Oxytocin, the natural pituitary hormone of labor and delivery, is also the hormone of love. It is a hormone that figures prominently in all aspects of love: bonding as a couple, orgasms, being social, being maternal, and even a factor in social and other forms of anxiety. Even making suggestive eye contact has been linked to oxytocin!
Oxytocin’s critical role in health and medicine was recognized early on through a young researcher who graduated from our home town treasure the University of Illinois. In the year 1953 Vincent du Vigneaud was able to synthesize oxytocin and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Women differ genetically in their ability to metabolize and respond to oxytocin, and a new study has been able to link this fact with differences in how women differ in their health behaviors in pregnancy.
Those with more empathy for their fetus have differing levels of the ability of cells to recognize ocytocin via it’s receptors. Overall it promotes you to trust more.
Yoga, music, group singing, meditation, practicing kindness, getting a massage and being with your dog can all help oxytocin levels. And just like doggies, even head massage increases the release of oxytocin for humans!
Oxytocin may not only solve your love life problems, but appropriate levels may be able to overall benefit your mental health. Higher amounts of oxytocin lowers stress and anxiety. There is truth that sex can positively impact our waistline, and exactly how this happens may indeed be related to oxytocin.
When this hormone of love is given to healthy volunteers, they eat less! Studies showed, the higher the oxytocin level, the less snacking! And oxytocin boosts memory and is enhanced by estrogen: so enhancing estrogen will enhance oxytocin levels, and thus Women’s Health Magazine has proclaimed that ‘hugging it out’ actually works!
For that bedroom boost: come talk to your gyno about how your hormones can affect your thoughts, your feelings, your sexuality and perhaps your memory!
