604-Oxytocin: How to Increase The Happiness Hormone

Have you heard of oxytocin? It's a natural happiness hormone that you can easily produce every day. Want to learn how? Listen in on this podcast episode!

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life.

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and today I want to share a practical way to boost your happiness hormone, oxytocin. 

 

What we know is that happiness is up to you.  Now, a caveat, of course there are injustices and we should speak up, and there are things that we cannot control, and we should feel all those feelings.  But that should not preclude our happiness - in whatever moments of time, you can get it.

 

As we’ve discussed in this podcast, human connection is a basic way to quickly and effectively boost happiness.  We just talked about this again in episodes 264 and 266. 

 

On the flip side, for most people, scrolling through social media will not boost our happiness.  It doesn’t have the same connection. 

 

I’ve always said and felt like social media is my virtual coffee shop, I love it.  I am a connection junkie. But the science is pretty clear that social media is not a substitute for human connection, those likes and comments and seeing what your friends are up to, that’s not going to boost your happiness.  It’s like being on a diet, but binging on ice cream when you are hungry.  It’s not going to help your diet goals.

 

If you need a boost of the happiness hormone, oxytocin, human connection is a great way to go. And if this is true even for me, who thinks social media is my virtual coffee shop, it's probably true for you too.

 

When we are lonely, we are starving for OXYTOCIN.  We starve for eye contact and human touch, both boost oxytocin. 

 

If you can get with someone, do that. But if you can’t,  a video conference, or a Facetime is really the next best thing. 

 

The reason video conferencing works is that although I can not touch you, I can see you and OXYTOCIN comes from seeing you too - looking at your eyes. 

 

That means being intentional and not multitasking on the video call.

 

So, go out and touch someone or catch up with a friend on a video call.  Let me know over on social how it went - we hang out at @everydayhappinesswithkatie

 

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