Study finds five minutes with a dog can boost your happiness

Permission to pat all the dogs

Animals are beneficial to our mental and physical health. Image: Pexels

Researchers have confirmed what many of us already knew: spending time with man's best friend makes us happier and less stressed.

You’ve had a terrible day at work and all you want to do is curl up in a ball on the couch. You’re feeling lazy and frankly, down in the dumps.

That is until your faithful, loving canine meets you at the front door. Your frustration and lethargy suddenly melt away, and everything is right in your world again.

If you’re a dog owner, you know the feeling. According to researchers, dogs do actually give you well-needed spikes of oxytocin – also known as the love hormone – and they make us feel less stressed, too.

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“I think it is safe to say that animals are beneficial to our mental and physical health," Nancy Gee, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Centre for Human-Animal Interaction told NPR.

Gee told the site there’s evidence that shows a drop in the stress hormone, cortisol, and a rise in oxytocin, in people who spend as little as five to 20 minutes with a dog.

"They really can connect with another human being. And they do it in a very unassuming way," Gee said.

The best part? Gee said it’s a two-way street.

"We see the same thing in the dogs, so the dogs' oxytocin also increases when they interact with a human." Hence when you see them wagging their tails.

During a study conducted in the UK on eight and nine-year-old children, Gee and her team found that the kids who had twice-weekly exchanges with dogs were less stressed and more focused, and their cognitive processes had improved, too.

"We actually saw [those effects] one month later. And there's some evidence that [they] may exist six months later," Gee explained.

There’s evidence that shows a drop in cortisol in people who spend as little as five minutes with a dog. Image: iStock

Gee’s findings come off the back of another study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which showed dog owners are also significantly more active during the winter than petless people.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Centre for Diet and Activity Research at the University of Cambridge found that dog owners were 30 minutes more active each day, no matter the weather, Time reported.

“We were amazed to find that dog walkers were on average more physically active and spent less time sitting on the coldest, wettest, and darkest days than non-dog owners were on long, sunny, and warm summer days," Andy Jones, a UEA professor and project lead said.

This study’s findings correlate with what Gee discovered, because as we all know, exercise is a great outlet for getting rid of stress, and boosting our happy hormones.

It also sounds like a pet pup can rewire our brains. In an instant, we can go from selfish to selfless because we’re driven by the dog’s needs and not our own, Jones added.

Originally published as Study finds five minutes with a dog can boost your happiness