What is it about?
Saying “stop” at the right moment is important for a healthy lifestyle. A simple example: switching off a boring movie can spare us time for more interesting pastimes. In other examples, saying “stop” is even more determinant for our mental and physical health. Thus, leaving an unrewarding job early enough can prevent us from getting a burnout, while breaking up a toxic relationship can preserve our emotional balance. And yet, most of the time we fail to decide to stop the ongoing action before it becomes too late. Here, we found that boosting noradrenaline and acetylcholine in the human brain can enhance optimality of stay-or-leave decisions.
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Why is it important?
While we all may occasionally experience difficulties with saying “stop”, this may become particularly hard for clinical populations (e.g., people with as anxiety, gambling, or obsessive-compulsive disorders). We hope our findings will empower clinical research and inspire our peers to focus on noradrenergic and cholinergic systems while developing new therapeutic approaches.
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This page is a summary of: Acetylcholine and noradrenaline enhance foraging optimality in humans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2305596120.
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