Health Benefits of Owning a Pet: Pets Give You a Healthy Life.
By: Rabee Imran
Tags: Pets, Pets And Animals, Health, Health Benefits, Médium

Health Benefits of Owning a Pet

For adults

The statistic below outlines the health benefits of having a pet, reported by U.S. adults aged 50–80 years in 2018. Around 80% of adults in this age group reported “stress reduction” as a major health benefit of having a pet.

Health Benefits of Owning a Pet Statistics

Owning a pet is more beneficial to adults when it comes to their physical, psychological, or mental health. Let me tell you how.

For kids

When a child has no siblings, researches reveal that pets help those kids to develop greater empathy, higher confidence, and increased interest in physical activities. Kid’s exposure to pets also eases anxiety. In an experiment, the heart rate, behavioral distress, and blood pressure were measured in healthy kids aged 3–6 at two diverse doctor visits. One visit with a dog and the other one was without a dog. The visit with a dog shows that the children had lower heart rates, blood pressure rates, and less behavioral distress.

A survey was conducted in 2016, based on the opinion of French individuals about the benefits of having a pet while being a kid and how schools should uphold that thought, That year, only 10% of the respondents disagreed that having a pet is useful to kids.

Health Benefits of Having a Pet for a Child

Physical Health Benefits

You can easily observe the physical health benefits of owning a pet by yourself. Mostly, pet owners look physically fit & are more active. Studies reveal that pet owners are more involved in physical activities than those who don’t have pets. When people go out for a walk with their pets, they start to become more social, with a great ability to fight off their emotional stress.

The American Heart Association embraced a major bit of research showing how owning a pet reduces your chances of having CVD — the conditions that influence your heart and blood, for example, stroke. In an experiment, people having a cat or dog as their pet had lower resting pulses and blood pressure measures at the start of the experiment than those who don’t have pets.

Mental Health Benefits

The mental health benefits of owning a pet are quite obvious. If you want to control your anxiety then do a little chat with your pet, you’ll feel better. Depression is one of the most debilitating conditions that can be cured by owning a pet. Therapists often suggest owning a pet to the individuals battling depression. The act of caring for a pet gives a patient inspiration to forget about his disease & start thinking about his pet. The unconditional love given to humans from their pets can truly be the best medication for depression.

Psychological Benefits

One of the reasons why people might benefit from pet ownership is that pets represent a source of social support and numerous researches demonstrate that increased social support prompts improved psychological or mental health. People who get great emotional support from their pets become closer to other important people and get more support from them, not less. This is known as the “complement hypothesis”, pets complement many social support forms instead of rival them.

It doesn’t seem like a great impact on psychological health but researchers proposed that a care-taking role may develop a sense of responsibility in adults as well as in their children and reason that adds to their general well-being. So, we can’t deny the psychological benefits of owning a pet.