquid receptacles. In terms of my personality, I’m deeply introverted, but I’m also sassy and extra and spazzy and excitable and chaotic, something that gets whipped up in the presence of people. And sometimes I’ll burst into some place, just being my extra ol’ self, and realize by the reactions of the cashier or the group at the table next to me that they’re confused or suspicious by my Southern friendliness, probably because in LA, warmth “without a purpose” means I’m about to ask you for something. But through watching Bretman, and pattern-matching across all the visible examples of magnetism, I realized, omg: being extra means you are living from abundance. You have too many thoughts, desires, interests, and energies to stay contained.

And let me tell you, there is nothing more abundant than someone who’s felt like too much and decided to become more anyway. The world told you to contain it. Bretman Rock put false eyelashes on a chicken. One of these is a manifestation strategy.

A comment on his chicken video reads: “why does everything bretman do just work in his favor 😭😭” The reply? “it’s his attitude, reality reflects his mindset like a mirror.”

That’s 82,500 people independently arriving at the Law of Assumption on a TikTok about a chicken in false eyelashes. Bretman doesn’t know he’s a manifestation case study. He’s just living, because at some point on his journey toward pleasure and a life that nourished him, the good feelings and self-permission became normalized.

This is what maximum serotonin looks like in practice: a man on a farm adding extra seasoning because he’s worth the Maldon.

I do versions of this constantly. I’ll drive all the way to Torrance for Mama Says. I’ll hit two different Persian restaurants in one night—one specifically for the tahdig, the other for the gourmeh sabzi. When it comes to sensorial pleasure, my nervous system needs the evidence.

What brings you that level of unguarded, uncomplicated, nobody-asked-for-this pleasure? Start there and do it today.

Rx #2: Your Environment Is Dosing You Whether You Like It Or Not

Dosage: Ongoing.

according to Danielle LaPorte, pink is the frequency of Divine Love!!! she suggests breathing it in and visualizing it when you feel disconnected, armored, or calcified toward yourself or someone else. Domènech i Montaner apparently knew 🩷🧘‍♀️🪷

In the early 1900s, a Catalan architect named Lluís Domènech i Montaner was commissioned to build a hospital in Barcelona. He could have built something functional and sterile, the modern medical equivalent of a waiting room with fluorescent lights and a TV playing CNN. Instead, he built what is now considered the world’s largest Art Nouveau complex, because he believed something that the study we’ve been discussing just confirmed scientifically: beauty heals.

He designed freestanding patient pavilions surrounded by gardens, connected by underground passages; lofty vaulted ceilings to bring in fresh air and sunlight; vibrant ceramic tiles; sculptural details in every corner; and organic curves and plant motifs throughout. To him, the design choices were medicinal. He believed patients surrounded by beauty would heal faster. UNESCO agreed enough to declare it a World Heritage Site in 1997.

Your environment is running a continuous chemical experiment on your nervous system, and you didn’t consent to be a subject. If you don’t curate the inputs with some buffers, you’ll absorb whatever the default is, which is often fluorescent overhead lighting and a space that communicates I’m just getting through the day rather than I live somewhere worth adorning.

your popcorn walls don’t stand a CHANCE against free will and a mermaid zen garden 🧜‍♀️🪼🐚

When I was paying $1,950 a month for a single room that I shared with The Good Ex I Moved to California With, I poured everything I had into making it beautiful by Court's standards at the time. A Target marble bedside table with tchokes arranged with intention. Because I created something with what I had, the spaces slowly started upgrading, which was my subconscious registering: the person who lives here takes care of herself. That signal compounds. Small things I’ve done that have made an outsized difference include: switching to a red light after 8pm—which I put in this specific cutie IKEA circle lamp that’s survived several apartments because she’s so whimsical—sexy AND good for melatonin, which is two-for-one. Always at least one bouquet of fresh flowers somewhere visible. Making my bed first thing, every morning, because it signals to my subconscious that the day is worth showing up for, and it’s also an identity anchor: FutureCourt™ has standards for her space. Every single day, I open the windows and let the vibes reset. Fresh air is free and it cleanses your frequency with negative ions, increased serotonin, and a home that smells fresher. My mom puts LED strip lights under her bathroom cabinets so at night the whole room glows warm from the bottom up and looks like a boutique hotel. If you need a place to start, try a Himalayan salt lamp by your bedside. I’ve had the nightlight versions specifically in my bathroom too, which I loved. I love crystals lying around and natural textures.

