Pet parents are quick to exclaim how much their pets have changed their lives. If you have a pet, you know how much better you feel emotionally when your dog greets you after a long day, or your cat gives you a friendly head butt. But did you know that owning a pet can change you physically?
Your heart, hormones, immune system, stress levels, and other factors all benefit from life with a pet. Keep reading to discover more about how being a pet parent has the power to improve your physical health over time.
Owning a Pet Gives Your Heart a Healthy Boost
When you have a pet, you could end up enjoying a more active lifestyle, especially if you have a dog (or a very energetic, playful cat). You take your pet on daily walks, runs, or perhaps go hiking with your dog.
Even if you’re not doing a dedicated workout, you’re still moving more than you would sans Fido or Fifi. (Even scooping the litter box adds movement to your day!)
Therefore, you open yourself up to health benefits by owning a pet. Over time, this increase in physical activity can help lower blood pressure, improve cholesterol levels, and build cardiovascular endurance. All of these things contribute to a healthier heart.
Furthermore, interacting with your furry friends reduces stress. Chronic stress can strain your cardiovascular system, so reducing stress is a huge benefit. According to the American Heart Association, studies have shown that “dog owners are less likely to die from a heart attack or stroke.”
More Movement Also Helps Joints and Muscles
Increased physical activity also has the added benefit of strengthening muscles and joints, since you’re more mobile. If you’re not a fan of traditional workouts, having a pet can help keep you moving through incidental exercise, like short walks and play sessions.
Basically, the more time you spend playing with your pet, the more benefits you’ll notice. For example, you might notice your muscle tone improving, your flexibility increasing, and an overall boost in your energy.
How Does Owning a Pet Help With Stress?
When you interact with your pet, it affects your body’s chemistry, impacting various stress hormones. For example, when you love on your pup, your brain reduces cortisol production.
Cortisol is a stress hormone that pummels your body when you get it in high levels over extended periods. Ultimately, too much for too long can potentially lead to various negative consequences.
These consequences can include weight gain, sleep problems, or a weakened immune system. By interacting with your pet, you reduce the amount of cortisol that affects your body.
At the same time, your body ramps up its production of positive, feel-good chemicals, like oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. You end up with a chemical cocktail that helps you relax.
Your New Stress Response Leads to New Patterns
As your body’s response to stress changes thanks to your pet, you also start to carry this more positive response through to times when you’re not with your pet. In other words, over time, you train your body to stay calmer in high-stress situations.
The more you interact with your pet, the more your body reinforces a feeling of calmness. In time, it creates a pattern that can relieve overall feelings of loneliness, lower your baseline stress levels, and improve your emotional stability.
You reshape your emotional baseline, making yourself more resilient to stressful situations, even if your pet isn’t around. Your nervous system starts handling things differently.
Rather than being constantly triggered into fight-or-flight mode, pets calm your nervous system. Consequently, you’re better equipped to switch from stress mode to rest mode.
Pets Help Reduce Cognitive Decline
Owning a pet improves your health in a lot of ways, including how your brain functions and ages. Studies show a link between pet ownership and improved brain health.
A big contributor to cognitive decline is social isolation, which pet ownership can counteract through daily interaction with your pet. Even feeding your pet, talking to them, or petting them engages your brain.
In addition to interacting with your pet, having a pet could also lead to more interaction with people. For example, you bring your dog to the dog park or grab a cup of coffee at a local cat cafe, mingling with other pet parents.
Meeting new people, interacting more with others, and spending time with your pet could lead to several brain boosts. These brain benefits include:
- Improved memory
- Better attention span
- Reduced risk of age-related cognitive conditions
- Slower cognitive decline
Having a Pet Could Improve Your Immune System
It’s possible that your pet could help you strengthen your immune system over time. As previously mentioned, being a pet parent can lower stress and cortisol levels, reshaping your emotional baseline. When your body can better handle stress, this can help improve your immune response.
However, there’s another potential way your pet can help you build up your immune system. Pets introduce quite a bit of icky things into your home, like dirt, dander, and allergens.
You’d think you’d get sick more often, but over time, exposure to a variety of microbes could help strengthen your immunity. You likely encounter more outdoor bacteria and allergens, which could reduce your risk of allergies and make your body more resilient to illness.
Your Pet Might Help You Sleep Better
Having a pet nearby can promote relaxation, helping you sleep better. Reduced stress can lead to deeper, more restful sleep, and increased physical activity could also improve your sleep cycle.
Of course, if your pet sleeps in the bed with you, this can trigger a whole new set of challenges that make sleeping tougher. Or if your dog wakes you up at sun-up with their leash at the ready, you might disagree with this one.
But either way, you’re likely to develop more consistent routines thanks to your pet, which can help you regulate your sleep schedule. Ultimately, whether you plan for it or not, pets tend to require some structure. This structure could help you, too.
Your body thrives on consistency, experiencing improved digestion, sleep, and hormone levels. All of these benefits trickle into other areas of your life, improving your physical health.
A Pet Is Good for Your Body, Mind, and Soul
Owning a pet improves your health physically and in many other ways, but these changes don’t happen overnight. However, over months, years, and repeated interactions with your pet, well, small moments add up big time.
Many of the improvements you experience interconnect with other benefits. For example, reduced stress improves heart health, better routines mean better sleep, and social interaction supports a healthy brain.
The best part? It doesn’t take intense, crazy workouts or pages and pages of puzzle books to gain these benefits. You simply need to love and care for your fur baby, which is one of the easiest things to do when you’re a dedicated pet parent.
To learn more about living the best life possible with your special furry friend, make sure to peruse the rest of the Neater Pets blog! You’ll find all sorts of interesting tidbits to make life with your pets more enriching, memorable, and fun.