The Influence of Stress on Dopamine Levels In the quest to survive, every living organism is equipped with armor to withstand the impacts of stress. The African savanna leaves the zebra in a position of vulnerability to predators, full of anxiety. Stress can be as basic as lack of food, habitat or reproductive success. Humans are especially aware of the impacts of stress due to the nature of today's contemporary lifestyle. Too many daily demands can cause a person anything from insomnia to indigestion to depression. Every person is equipped to naturally deal with large amounts of stress, but when these amounts exceed what the body can handle, the discomfort is considerable. In addition to the qualitative approach to dealing with stress, what bodily mechanisms are responsible for managing anxiety? This task is almost exclusively attributed to the nervous system. The complex system of interaction between billions of individual neurons facilitates a large number of behaviors that result due to inputs originating inside and outside the organism. The spaces between neighboring neurons are called synapses, and one way they communicate is by sending chemical signals called neurotransmitters across the presynaptic membrane to the postsynaptic membrane. Years of research on the nervous system has established that stress activates the neurotransmitter, dopamine. The functions of dopamine are numerous, but in general it inhibits the transmission of nerve impulses. This transmitter is found throughout the body, although it is primarily housed in the internal basil ganglia of the brain, in the frontal lobe of the brain's information processing center, or in the limbic system (1). Many chronic diseases result from the overproduction or underproduction of dopamine. The inability of dopamine to move into the frontal lobe of the brain results in the inability to control fine motor movements and is commonly called Parkinson's disease(1). If the flow of dopamine through the nervous system is not allowed to circulate as usual, schizophrenia results (1). Now that we've discussed the extreme abnormalities of dopamine, let's look at how dopamine affects the average person under stress. environment. One study claims that the chewing behavior of mice is a response to stress and therefore serves as a coping device. The body responds to stress by activating the brain's dopaminergic (DA) system. Study shows that when given the opportunity to chew, the activation of the mouse's DA system is prolonged (2) In other words, when allowed to chew, a mouse's body will have prolonged presence of stress handlers; this coping mechanism reduces the impact of stress.