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On Oxycotin

Our love chemical is, in fact, extremely healthy for us!

By Gabriel MohrPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Quick Facts

-Oxytocin is our love chemical! It makes us feel amazing, it enhances trust and empathy with our partner, it stabilizes our overall psychological stability, trust, and relaxation levels, it reduces behaviors infidelity, particularly with women who have a lot of interactions with strangers of the opposite sex… And more!

-Oxytocin can encourage favoritism and prejudice, envy and dishonesty! If we love one, we are more than likely to feel the opposite towards another.

Intro

Oxytocin is becoming much more popular and well-known as time goes on! It's considered the love hormone because of how it's produced, however, I'll love to shed some light on what it does and how it's very good for us.

What Is Oxytocin?

Oxytocin is a hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter. It's often considered to be connected with love and pleasure, and it's produced in the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland.

What Does It Do?

It does a lot of things for us:

-It's in the same ballpark as serotonin, dopamine, and your endorphins in the sense that it makes you feel amazing! Oxytocin is a pleasure chemical, and that's one of the main reasons I'm writing about it right now :)

-It has many positive effects on our relationships including enhanced trust, empathy, positive relationship memories, getting to it, and positive communication with your partner.

-It greatly increases our overall psychological stability, trust, and relaxation levels. It definitely reduces stress and anxiety in our bodies!

-Oxytocin helps us be more sociable, and it may help autistic people to be more socially aware. That's pretty cool!

-A healthy level of oxytocin helps the mother through labor, and it greatly helps the mother bond with her baby. It's released when the baby attaches to her breast, which releases the milk.

-A healthy level of oxytocin in the father encourages him to point out certain objects to the baby and encourage them to explore.

-It probably encourages males to keep a greater distance from attractive strangers and engage in social/sexual activities with their partner, which makes them feel good, thus creating a behavior loop.

-Oxytocin reduces behaviors associated with infidelity, particularly with women who have a lot of interactions with strangers of the opposite sex.

-It decreases the novelty of interacting with a stranger. I've personally experienced this!

-Oxytocin can encourage favoritism and prejudice, envy and dishonesty. This makes sense since we associate certain people and activities with feeling good, and we can treat the activities and/or people that don't make us feel good as if they "have to be dealt with" so that we can get back to feeling good. This can be remedied with understanding that we can produce oxytocin and other feel-good chemicals whenever we want with meditation!

How Can We Produce More of It?

That's a lot of positives when compared to the other pleasure chemicals! So, if we feel like we want more of it, how do we get it?

Romantic interactions with a singular partner seem to be the best way to do this, although I wouldn't be surprised if those of you who are in open relationships experience oxytocin as well! Cuddling, engaging in conversation, doing things together, and sex are all ways to increase both of your oxytocin levels. Having children and bonding with them is also a great way to produce oxytocin!

You can produce it through meditation, and particularly while thinking the thought, "I choose to produce more oxytocin" over and over again. I personally vouch for this because I've been doing it all day today, and it's been working!

Yoga, listening to and making music, massages, spending time with friends, empathetic and deep conversations, cooking and eating (healthy) food with the partner you love, doing nice things, and petting animals all increase our oxytocin levels :)

Final Thoughts

I wouldn't be surprised if oxytocin is the feeling of love that everyone wants to feel! What's interesting to me is that we can feel it on our own without anyone else if we want to, and perhaps this is a way to revive relationships that are sinking - that is, both partners individually choose to produce more oxytocin with themselves and each other on a consistent basis. It's very important for well-being anyways, even if you're single :)

Conclusion

Thank you for reading my article! I'm deeply grateful that you're joining me today and swimming in the sea of knowledge, and I'll see you in the next post!

Sources

This post was written with some help by:

Healthline, twice!

science
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About the Creator

Gabriel Mohr

Hey everyone, my name's Gabriel! I love writing short stories, spreading conscious knowledge, and positivity! Author of 3 books :)

Check out my website! www.gabrielmohr.com

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