Asking Brain For Serotonin Gets You Cortisol Instead
Text content
Can we get SEROTONIN ?
My brain: We have SEROTONIN at home.
The SEROTONIN at home: Cortisol, plus the chemical structural diagrams of serotonin and cortisol
Overview
This meme uses the viral "we have [desired item] at home" comedic format to joke about relatable poor mental health experiences. The setup shows a person asking their brain for serotonin, the hormone associated with happiness and calm. The brain responds that it has serotonin at home, and the punchline reveals the "serotonin at home" is actually cortisol, the primary stress hormone, paired with its full chemical structure. The joke highlights the common experience of seeking positive feelings but instead only experiencing stress and anxiety from one's own brain.
Origin notes
This meme was pulled from an RSS feed of Reddit r/Meme community posts, originally shared with the title "It do be like that". It adapts the widely circulated "at home knockoff" meme template that gained mainstream popularity across Reddit, Twitter/X, and Instagram starting in the late 2010s, applied here to the popular online neurochemistry and mental health joke niche common in mental health discussion spaces online.