There’s some imaging research that suggests that social and physical pain could have overlapping biological mechanisms, he tells me, so the parts of the brain that Tylenol affects to make your headache go away are the same parts that are involved in these other feelings as well; the same brain networks that allow us to feel and respond to physical pain may have been co-opted to also feel social pain.
He felt like the effects of Tylenol they were seeing were similar to mind wandering. People cared less about social rejection. They didn’t respond as much to existential anxiety; a similar kind of sensitivity reduction to the outside world.
“I think we should absolutely have a scientific concern to recognize the neurocognitive and neuro-affective consequences of substances that we've heretofore thought of as benign,” Handy says.
Ratner says there’s also the intriguing possibility that acetaminophen might be used therapeutically one day for people dealing with minor cases of depression or social anxiety.
The last point is the one which i had observed in my own behaviour and led me to suspect a correlation between acetaminophen/paracetamol and my "feeling good".
