Whether your pet is purring, prancing, dancing, sleeping or happily wagging his tail, he is probably bringing you stress relief. While the stress relief may be tempered on occasion if your pet chews up your smartphone or pees on your favorite rug, the general consensus from a wide range of studies is that pets are good for your health.
Mental Health Benefits of Pets
Pets can help:
- Alleviate anxiety and depression
- Quash loneliness
- Build self-empowerment and self-esteem
- Provide empathy
- Prompt social interactions
- Teach us unconditional love
- Serve as stand-ins for family members, friends
- Stave off thoughts of suicide, giving us a feeling of being needed and, in some cases, a reason to live
You’re never truly alone if a dog, cat, rabbit or bird is always at your side. The same may even hold true for a lizard or snake, although reptiles aren’t typically as warm and cozy as other critters. And it certainly holds true for pets you may not even directly interact with, like fish swimming round in a fish tank.
“Observing an aquarium can be an even more powerful relaxant than several proven meditative techniques,” according to a Delta Society study noted by the Science section of HowStuffWorks.
Physical Health Benefits of Pets
Pets can help:
- Increase activity and exercise levels
- Lower blood pressure
- Decrease instances of minor health problems
- Enhance the recovery process in hospitals and medical institutions
- Reduce harmful stress that may otherwise result in distress, disease and other health issues
How Pets Do All This
Some of the benefits stem from obvious reasons, such as the need for dog owners to walk their dogs, which automatically results in instant exercise. Other pet owners may find themselves engaging in physical play with their animals, which can also lead to a bit of calorie-burning and other exercise benefits.
Mayo Clinic reports benefits of regular exercise include helping to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, elevate your mood and energy levels and improve the quality of both your sleep and your sex life. Regular physical activity also decreases unhealthy cholesterol levels while boosting the good cholesterol, a move that can help prevent heart disease, high blood pressure and other diseases and health problems down the line.
On the mental health side of things, the act of caring for and about a pet brings on the benefits. This holds true for any type of animal – even the reptiles, according to Purdue University Center for the Human-Animal Bond Director Alan Beck.
Beck tells HopetoCope.com that one of the keys to animal’s success for alleviating anxiety and depression is their power to pull us into the moment. Pets help us be fully present in the here and now.
“If you can focus on the present in positive ways, it makes you less anxious,” HopetoCope quotes Beck. “Much anxiety and depression comes from the thoughts of past or future that you are worried about.”
Another boost comes from the relaxation response that is automatically induced when we start stroking or petting our pets. Being around animals actually lowers levels of that anxiety-inducing stress hormone known as cortisol. A study out of New Jersey’s Center for Nursing Research at Kean University compared stress levels of pet owners with non-pet owners in general and then after each group spent 20 minutes with a trained therapy dog.
Overall, pet owners showed lower levels of cortisol, but even the non-pet owners showed a significant reduction in cortisol levels after they hung out with the therapy dog. Saying goodbye to cortisol can also mean saying goodbye to stress, anxiety – and high levels of driving fears.
It’s pretty tough to stay mired in a pit of depression or anxiety when you’re faced with a smiling face or wagging tail that comes with unlimited affection and thinks you’re the best thing since sliced beef. A well-known yet anonymous quote sums it up nicely, with:
I hope to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.
Pets never judge, criticize or otherwise go out of their way to make us feel bad. All they want to do is love us.
The Special Pet Bond
Our relationships with animals is not the same as it is with people, that stuff about unconditional, nonjudgmental love pretty much ensures that fact from the get-go. What makes pets so special, however, is something researchers are still trying to figure out.
One theory mentioned by author and University of Colorado associate professor Leslie Irvine in HopetoCope says that pets force us to use a different set of skills and provide a different type of bonding process than we have with other humans.
“They stretch our emotional capacities,” Irvine says of pets. “We can’t tell animals we love them, so we have to communicate through touch, eye contact, and other nonverbal [behavior].”
And then there’s the social aspect, where a bond with a pet can actually induce a bond with other people. In fact, guys may even refer to cute puppies or other pets as “chick magnets” for capturing women’s attention.
People who are walking any type of dog are generally considered more approachable, according to a study out of England’s University of Warwick. Researchers observed how many strangers would stop to talk to a man or woman who was walking a dog versus that same man or woman walking alone. Results weighed in with 65 strangers stopping to chat with the dog walkers, compared to the mere three that stopped to chat with the non-dog-walking person.
Even the images of animals can create a connection, as evidenced by how many people author Irvine says stop to talk with her when she’s wearing socks, earrings or T-shirts decorated with cats.
Another theory, also mentioned in HopetoCope, says that pets make us feel better because they allow us to be closer to nature. This theory comes from University of Rochester Medical Center assistant psychiatry professor Joseph Lancia.
He notes that many people find healing in nature and, since being close to an animal is being close to nature, pets can produce a calming, soothing, healing effect.
“The more we move away from nature, the more we feel distressed,” he tells HopetoCope. And the more we move toward pets, the more fulfilled we may tend to be.
Coming Soon: How to Pick a Pet to Beat Your Stress
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Photo Credit: Dunechaser via Compfight cc
