Hug the Monkey

The Relaxation Response, Your Genes and Oxytocin

New research shows that activities like meditation or prayer that produce a relaxation response in the body actually change the function of our genes.

Herbert Benson and his team looked at long-term practitioners of deep breathing, meditation and prayer, and compared the patterns of gene expression among the individuals. Next, the control group spent eight weeks in one of the practices, and then the researchers compared the before and after gene expression.

Both phases of the study indicated that the relaxation response alters the expression of genes involved with processes such as inflammation, programmed cell death and how the body handles free radicals.

Science now knows that genes are not static. Their activity can be suppressed or enhanced, and they can be "turned on" or "turned off" by other physiological states, as well as events external to the body.

The relaxation response was named by Benson, a Harvard prof who founded the Mind Body Medical Institute. He defines it thusly: "The relaxation response is a physical state of deep rest that changes the physical and emotional responses to stress... and the opposite of the fight or flight response."

Kerstin Uvnas Moberg, the Swedish researcher who first identified oxytocin's calming effects, calls it the "calm and connection" response. Although Benson doesn't mention oxytocin, I believe that oxytocin is the ruling hormone and neurotransmitter in the relaxation response. If this research had looked at oxytocin receptors and oxytocin-producing neurons, I bet they would have seen "up-regulation," that is, increased functioning.

From the article in Science Daily:

"For hundreds of years Western medicine has looked at mind and body as totally separate entities, to the point where saying something 'is all in your head' implied that it was imaginary," says Herbert Benson, MD, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute and co-senior author of the PloS One report. "Now we've found how changing the activity of the mind can alter the way basic genetic instructions are implemented."

To my mind, this is further proof that we can build or heal the oxytocin response naturally, without snorting anything.

Journaling Can Provoke an Oxytocin Response

The top question among most of us who are interested in oxytocin is, "How can I get more of it?" I always try to promote natural ways to get an oxytocin rush, instead of buying probably-useless products over the internet.

A new study, published last month and reported by Science Daily, points to still another way: writing about your values and core beliefs.

Jennifer Crocker and Yu Niiya from the University of Michigan and Dominik Mischkowski from the University of Konstanz in Germany, followed up on a different study that showed coffee drinkers were more open to hearing information about why it's bad for you if they had first written about their most important value. Crocker and Niiya wanted to understand what caused this effect.

They did two experiments. First, they had people write for ten minutes; half the subjects wrote about their most important value, the other half about their least important value. Then, they rated how much love or empathy they felt afterwards.

In the second experiment, smokers and non-smokers did the same writing exercise, and then they read an article about the harm of smoking to your health. The people who had written about an important value felt more loving and they were also less defensive about the negative info on smoking.

They didn't test the subjects' blood, but the researchers think that oxytocin is what made the difference. According to the article,

The researchers speculate that the love and connection people feel after writing about important values could affect hormones related to care giving, such as oxytocin. Because oxytocin increases trust, it might account for reduced defensiveness in people who take a few minutes to reflect on their important values.

James Pennebaker has shown that writing about things that bother you can boost your immune system's functioning. A release of oxytocin also could explain that effect.

So, before you spend $49.95, sit down and think about what matters to you -- and write it down.

Live Longer Connected

A survey of centenarians -- people who are 100 years old -- found they credited strong social connections, not genetics, with their longevity.

The survey by Evercare, which, I think, is a service that coordinates health care for the elderly, found that in addition to staying in touch with people in their communities, some of these long-living folks also use the internet to connect.

Centenarians say staying close to friends and family is most important to healthy aging (90 percent). Keeping the mind active (90 percent) and laughing and having a sense of humor (88 percent) also ranked high for living longer.

When we engage with others, even via electronic means, the oxytocin response tunes the immune system, promoting relaxation and healing while lowering blood pressure and reducing the stress response. Sociologists and healthcare providers have long known that married people -- especially married men -- live longer and healthier. But you don't need to be married, you just need to have people you can connect with regularly.

Are Women More Likely to Forgive (and Forget)?

Still another fascinating human oxytocin study was published last week. Adam Guastella, from the Brain & Mind Research Institute, University of Sydney, gave 69 men a whiff of oxytocin and then showed them photos of faces. Some of the faces were happy, some neutral, some angry.

The next day, they showed the men some of the same photos mixed with new ones -- sans oxytocin. They asked them which ones they remembered; the men who had inhaled oxytocin were more likely to remember the smiling faces.

Adam Guastella also is doing a trial using oxytocin during couples psychotherapy, to see if it makes the couples more open and connected, thereby increasing the progress they make. Beate Ditzen did an experiment a couple of years ago in which couples snorted oxytocin and then engaged in an argument. Those who got oxytocin were better able to resolve the dispute with less anger.

