Petting a dog, even briefly, can reduce stress and increase happiness: expert

There’s no such thing as too much puppy love.

Interactions with dogs, whether it be your own or someone else’s, can actually boost your health — even if they’re brief, Nancy Gee, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Human-Animal Interaction at Virginia Commonwealth University told NPR.

“I think it is safe to say that animals are beneficial to our mental and physical health,” Gee proclaimed.

Gee pointed out that evidence found in studies suggests spending just five to 20 minutes with a four-legged friend can drop levels of the stress hormone cortisol in people.

“Also, we see increases in oxytocin, that feel-good kind of bonding hormone,” she added.

However, there are, of course, different factors that come into play when it comes to whether a person will truly gain anything from these interactions — mainly whether they are a dog person and how much they click with the canine.

“Pets are not a panacea,” Gee said. “They’re not necessarily going to be great for every single person. But for people who really get it, who really connect with the animals, they really can make a big difference.”

Therapy dogs used in research are now screened for different traits such as friendliness, good behavior and responsiveness.

While owning a dog has been linked to living a longer life — especially among heart attack and stroke survivors — Gee admits that there is mixed evidence on this, partly because pet ownership studies can’t definitively conclude cause and effect, “since you can’t just randomly assign one person a dog as a pet and another a horse.”

Gee also collaborated on a study that looked at whether short amounts of play time with pups benefitted the cognitive processes in 8- and 9-year-old children in the UK.

Short exchanges with dogs in the classroom twice a week proved to lower kids’ stress levels and improved focus.

“We actually saw [those effects] one month later. And there’s some evidence that [they] may exist six months later,” Gee shared.

But humans aren’t the only ones who reap the benefits of these interactions.

“What I love about this research is that it’s a two-way street,” Gee told the outlet. “We see the same thing in the dogs, so the dogs’ oxytocin also increases when they interact with a human.”

Megan Mueller, an associate professor at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, told NPR that this relationship between humans and dogs allows people to see the world through their eyes.

“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,” Mueller explained. “They sort of pull you out of your phone and into whatever environment that you’re in.”

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