There’s a moment most people recognize, even if they’ve never named it.

 

A long conversation with a close friend that ends with you feeling lighter than when you started. A child reaching up for a hug. Eye contact across a table that turns a meal into something else. The dog leaning into your hand. Whatever the source, the body responds as a settling in the chest, a softening at the shoulders, something that feels like calm and pleasure at the same time.

 

For decades, the standard explanation for this has been oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone.” Released during touch, intimacy, childbirth, and social bonding, oxytocin became shorthand for any moment of human warmth.

 

The story is true, but it’s incomplete. New research has identified something unexpected: when oxytocin gets to work, one of the first things it does is trigger the release of an entirely different molecule: anandamide, an endocannabinoid. The “love hormone” and the “bliss molecule,” it turns out, are working in sequence.

 

This is the second piece in a series exploring how the endocannabinoid system relates to the other chemical messengers in your body. The first piece on endorphins looked at a case of mistaken identity with credit being given to the wrong system for the runner’s high. The oxytocin story is something different. It’s not a misattribution. It’s a partnership.

 

What Oxytocin Actually Is

 

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, a small chain of nine amino acids, produced in the hypothalamus and released by the pituitary gland. It is one of the body’s most ancient signaling molecules, present in mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles in slightly varied forms.

 

Its job is connection. Oxytocin is released during physical touch, eye contact, social bonding, sex, breastfeeding, childbirth, and meaningful conversation. It plays a major role in pair bonding, parental attachment, trust, empathy, and the regulation of stress and anxiety in social settings.

 

Oxytocin is also a reward signal. The reason close relationships feel good, meaning the reason the body actively pulls toward connection rather than away from it, is that the brain has built oxytocin into its core reward circuitry. Social pleasure, in a biochemical sense, is not metaphorical. It is a physical chain of events that begins with contact and ends with a measurable change in brain chemistry.

 

The catch (and this is the part the oxytocin-only story leaves out) is that oxytocin doesn’t produce the rewarding feeling of social contact directly. It produces it through a second molecule.

 

What Endocannabinoids Actually Are: A short refresher, for anyone new to the series.

 

Endocannabinoids are lipid-based molecules (fats) produced by your body throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems. The two most studied are anandamide (AEA), named after the Sanskrit word ananda for bliss, and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG).

 

They bind to two main receptors: CB1, densely packed in the brain and central nervous system, and CB2, concentrated in the immune system and peripheral tissues. Together with the enzymes that synthesize and degrade them, these molecules and receptors form the endocannabinoid system, one of the body’s primary regulatory networks, involved in mood, pain, appetite, sleep, immune function, memory, and social behavior.

 

The endocannabinoid system is roughly 600 million years old and is present in nearly every vertebrate species. It predates the appearance of the cannabis plant by hundreds of millions of years. Cannabis, when consumed, produces effects in humans specifically because the molecules it contains such as THC and CBD are structurally similar enough to our endogenous endocannabinoids that they can engage the same receptors.

 

That overlap is the entire reason cannabis has the effects on the human body that it does. And it is also why the rest of this article matters.

 

How Oxytocin and the Endocannabinoid System Work Together

 

In 2015, a research group led by Daniele Piomelli at the University of California, Irvine published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that fundamentally changed how scientists think about social reward.

 

They were studying mice and specifically measuring anandamide levels in the nucleus accumbens, which is a brain region that processes reward, under different social conditions. What they found was that when mice were allowed to socialize after a period of isolation, anandamide levels in the nucleus accumbens went up significantly. When mice remained isolated, anandamide levels stayed low. Social contact, in other words, was directly increasing the production of an endocannabinoid in a reward center of the brain.

 

The team wanted to know what was driving the anandamide release, therefore they tested oxytocin and they found that activating oxytocin neurons in the hypothalamus triggered the same anandamide spike whereas blocking oxytocin receptors stopped it. The conclusion was direct: oxytocin causes anandamide release, and anandamide is what produces the rewarding feeling of social contact.

 

A follow-up paper in Trends in Neurosciences a few years later called this an “oxytocin-driven endocannabinoid signal” and described it as a mechanism that may help explain why social bonding feels good, why isolation feels bad, and why the social effects of cannabis to include increased connection, reduced social anxiety, heightened sensitivity to interpersonal warmth, show up the way they do.

 

This is not a small finding. It reframes oxytocin’s role from “the molecule that makes connection feel good” to “the molecule that triggers the molecule that makes connection feel good.” The bliss part of social bonding is, mechanistically, an endocannabinoid event. In other words, oxytocin sets the table and anandamide brings the food.

