It is always beneficial for us to take care of them, feel their love, and have them around our feet to play and walk with us every day, spending quality leisure time with us.
Do we really know what power our pets use to improve our health?
One of the main reasons why spending time with our pets can make us physically and mentally happy is hormonal. At the moment of caressing a pet, the human body secretes oxytocin. This hormone is also known as the “love hormone”. In addition to helping us reduce anxiety and stress, it also has a calming effect.
Dopamine and serotonin are also secreted when we feel happy about our pets, and they are both associated with a sense of well-being. As a result, people who care about their pets and enjoy playing and sharing good times with them tend to have better moods, lower cortisol levels, better blood pressure, and lower chances of depression than those who don't care about their pets.
All people who interact with animals on a regular, loving and caring basis can slowly learn to control impulsive emotions. If you have a pet, making the pet part of the family means learning to take responsibility and also helps to develop good habits.
For children, it is also important to teach them to respect the moments when animals don't want to play and they need to rest or be alone. It is important for children to understand that a pet is not a toy, it is a creature that has feelings just like them and it is a responsibility to take care of it. As a result, children can also learn to have empathy and respect when interacting with others.
Taking care of the animals that accompany us also contributes to improving our physical health, especially our cardiovascular health, since having a pet contributes to the necessity of staying physically active. No matter how lazy you are, the necessity of walking your dog forces you to maintain a healthy habit of taking walks.
On the other hand, owning a pet helps prevent social isolation. It is easier to improve your social skills if you have a pet. When you are out walking your dog, you may talk to other dog owners and children will gather around.
Contact with animals is important for our health, so assistance and therapy dogs are essential. Assistance dogs are those trained to help people with mental or physical disabilities, such as guide dogs; therapy dogs can be involved in a number of treatments in order to get better results for the patient.
Similarly, these trained animals can be used in the home or hospital environment to help reduce stress, anxiety and promote the production of healthy hormones in the human body.
Dogs have also been used in group therapy for children with ADHD. Even recent studies have shown that it can be beneficial for teens with diabetes to try caring for fish in aquariums, as they can learn to better their health as they learn the care procedures involved.
With all of this in mind, it's no surprise that living with a pet and its beneficial effects on people's health has been dubbed the “pet effect”.
