Just last year, Medical News Today reported on a study that showed that owning a dog reduces a person’s risk of premature death by up to a third.
Also, researchers at the University of Harvard in Cambridge, MA, suggest that dog owners have a lower risk of heart disease.
Why is that? It is difficult to establish a causal relationship between owning a dog and enjoying better health.
However, the benefits may appear thanks to a series of factors related to lifestyle adjustments that people tend to make after they decide to adopt a canine friend.
The most prominent such lifestyle factor is physical activity. There is no way around it: if you own a dog, you have to commit to twice daily walks — and sometimes even more.
Perhaps the most intuitive benefit of sharing your life and home with a canine friend is that dogs give you “feel-good vibes” almost instantly.
It is really difficult not to cheer up, even after a hard day’s work, when you are greeted with — often vocal — enthusiasm by a friendly dog.
This, researchers explain, is due to the effect of the “love hormone” oxytocin.
“During the last decades,” write the authors of a review that featured in Frontiers in Psychology, “animal assistance in therapy, education, and care has greatly increased.”
When we interact with dogs, our oxytocin levels shoot up. Since this is the hormone largely responsible for social bonding, this hormonal “love injection” boosts our psychological well-being.
Previous studies analyzed in the review have revealed that dog owners have more positive social interactions, and that the presence of canine friends makes people more trusting…and also more deserving of trust.
Moreover, dogs appear to reduce symptoms of depression and render people more resilient to stress. That is why dogs are often used as therapy animals. As researcher Brian Hare, of Duke University in Durham, NC, noted in an interview for The Washington Post:
“Dogs make people feel good, and their only job is to help people in stressful situations feel better.”
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Resource: Medical News Today