By: Jason Huang

Research shows that spending just 5 minutes with a dog can make you feel better and less stressed. Researchers have confirmed that hanging out with dogs is good for your health because it gives you natural doses of oxytocin, which is also known as the love hormone.

Nancy Gee, a professor of psychiatry and a Director of the Centre for Human-Animal Interaction at the Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, says there is evidence that shows that spending as little as just five or twenty minutes with a dog can lead to a drop of the stress hormone cortisol. Spending that time with a dog can also lead to an increase in oxytocin. “Dogs really can connect with another human being. And they do it in a very unassuming way,” Professor Gee said. She also says that it works both ways.

“We see the same thing in the dogs, so the dogs’ oxytocin also increases when they interact with a human,”Gee said. That could be why the dogs wag their tails when we pay attention to them. During a study with 8 to 9 year old kids, the kids who had exchanges twice a week with dogs were less stressed and more focused and their thinking and reasoning had improved.

“We actually saw (those effects) one month later. And there’s some evidence that (they) may exist six months later,” Gee said. Megan Mueller, who is an associate professor at the Cummings school of Veterinary Medicine, which is at Tufts University, says that dogs prompt us to experience the world like how they experience the world.

“Animals, and dogs in particular, live in the moment. They’re experiencing their environment with wonder and awe all the time, and they’re not bringing up what happened to them earlier in the day or what they’re thinking about in the future. They’re there right now,” Associate Professor Mueller said.“They sort of pull you out of your phone and into whatever environment that you’re in.”

So being with a dog can help people be less stressed and give them more oxytocin, the love hormone, and decrease cortisol, the stress hormone.