What Happens When You Pet a Dog for 10 Minutes
📝 Summary
What are the perks of petting a dog? It can cheer the dog, lower allergy odds, even shift your mood. Owners differ, but it surely relaxes.
1 Overview
What’s the biggest perk of petting a dog?
Washington State University found: a few minutes of petting drops your cortisol sharply.
‘In just 10 minutes you’ll see a clear change,’ wrote Patricia Pendry, associate professor of human development at WSU, on the report’s front page. The study was spurred by high U.S. college suicide rates!
Over the decade, more students faced suicide, self-harm, anxiety, depression from school stress; to manage moods and relieve pressure, WSU launched a program called AVP.
What’s AVP? Scheduled dogs surprise classrooms so students play. This simple act sharply cut suicide and illness rates, and reached Congress with the slogan ‘colleges should have dog-interaction classes.’
Does petting release human stress?
Studies show direct contact lowers human cortisol.
What does cortisol do? It’s the hormone that fuels a positive stress response – meet a tiger with none and you’d just shake, not flee.
Cortisol is good, but chronic release brings high blood sugar, more appetite, weight gain, low libido, deep fatigue.
High-stress, fast-paced, late-sleeping people run higher cortisol.
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