Your Brain on Adorable Animals
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
There are plenty of stress-reducing coping mechanisms circulating right now, and for good reason! Our “surge capacities” have been depleted; our “windows of tolerance” have been smashed. I want to recommend one more technique that might not have made it onto your therapist’s radar: looking at pictures of cute baby animals.
While it sounds a little silly, there’s real research to back up the benefit. Jessica Gall Myrick, an associate professor of communications at the University of Indiana, ran a study to find out why people watch cat videos online. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that looking at adorable felines measurably boosted people’s moods. Specifically, people reported feeling more hope, happiness, and contentment; less anxiety, annoyance, sadness, and guilt; and they felt more energized afterward. Pharmaceutical executives are salivating over these effects.
In the brain, looking at dogs, especially your own, activates the emotion and reward circuits. Petting a dog does one better, lowering the stress chemical cortisol and elevating levels of the neurochemicals dopamine…
