Healthy People Benefit from Taking Lithium
What happens if you give lithium to healthy people and ask them to gamble? Nothing impressive, actually. But if you ask participants how they are feeling, they may paint a precise picture of their emotional state.
The Study
Participants without mental conditions took 800 mg of lithium for five days. The typical dose for bipolar disorder would be 900 to 1800 mg/day.
Researchers, led by Fitri Fareez Ramli from Warneford Hospital in Oxford, measured how lithium influenced the following parameters:
- Decision-making.
- Reward-seeking.
- Emotional processing.
Tests included betting and emotional recognition tasks. Decision-making and reward-seeking were not that much affected, whereas emotional processing showed some changes.
Emotion recognition is important because it often changes before people feel subjectively better with certain treatments. On lithium, participants showed:
- The brain became less biased toward sadness-related negative interpretations.
Lithium made people less prone to distort sadness. Imagine a colleague looks neutral. The brain might interpret that as “something is wrong.” With lithium’s effect, the brain is slightly less likely to jump to that conclusion.
- Negative self-related information became less dominant.
Negative thoughts about oneself did not “snap into place” as quickly. If a thought like “I messed that up” appears, lithium’s effect would be like a small mental pause before the thought fully lands. The thought still occurs, but it does not dominate attention as fast.
- Emotional reactions became more finely tuned.
Lithium subtly adjusted how emotional signals were perceived, rather than dampening emotions overall. Participants became more accurate in recognizing certain emotional expressions, such as sadness and disgust, and showed shifts in how readily they labeled emotional cues. In real life, this could look like noticing when something feels unpleasant or concerning without reacting too strongly or misreading the signal.
What Does It Mean for You?
If you are not prone to mental health disorders, you still can benefit from lithium. If you are looking for over-the-counter options, consider lithium ascorbate.