Life can feel stressful and overwhelming at times, especially during adulthood. However, you can do plenty of things to make it feel manageable. For example, pet ownership and all it entails can be a benefit to your mental health.
Here are a few of the most impressive mental health effects you can expect from owning a pet.
Bonding with Pets Helps to Release Oxytocin
Every day, your thoughts, emotions, and feelings result from a stream of hormones and external stressors. Thankfully, you have some influence over which hormones are released, giving you power. Simply looking at a pet releases oxytocin, which improves your sense of well-being and mental health.
Scientists have taken a look at this effect, and it seems to be relatively consistent. Furthermore, oxytocin is involved with bonding in many activities, such as child-rearing. When a mother looks at her child, it releases the same hormone that is released when you look at a dog. This is a huge benefit to your mental health.
Caring for Something Helps You Care for Yourself
It can be difficult to manage even small tasks, like making the bed when feeling down. Yet, your cat will not give you a reprieve, no matter how sad you feel. While that may sound like it would be burdensome at first, it is quite helpful. Responsibility is what makes life worth living, and it shows when you look at its effects.
Refilling an extra large litter box sounds like a simple chore, but it represents a source of control. For those suffering from depression and anxiety, having control is a big source of relief, and it is not hard. Although it only takes a few minutes, taking care of something else can make caring for yourself easy.
Owning Pets Lowers the Release of Cortisol
You might have heard that owning a pet was a great source of stress relief, even if you did not believe it. There is real evidence to support this assertion, and it comes in the form of cortisol reduction.
Normally, cortisol is released as a response to stressful events, such as bad news. However, owning a dog or cat can reduce its release, lowering feelings of stress and anxiety in tandem, which is a benefit to your mental health.
Loneliness Won’t Be as Much of a Factor
Nothing wreaks havoc on a sense of well-being and fulfillment like being alone too much. Luckily, pet ownership is an easy way to ease those feelings, and it is usually available to everyone. Imagine how it would feel to get home from work, open the front door, and be greeted by an excited puppy. Moments like those are priceless and worth looking forward to.
That would feel much better than stepping into a quiet, empty home. In addition, you may use a pet to find other people in the neighborhood, decreasing loneliness. When you take a dog for a walk, neighbors might be walking their dogs too, and you would get a chance to meet them.
Petting Pets Produces Stress-Reducing Effects
In humans, skin-to-skin contact has a measurable impact on heart rate and stress. It is overall a benefit to your mental health. Still, not everyone realizes a pet can have the same effect on you, especially when petting it.
Go ahead and give it a try if you own a pet already. By petting a dog or cat, you should feel a noticeable reduction in the speed of your heartbeat, lowering anxiety. Researchers studying the effect of bringing animals to hospitals found evidence supporting this.
What the researchers discovered was that animals helped embody mindfulness. As such, it was easier to teach patients these principles, which can help a ton when anxious.
Routine and Habits Are Crucial to a Healthy Life
NIH/Mars funded studies to examine the effect of human-animal interactions. In one example, they looked at teenagers who had diabetes and gave them fish to take care of.
Compared to the control group, the teens who cared for fish were more likely to monitor their glucose. Since the teens were more responsible for self-care, their health tended to improve.
This study proves that taking care of a pet can enforce routine and daily habits. Having the consistency of a routine can eliminate anxiety and improve quality of life.
The Astounding Mental Health Benefits of Pet Ownership
Owning pets does bring a lot of responsibility to your life, but the benefits are more than worth it. If you have been dealing with symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression, you may want to get a pet as a benefit to your mental health. There is more than just a small chance that owning one would help, and science supports that.
