What impact have endorphins had on human adaptations and evolution?

Endorphins are chemicals that are produced by your body to relieve stress or pain. They can also be boosted when doing physical exercise or when performing activities such as sex or when laughing. Endorphins can make you feel very good and can prevent you from being depressed but in other cases, they can make you not feel anything at all when your body enters a state of ‘shock’ after a sever injury. In this essay, I will argue that endorphins have had a positive impact on human adaptations and evolution and that their impact makes us move forward as a community and evolve as humans. Firstly, I will talk about how endorphins help promote physical activity and improve their motivation to do sports on a regular bases, therefore making the person more fit and better. Secondly, I will explain how endorphins can make people less stressed in their daily life and therefore promote their positivity and productivity on a daily basis and how this has an impact to the human race as a whole. Finally, I will aboard a very subjective subject which is happiness and its overall correlation with endorphins. I will also come to a conclusion after these points on whether endorphins are a disadvantage for human survival or if they have had a positive impact on human adaptations and evolution.

Firstly, endorphins promote physical activity and makes people do more sports on a regular basis. For years, researchers suspected that endorphins cased “runner’s high” (Medical News Today, 2018) which is when you feel good after doing a lengthy, vigorous physical activity. This which makes the person want to do more sports and physical activity. It has been proven in 2008 when a group of researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to view athlete’s brains both before and after exercise. The results show an increase in the levels of endorphins after exercise. In other words, people produce more endorphins during the period when they do physical exercise and therefore feel good about themselves after the workout. This makes humans evolve faster and in a better way because when a community is healthy and positive, they grow and evolve faster with more desire to improve.

Secondly, endorphins make people feel less stressed in their daily life. This is because of the fact that when you feel stressed or feel pain, a lot of endorphins are created and boosted in order to relieve stress and feel less pain. For instance, if you have a car accident and you are severely injured, you might not feel anything because the endorphins will block the neurotransmitters from the brain to the part of the body you feel pain in. However, when you are just slightly cut by a piece of paper, the body does not enter a state of shock and the endorphins do not kick in to reduce the amount of pain you feel. Endorphins also relieve stress and the more endorphins levels you have, the less amount of stress you will feel in your daily life. If our body didn’t have endorphins, we would feel much more pain and daily stress and therefore have a huge negative impact on the character and mood that we would inflict on the people around us. Therefore, this would make society grow at a lower rate and evolve slower because there is a strong negative correlation between stress and productivity and positivity. In other words, the more stressed you are, the less positive and product you are and the slower the human race evolves.

Lastly, I would like to talk about how endorphins can make you feel ‘happy’ in general. Even though happiness is very subjective and every human has a different version of being happy, a person it more likely to feel good and happy when they have a better and healthier lifestyle and when they feel less stressed which is why endorphins are also called ‘feel-good’. The more endorphins you have in your body, the happier you will feel because of the fact that stress will be significantly reduced and also because of the fact that it might push a person do live a healthier lifestyle by doing sports. This is why I strongly believe that endorphins are extremely important for the survival of humans and the evolution of the human race as a whole. When endorphins are boosted by doing some activities such as sex or physical activity, it makes a person feel better with themselves and as a result, makes the person more productive, kind, pleasant, intelligent and inflict general positivity around them. This will increase the human adaptations and make the human race evolve significantly faster. If endorphins were not part of our immune system, the human race would constantly be depressed and would feel a lot more stressed which would have a huge effect on how our society functions and works. It could potentially lead to people quitting their jobs because of depression, or even committing suicide. People would not enjoy making children and having sexual relationships with people which would lead to huge problems in our society. As you can see, the human race really relies on endorphins to grow and to evolve because if they were not here, it would only make our society decrease and lead to a worldwide disaster.

Works Cited

Google Search, Google, https://www.google.com/search?q=endophins+block+of+the+motor+receptors&rlz=1C1CHBF_frPT816PT816&oq=endophins+block+of+the+motor+receptors&aqs=chrome..69i57j33l2.15287j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

Stibich, Mark. “The Best Forms of Exercise to Release Endorphins and Improve Mood.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 31 July 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/exercise-and-improving-your-mood-2223781.

PressReader.com - Your Favorite Newspapers and Magazines., https://www.pressreader.com/philippines/panay-news/20170811/281775629256803.

Stibich, Mark. “The Best Forms of Exercise to Release Endorphins and Improve Mood.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 31 July 2019, https://www.verywellmind.com/exercise-and-improving-your-mood-2223781.

By Luca Romera Year 12