Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is usually used to treat physical pain. But beyond things like headaches or sore muscles, researches believe that it can also affect our emotional state, for better or worse.
“It seems to take the highs off your daily highs and the lows off your daily lows,” Baldwin Way, a psychologist at Ohio State University and the principal investigator on the study, told NPR. “It kind of flattens out the vicissitudes of your life.” The results were published in Psychological Science.
A study from 2010 also examined how over-the-counter pain killers can affect psychological and neurological states, specifically with social anxiety. They found that acetaminophen dimmed activity in the insula, a region of the brain involved in processing emotional pain. Way and one of his students, Geoffrey Durso, decided to take a closer look at what this reaction was in the insula.
The researchers gave about 40 people the equivalent of two extra-strength Tylenols and gave another 40 people a placebo. Then they asked the volunteers to rate pictures ranging from weeping, starving children to kids playing with kitties on how pleasant or depressing each photo was and how powerful they found the image.
On average, the people who’d taken the acetaminophen said they felt nearly 20 percent less happy when they saw the delightful photos and nearly 10 percent less sad when they saw the dreadful photos compared to those who’d taken the placebo. The same was true for their ratings for the power of each image.
But the researchers acknowledge that the measurements were too small for this study to be really conclusive in terms of why this reaction takes place.
“I’d say there’s a common mechanism — a common lever, if you will, where one can affect both positive and negative systems in the brain,” Way speculates. Or maybe there are two levers to dampen each system, and the pain medication just seizes them both at the same time, numbing our entire emotional connection to the world. “The bottom line is we don’t know,” Ways says.
Studies like this can be valuable simply to help us better understand how our brains work – but it doesn’t imply that people should take Tylenol when they are feeling emotional unstable. Dr. Lewis Nelson, a medical toxicologist at NYU Langone Medical Center, told NPR, “This is not the kind of drug we want people to use to any sort of excess.”
