by Frankie Wallace
People often go through many steps and schemes to stay healthy, whether by exercising constantly, dieting, taking all sorts of vitamins and minerals, or consuming herbal supplements and naturopathic medicine.
However, a huge factor to overall health that people often don’t address is their mental health. The stigma surrounding mental health and the fact that it’s not something that can be easily fixed make this a difficult area of health for people to tackle.
However, something as small as a short hug has been proven to help individuals reduce their stress levels along with their blood pressure.
Hugging Decreases Stress
High stress levels are widely recognized to have adverse effects on an individual’s health, a knowledge that is common enough to cause doctors and business managers to make lowering stress levels a priority among patients and employees.
Although decreasing a person’s workload and treating mental health issues can both effectively decrease a person’s stress, there are simple steps people can take to decrease daily stress, such as meditation, getting enough sleep, and hugging a family or friend every day. Children, as well as adults, have been found to become ill less often when they receive hugs regularly, and are able to handle stressful situations better.
Stressful events often lead a person’s body to elicit a fight-or-flight response, which makes individuals feel the need to physically react in some way to protect themselves. However, hugging or other forms of physical contact have been known to modulate the feel-good hormone known as oxytocin, which produces a soothing effect that can make people less reactive during threatening situations, whether they’re dangerous or simply socially stressful.
People who are busy often and don’t make time for small unwinding activities on a day-to-day basis can easily neglect their mental and physical health by not prioritizing their human needs. It’s important to make time for hugging your family and casual conversation that helps build connections and makes you feel understood in order to maintain positive mental health.
Similarly, executives need to unplug and should give themselves small blocks of time where they can relax and stop thinking about work for a few days. People who work constantly without giving themselves a break often burn out and become less effective at work.
Improves Overall Health
By decreasing stress and releasing feel-good hormones, hugging has the ability to not only elevate your mood, but to also lower your blood pressure, which is important for heart health.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the U.S., as it encompasses a variety of heart problems. Although there are many factors that contribute to heart disease, such as an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise, high stress levels contribute to increased blood pressure, which is also a factor in heart disease.
There are many easy steps to improving your health, such as by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, drinking more water, eating breakfast as well as fruits and vegetables, eating less meat and more nuts, and getting sun and fresh air every once in a while.
We feed off of the earth, its water, and the sun, like most living creatures, and when we forget to spend time outside and eating natural products, it can start to impact our health. By following some basic care routine steps, we can avoid the consequences of not giving our body its necessary vitamins and minerals.
Even though heart disease is the leading cause of death, it is often overlooked and goes unaddressed. A study of over 1,000 women suggests that out of 74 percent of women who had risk factors for heart disease, only 16 percent knew about their risk factors.
This is concerning because the more people who decrease their risk factors for heart disease, the less likely they will be to develop some form of heart disease. This can be done by watching what you eat, exercising regularly, reducing risk factors, and finding ways to relax, such as by hugging your loved ones often.
Stigma Against Hugging
Hugs and other forms of casual physical contact are really important in decreasing our stress levels because of the need humans have to interact with other people and to feel accepted.
Feeling lonely, and unsure of how to relieve stress can deteriorate a person’s mental health, for extroverts as well as introverts, which is why it’s important to hug your loved ones and to be kind to your peers — you never know who needs it.
Although acceptance and regular physical contact are important for every person, there are a few barriers for men in particular to receive affirmation and physical touch. Stigmas surrounding men’s behavior prevent many men from receiving casual touch from their peers, and even their best friends and family members.
Toxic masculinity is a term used to describe stereotypically masculine gender roles that restrict the kinds of emotions boys and men are allowed to express. These gender roles often prevent men from feeling comfortable in expressing loneliness, sadness, and love towards their friends and family, which can make it more difficult for them to get the validation they need, as well as make it easier for them to fall into depression.
We live in an era of information unlike any we’ve ever experienced before, but the excess information we have available makes it so that we have to sift through a lot to find what we’re looking for. This makes it difficult to always know what’s true and false, and to know which health concerns are real and which ones are blown out of proportion for marketing purposes.
There’s no doubt that in the U.S., high stress levels and poor eating habits make heart disease the number one killer of American adults. For this reason, it’s important for us to do what we can to be a little healthier and decrease our stress levels by unwinding every now and then. Hugs are not the save-all for our society, but they absolutely don’t hurt, and when they’re on your terms, they can help you feel more comforted, relaxed and accepted. So, make an effort to hug your loved ones a little more often, as it can literally help their heart.
(Frankie Wallace writes for a variety of blogs on several different topics, from education to environmentalism. Wallace is a recent graduate from the University of Montana and currently resides in Boise, Idaho.)
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