Rx for trust and connectedness? Eight hugs a day

photo by Jesslee Cuizon, Wikimedia Commons

If you knew an easy way to help yourself become more generous, more connected, and more empathetic towards your fellow humans, would you do it?

Because Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA, knows how you can do that.

The more we hug each other, the more oxytocin we produce, the more connected we are. How simple is that?  

Zak and his team have been studying the hormone oxytocin for the past decade. Until they started studying this “love hormone,” most of our understanding about oxytocin has been in other areas. Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for the milk “let-down” during breastfeeding. And oxytocin plays a critical role in labor. Oxytocin is also released by both men and women during sex.

These are vital functions in a life, sure. But Zak wanted to know what oxytocin was influencing in our everyday lives. And what he discovered is that when we are producing oxytocin, we feel more connected, more loving, more cuddly, more generous, more trusting, and more empathetic.

Who couldn’t stand a little more of all that?

Zak’s research includes a lot of in-lab experiments. For example, Zak had people play a classic research trust game. Two strangers sit in different rooms. They’re each given $10 for coming to do the experiment. One person is given the opportunity to give some of his money to the other. Whatever he gives will be tripled in the second person’s account. The second person then has the opportunity to send back some of the money to the first person.

The first person giving the money has a financial interest in being generous. Whatever he gives will be tripled and perhaps he will gain some money back. But the second person has no financial interest at all in giving any of the money away. And yet, in these experiments around the world, the second person almost always gives some of the money back to the first person. Don’t you just love that?

Zak’s research twist was adding oxytocin to the mix. He found that 95 percent of the second people in the experiments gave money back. The higher the levels of oxytocin, the more money people gave away.

Maybe because he’s been sniffing oxytocin (and here would be a good time to distinguish the hormone from the addictive painkiller OxyContin), Zak has done some untraditional research to show the power of oxytocin.

He actually went to a wedding, took blood from everyone in the wedding party before the ceremony, and then immediately following. He found that the bride had the highest increase in oxytocin levels, followed by her mother.

Zak has a huge fear of heights, but he strapped himself to another person and jumped out of a plane with a parachute. Huge jump in trust levels. Huge oxytocin increase.

So, Zak says, our biology is designed to connect us, designed to help us feel loving and trusting of each other. Of course there are all kinds of things that interfere with our properly-functioning oxytocin system, from stress to lack of proper nurturing or abuse. Well, yeah. We can always screw up our perfect bodies. Let’s try not to do that, okay?

And what about the ways we can increase oxytocin in our systems naturally? Not all of us are ready to jump out of a perfectly good plane.

But we don’t have to. We can get a massage, we can read a great poem to someone we love, we can even connect on Facebook (he studied this; I’m not making it up.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see little oxytocin bottles at every check-out register soon. But wait. We don’t need that. One of the easiest ways to increase our oxytocin levels? Hug people.

Zak says eight hugs a day and your world will be a better place. The whole world will be a better place. I happen to live in a community that must have one of the highest hugs-to-people ratios in the country. There hasn’t been any research, but I can tell you that there’s a lot of oxytocin flowing in these hills. I think Zak’s got this thing nailed. I love the implications of this knowledge for the world. I could just hug him.