How to Boost Your Love Hormone
Love is not only about how you feel towards your nearest and dearest. Love signifies your connection to our planet, the universe. And all living things around and beyond you.
Oxytocin is a hormone which helps to create this love and connection.
Oxytocin is a potent hormone. Without adequate levels you’ll not only feel unloved and disconnected but giving love will feel awkward.
Chronic stress has a lot to answer for when it comes to our hormone balance. Including dwindling levels of this love hormone. With stress, we also see the rise in emotional and mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety.
Oxytocin encourages:
Healthy socialization
The need to protect others and feel protected
Wanting to seek out comfort in groups
Bonding between partners and children
The act of cuddling after sex. Or nurturing a newborn helps to release oxytocin and strengthen the loving bond.
The science of oxytocin
Your hypothalamus triggers oxytocin. The posterior pituitary then releases oxytocin into the bloodstream. Many things can stimulate oxytocin. These include intercourse, childbirth, suckling on the breast and even stress.
Your Hormones and Oxytocin
Estradiol also helps to regulate the oxytocin levels by upregulated it. This may explain why oxytocin levels fall after menopause.
Progesterone has been shown to down regulate oxytocin levels, so if you naturally have elevated progesterone or you have an issue with progesterone resistance you may also find that oxytocin levels are suboptimal
Here are some common signs that come with low oxytocin
– Constipation
– Difficulty reaching orgasm
– Wanting to retreat from groups and your community
– Difficulty falling pregnant
– Induction at birth
– Difficulty breastfeeding
– Poor social skills
– Feeling of disconnect
– Increased pain sensation
– Increased appetite
– Binge eating
– Chronic Tinnitus
Oxytocin and Your Response to Stress
The fight-flight stress response is the dominant human stress response. Men tend to have higher testosterone. When going into fight or flight during stress, their hormones dance between cortisol and testosterone. Whereas women tend to have higher oxytocin and this creates the tend and befriend response to stress.
Tend and befriend
The Tend and befriend response is a survival instinct that women show more than men. Especially in the animal kingdom.
The tend-and-befriend state of referring to how women deal with stress. During this stress response, all the feminine traits increase and heighten. Feminine traits include nurturing, life giving, creative, and open. Also associated with gentleness and kindness.
During a stressful situation, Oxytocin rises. This, in turn, heightens the response of nurturing, connection and wanting to protect.
Cultivating oxytocin levels seems to be the best way for women to not only adapt to stress but also to help them develop better relationships with those around them and their children.
Below are six ways to help you cultivate this wonderful juicy hormone.
Six ways to enhance your oxytocin for better relationships and stress adaptation:
– Deal with problems in groups rather than retreating (great in the work environment)
– Catch up with girlfriends regularly
– Hug three times daily for 30 seconds or longer
– Exercise with your friends
– Go for a massages or body work regularly
– Get a pet and cuddle it often
