Health Benefits of Love
Why we need love
By Christine Ferch
Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are, gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest people. Who could argue with that?
-Mr. Rogers
Yes, we need love. All mammals require love and nurturance from others, and this need is demonstrated in a large amount of research in many different fields. The need to love and care for others is hard-wired, meaning we are born with this need. Our environments, our what help build a solid foundation for how we demonstrate love to ourselves and others.
One individual Abraham Maslow has love in his hierarchy of needs because it is essential to proper development and living a happy and fulfilling quality of life. John Bowlby demonstrated our need for love and attachment with his research with Rhesus Monkeys, even those monkeys who had the choice between a wire monkey with food and a cloth monkey with no food. The baby Rhesus monkeys would go the cloth monkey and only briefly to the wire monkey to get food. This behaviour was defined as contact comfort.
When children do not receive enough contact comfort, more so during the first six months of their life after they are born, can be psychologically damaged. Moreover, as the child begins to age and does not have a warm and nurturing caregiver, one can begin to feel they are not worthy of love and develop low attachments to individuals in their life with friends and with romantic partners.
Please note, there is a difference between providing comfort and allows the child to learn to self-regulate. Teaching the child to self-regulate should not occur before the age of one year. As adults, our contact comfort is demonstrated in people’s expressed desires to have healthy relationships.
We need love in our friendships and our intimate relationships, and we receive love from family, friends, and the partners we chose to be romantic with. Love is a parallel feeling, in need to love and care for others; this need is just as strong as our need to be loved and nurtured. In simple forms, we need to receive love from others, and we need to give love to others. Additionally, we need self-love, meaning we also need to love ourselves.
For love to grown, Abraham Maslow indicates we also need to feel safe and secure before we can feel and provide love and have a sense of belonging. Safety and security are meant when our basic needs are provided for such as food, water, shelter, academics, positive emotional experiences, nurturance from a caregiver. Research has even demonstrated, children who grow up in impoverished homes with little access to basic needs, when provided with warmth from their caregiver and basic needs, there is the little onset of psychological concerns but growth in resiliency.
Health Benefits to Love!
There are health benefits to love?? You bet!
When we give love to others, it ignites many of the systems within our central nervous system and how our body reacts. When we receive love our levels of serotonin, dopamine levels rise signalling to our brain to have happy and positive emotions, thoughts, and behaviours.
When we engage in happy thoughts and behaviours, our body has physical reactions towards these and can help:
- Lower blood pressure
- Reduce Anxiety
- Improved Immunity
- Reduced Chronic Pain
Love and Affection
Affection is an act associated with love; it is the physical contact we give to our loved ones such as hugs, kissing, holding hands, phone call, love notes and sex. When we are affectionate or engage with others closely, we are building a connection with another person, and it is a special kind of social interaction which varies on different levels. Both love and affection require work on each party as the more affection we provide, the more love we are giving the other individuals. The more love we have, the more affection we give. The process is cyclical.
We need love and affection because they help us feel secure and provide a sense of belonging as another individual wants us. It creates a sense of harmony between those in the relationship, whether it is with a friend or romantic partner. When we give and receive love and affection, we are understanding our emotional boundaries and knowing how far we will reach out and be vulnerable.
Love is about putting someone else’s needs before your own, affection is telling the world we are content with who we are with, and we know everything about them. We have an unconditional acceptance of our partner from the things they do well, to the things which annoy the heck out of us!
How do we show Love and Affection?
There are many ways to demonstrate how we love someone and how we can give them affection:
- Put your needs on hold if your partner requires your support “Can you put your paper on hold for a few minutes, I need your help with something important.”
- Provide love without conditions: “If I hold your hand, you will….”
- Hugs!!, these can be provided to those of all ages and for any reason!
- Say I love you
- Do something nice for your partner
- Leave a love note/text
- Hold Hands
- Snuggle
- Describe an emotional experience
- Complete and activity together
- Road trips
- Provide words of encouragement
- Support each other’s dreams or goals
Do you feel you struggle with love and affection within your relationships and want to build on loving yourself and others, or have questions about this topic, contact us admin@ovcs.ca
Additionally, check out my other blogs on various other mental health topics! 😊