 

Where the Two Systems Differ

 

Even though oxytocin and the endocannabinoid system work together, they are not the same system, and the differences are worth understanding.

 

Chemistry. Oxytocin is a peptide, a chain of amino acids. Endocannabinoids are lipids, fatty molecules. This means they are produced differently, stored differently, and break down through different pathways.

 

Receptors. Oxytocin binds to oxytocin receptors, which are concentrated in specific brain regions related to bonding, reward, and stress regulation. Endocannabinoids bind to CB1 and CB2 receptors, which are distributed far more broadly across the body including in the brain, but also in immune tissue, the gut, reproductive organs, and skin.

 

Specificity. Oxytocin is largely specialized for social and reproductive functions. The endocannabinoid system is a generalist that regulates dozens of physiological processes, of which social behavior is just one.

 

Plant analogues. Oxytocin has no major plant analogue. There is no widely available plant that produces a molecule structurally similar to oxytocin and binds the same receptors. The cannabis plant, on the other hand, produces phytocannabinoids, which are compounds close enough in structure to anandamide and 2-AG that they engage CB1 and CB2 receptors directly. Cannabis is, in this sense, one of the few plants in the natural world that interacts meaningfully with a human social-and-bonding signaling system. Not because the plant was designed for that purpose, but because of evolutionary convergence and molecular shapes that happened to align.

 

This is part of why cannabis has been used for social and ceremonial purposes across cultures and across millennia. Cannabis modulates the same system that oxytocin uses to make connection feel rewarding.

 

Where the Two Systems Genuinely Overlap

 

Beyond the direct oxytocin-anandamide pathway, the two systems share territory in other ways.

 

Both are deeply involved in stress regulation. Oxytocin reduces cortisol and dampens the body’s threat response. The endocannabinoid system does the same through CB1 receptors in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. A 2023 study in Cell Reports found that the brain releases endocannabinoid molecules during stress to activate the same brain receptors that cannabis-derived THC binds with, essentially producing a built-in calming response.

 

Both are involved in pain modulation, especially the kind of pain that has emotional or social components. Loneliness, grief, social rejection activate physical pain pathways, and both oxytocin and the endocannabinoid system play roles in regulating them.

 

Both are central to maternal physiology. Oxytocin’s role in childbirth and lactation is well-established. The endocannabinoid system also plays a role in early-life development, though research in pregnant and breastfeeding populations remains limited and is an active area of study. Anyone navigating pregnancy or breastfeeding with questions about cannabinoid use should speak directly with a qualified provider, and our care team can help with that conversation.

 

And both, importantly, are systems that respond to lifestyle. Touch, exercise, meaningful social contact, time in nature, certain foods, and quality sleep all support both oxytocin and endocannabinoid function. You do not need to take anything from outside the body to engage these systems. Your body engages them on its own, every day, in response to how you live.

 

Why This Matters

 

The endocannabinoid system has historically been treated as a niche topic and only interesting when cannabis comes up. The oxytocin partnership makes clear why that framing is too small.

 

The endocannabinoid system is part of how your body produces the feeling of being loved. Not metaphorically, but chemically. When a baby is held by a parent, when a friend shows up in a hard moment, when a partner reaches for your hand, your body responds with a chain of signaling that begins with touch, runs through oxytocin, and arrives in the reward center of the brain, which is an endocannabinoid.

 

This is the system the cannabis plant interacts with. Not a system unique to drug use. A system unique to being alive in a body that responds to other bodies. And it is the same system that has been disrupted, downregulated, or compromised in many of the conditions for which people seek cannabinoid therapies, such as chronic pain, anxiety, PTSD, autism spectrum conditions, certain forms of epilepsy, and others where social engagement and emotional regulation are central to quality of life.

 

Realm of Caring was founded thirteen years ago by two mothers who came together because of their children, whose stories changed how the world thinks about cannabis as medicine. The fact that the organization carries forward from a maternal foundation is not incidental to the work. Connections between mother and child, caregiver and patient, and community members are, biochemically, an endocannabinoid event. It is the system this organization has always, in a sense, been speaking for.

 

Coming Up Next

 

Future pieces in this series will examine how endocannabinoids relate to dopamine and the reward system, serotonin and mood regulation, GABA and the body’s brake on anxiety, and others. Each comparison shows a different angle on the same underlying network of internal chemistry that keeps you balanced, regulated, and well.

 

If you have questions about your own endocannabinoid system or about how cannabinoid therapies might fit into your care, Realm of Caring’s care team is available worldwide at no cost. Our Research Library holds nearly 4,000 peer-reviewed studies on cannabinoids and human health.