What is The Tingly, Electric Feeling When You kiss? | Why Do You Feel High After a Kiss?

Have you ever wondered why kissing can feel so good? Or why can kissing seem like an experience that takes you to another world? What causes the tingly, electric feeling when you kiss? 

Why do you feel high after a kiss? This article will answer all these questions on what causes that incredible sensation of being kissed high! Read on to learn more!

What is the tingly, electric feeling when you kiss?

A full-on romantic kiss stimulates areas in your brain associated with pleasure and reward. In particular, kissing activates areas such as the orbitofrontal cortex and caudate nucleus involved in dopamine production. 

When we think of feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin (aka oxytocin), we associate them with sex or sugar-filled desserts.

However, research has shown that these chemicals are also released during activities as simple as sharing a laugh with someone close to us. The release of dopamine and serotonin creates feelings of pleasure associated with positive reinforcement, making us want to seek out activities that make us feel good again!

Oxytocin – The Feel-Good Hormone

The chemical compound oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter that controls social recognition and bonding. Because of its effects on relationships, this is also known as even the love hormone. After kissing your partner or child, oxytocin levels in both of you will rise; it makes us feel good and helps build strong bonds between people.

If increased oxytocin levels are present in people with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD), perhaps an increase in oxytocin could help ease symptoms by improving social interaction. More research on oxytocin therapy and ASD needs to be done, but the initial results are promising!

Kissing Triggers Oxytocin

A couple of things happen when we lock lips. First, an increase in breathing and heart rate can create a heightened state of arousal. Second, oxytocin levels increase as well. What does oxytocin have to do with kissing? Studies show that oxytocin can lead to feelings of closeness and trust—and it may even play a role in pair-bonding!

Oxytocin is also responsible for sending those lovey-dovey dopamine signals throughout your brain once you fall in love (and there’s nothing more romantic than locking lips). As your partner kisses you, not only are their hormones triggering your response, their emotions and feelings are wrapped up in yours!

Does it Matter How Long You Kiss?

It’s not about how long your lips stay locked but what happens before and during that lip-locking moment. Kissing activates all of your senses: It makes your heart race, sends a rush through your body, and helps stimulate those sleepy sexual parts of your brain.

Keep in mind that there’s more to sex appeal than lustful kissing alone; foreplay plays an essential role in building desire. In most ways, say, professors, this takes upwards of one kiss to make two people want each other sexual intercourse.

Why do you feel high after a kiss?

A combination of hormones and neurotransmitters is responsible for that high sensation. Oxytocin (aka the love hormone) has been found to play a significant role in feelings of attraction and attachment. When two people kiss, oxytocin levels increase in their brains and saliva.

The resulting increase in oxytocin production creates a pleasurable chemical feedback loop between partners that causes kissing to be enjoyable and can lead to long-term sexual arousal and attachment. Oxytocin production may explain why it’s so hard to kiss just one person!

Kissing isn’t just fun; it makes us want more. Kissing is an addictive behavior, similar to eating or taking drugs. Research shows that humans experience elevated activity in brain regions associated with reward and motivation while kissing. Essentially, kissing produces its high.

Kissing releases endorphins as well as dopamine which makes us feel good. Kissing gives us pleasure chemicals like dopamine and endorphins, making us happy, less stressed out, and more relaxed, making everything seem more accessible and better! In short: It feels good!

So Far, We’re Talking About Romantic Kisses

You’ve presumably heard people complain about how much they enjoyed about there wedding day or a vacation with their significant other. But what about non-romantic kisses? What’s going on there? A recent study published, Psychology found that even a peck from someone we don’t love can cause us to have feelings of euphoria and excitement.

Experts suggest this has to do with passionate kissing, which creates an association between sex and kissing. In other words, we’ve all built up our sexual history with long romantic kisses—and everyone since then feels like foreplay (even if it’s not). This might also explain why your breath stinks after a great night out—you’ve just had sex and haven’t brushed your teeth!

How Can You Get Oxytocin From Other Kisses?

Even though it is associated with feelings of trust and companionship, oxytocin is commonly referred to as the love hormone. The hormone appears in women during labor and nursing. In men, oxytocin plays a role in how their bodies respond to sexual pleasure—including triggering erections and ejaculation. Kissing someone for longer than 30 seconds can stimulate your body to release oxytocin, producing that tingly high sensation we often feel after kissing.

It works by blocking other nerve impulses from reaching your brain to make sensations less sharp; it’s like turning down the volume on your nervous system through prolonged touch.

How else can you get oxytocin?

Although kissing produces oxytocin, there are other ways to get your fix of the love hormone. You may have heard that babies are born with a supply of oxytocin (the so-called love hormone), but that isn’t entirely true. While newborns release some oxytocin naturally in their brains (the same way adults do), it takes some time for their brains to produce enough to reap its benefits.

And while infants may have some interactions with others during labor that help trigger the production of oxytocin and create early bonds between mother and child, for most babies, it takes time and experience to build up their store of oxytocin—or develop social skills at all!

Conclusion

The experience of kissing is complex and fascinating. Even if we aren’t aware of it, many things happen: signals are sent to different parts of our bodies; hormones and neurochemicals are released; neurotransmitters from outside our bodies interact with chemicals within our brain.

Understanding how kissing changes over time can help us understand why it feels so good and sometimes doesn’t. It can also explain why some people experience adverse symptoms like nausea or headache after kissing someone with cold sores or herpes. Knowledge is power: next time you get that tingly-electric feeling, enjoy every second!