You need one thing in your space that tells your nervous system: someone worth taking care of lives here.

Rx #3: Feed The Factory

Before I was writing a book about manifestation, I was a corporate copywriter—and one of my stops along the way was Ritual, the sunny yellow California vitamin brand you’ve probably seen on your Instagram. They’re famous for their prenatal, but when I joined they were expanding into probiotics, which meant I got to spend company time nerding out on gut health research and calling it content marketing. My reporting degree finally felt useful. If you want to go deeper, here are some of the articles I wrote. Throwback to my blonde era at the bottom:

• What Are Probiotics?: A Beginner’s Guide to Gut Health

• What Does Your Poop Say About Your Gut Health?

• Prebiotics vs. Probiotics: What’s the Difference?

• The Best Time of Day to Take a Probiotic, According to Science

What you need to know for our purposes is that approximately 90% of your body’s serotonin is produced in your gut, not your brain. The organ responsible for manufacturing most of your cognitive flexibility, belief updating capacity, and transmission quality is the same one you’ve been treating to 10:52 pm 7/11 orders for Gushers, Dot’s Pretzels, and Sprite Zero. I say this with full love and zero judgment because the receipts are in my own UberEats history and this entire admission is autobiographical. 🥰

Your gut contains roughly 100 trillion microorganisms including bacteria, fungi, and other microbes collectively called your microbiome. These microbes produce and regulate serotonin through specialized cells in your gut lining. When your microbiome is diverse and healthy, serotonin production is supported. When it’s compromised—through stress, poor diet, antibiotics, or chronic doomscrolling while eating takeout at midnight—production drops.

Your Emotional WiFi has a gut component. The signal quality your subconscious broadcasts to the universe is at least partially determined by whether you’re feeding the factory or depleting it.

Practical things that actually move the needle include:

Fermented foods like kimchi, yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, miso. As a Korean-American woman I have been eating my way to serotonin my entire life without knowing it. The gut bacteria that produce serotonin thrive on fermented foods. Add one serving daily. I’ve taken probiotics before (refrigerated in the Whole Foods aisle), and have also tried this Coconut Cult yogurt, which deeeeeeefinitely worked. 💩 (Side note: good gut health = glowing skin, which is its own form of identity anchoring!)

Tryptophan-rich foods like eggs, salmon, dark chocolate, oats, and turkey. Tryptophan is the amino acid your body converts into serotonin. You cannot manufacture serotonin without this precursor. Dark chocolate counts and I will not be elaborating further on why this is the best news I’ve ever delivered.

Fiber from fruits, vegetables, and legumes. Your gut bacteria eat fiber. When they're well fed, they produce more serotonin. This is the least glamorous prescription in this entire formulary and also one of the most mechanically important.

Probiotics either through food or supplementation. The research on specific strains is still developing but the general direction is clear: a more diverse, thriving microbiome supports serotonin production.

The metaphorical extension is your inputs are feeding something. Every piece of content you consume, every conversation you have, and every environment you spend time in is either feeding the factory or depleting it. Your gut microbiome and your subconscious are running on the same principle: what you consistently feed determines what gets produced.

FutureYou™ has a thriving microbiome and immaculate Emotional WiFi. They’re related. As above, so below. When the body feels good, the brain releases its grip on the old story—and a brain that can release its grip is a brain that can finally install the new one.

That’s the formulary: consistency, free will, and the decision to keep going even when the cached version of you insists nothing is changing.

It’s changing. Feed the factory,
Court 🍒
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P.S. I’m here, I see your comments, and I love you for leaving them!!!!!!! The manuscript is in its final stretch and my fingers are staging a labor dispute, but I am reading everything and it ALL matters, DMs included. I don’t like half-assing responses, so you can probably gauge how deep in the book I am by how quiet I’ve been. Back soon. I genuinely cannot wait. 🤣👩‍💻🫂

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