At LiveScience.com, Meredith Small reports on the study in a post with the provocative title, How Birth Control Lets Us Down. Her premise is that because lactating seems to be the state in which we release the most oxytocin, when women don't have children or have fewer of them, we're missing out on the positive emotional benefits:

...the oxytocin universe has altered for many women. In Western culture today, women barely lactate at all, leaving them just as physiologically ready to hold a grudge, to never forget the face that did them wrong, as any man.

Too bad. Perhaps what we need is more lactation, by men and women, or a daily shot of oxytocin to help us all put on a happy face.

Of course, oxytocin is released in response to all sorts of social interactions. And, while estrogen seems to enhance its effects, making women more open to bonding or to forgetting those angry faces, men certainly fall under its influence as well.

Small makes another interesting and very important point, though: In situations or cultures where women do tend to be the ones to center the family and maintain social connections, this skill is not always valued:

Problem is, those good social skills, that penchant to forget the faces of those who are angry or neutral, has not always helped women. Instead, men, who are never awash in oxytocin and who apparently never forget an angry face, usually see women as emotional Pollyannas, silly creatures always ready to forgive and forget.

Of course, she is engaging is some stereotyping. Women certainly hold grudges, sometimes better than men, perhaps because a breach of the social bond is more devastating. And men are certainly awash in oxytocin, although their neurochemistries can make its effects less obvious.

See "Oxytocin enhances the encoding of positive social memories in humans."

Finally! Massage Increases Oxytocin

UCLA scientists have confirmed something we feel intuitively must be true: Massage increases oxytocin.

Countless magazine and newspaper articles have said getting a massage is a good way to increase your oxytocin levels, and it sure makes sense. But there has been no scientific evidence that it was the case. According to this article in the Boston Globe, a new study included not only playing the Trust Game after getting a massage, but also drawing people's blood to measure the oxytocin levels. This study used men and women, too.

According to the article,

volunteers at UCLA were randomly assigned to be massaged or just wait in a room for 15 minutes and then play an anonymous, one-shot, money-giving game via computer. Those who were massaged returned 38 percent of the money that was given to them, compared with 11 percent for those who were not massaged. The researchers also drew blood from each person before and after the experiment to see if physiological changes - namely in the level of the hormone oxytocin, which is known to influence bonding behavior - could explain the effect. There was an increase in oxytocin only for those people who were massaged and then played the game.

Another way to describe the effect of oxytocin is to say that the well-kneaded group returned 243 percent more money than the stiffer bunch. The effect was stronger in women than in men, which also makes sense, given our greater sensitivity to oxytocin's effects.

They saw this effect not so much after the massage itself as after the trust game. Paul Zak, one of the researchers, thinks that the massage acts as a signal to the brain to be open to trusting interactions.

Another way of saying this is that massage makes us more relaxed, and when we're relaxed, we tend to be more open to others.

To get the most oxytocin-producing benefits, choose a gentle, soothing massage style. Avoid deep tissue work or acupressure; while these are valuable techniques for reducing muscle tension, their intensity may not allow for the right kind of relaxation. The Swedish or Esalen styles use gentler, rhythmic motions that have been shown to elevate oxytocin levels in animals. After the massage, you can test whether you feel more open to connection by calling or visiting with a friend.

"Monetary Sacrifice Among Strangers is Mediated by Endogenous Oxytocin Release after Physical Contact," is by Vera B. Morhenn, Jang Woo Park, Elisabeth Piper, Paul J. Zak, in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Sex Marathon Improves Love Relationship Too

When Doug and Annie Brown realized they weren't having sex for months at a time, they made a pact to have sex every day for 101 days. Then, they wrote a book about it.

In this article in the Boulder Daily Camera, writer Aimee Heckel discusses how the neurochemistry of sex, including tons of oxytocin released during touching and orgasm, makes every part of the relationship better. She interviewed Doug Brown, who said that while they really really didn't want to have sex some of the times, it changed not only their sexual relationship but also transformed them emotionally.

Brown told Heckel:

"It's a very powerful and unique act," he says. "I think in the context of a relationship, it can really add an almost spiritual shine to the relationship."

When he talks about the "spiritual" dimension of sex, he isn't talking about religion, but rather something primal, something natural.

"There's definitely an electricity. A sort of flesh-to-flesh electricity that happens," he says. "We also found the more we did it, the stronger that electricity was. There's something there beyond just kind of having sex. It is beyond just pure pleasure."

Sex is the thing that keeps couples together. It's what creates and maintains the bond. In my experience, it does get harder and harder to find time to connect in bed, but it's a really necessary part of being with someone.

Hug Your Monkey Even If You Don't Want Sex

I thought this was a good column from the Times Online: Touching Shouldn't Always Mean Sex.

Relationship expert Pam Spurr points out how hard it can be for male/female couples to send and understand signals about touching. Sometimes, you don't want sex, but you need to be touched and held. She points out:

When our skin is touched, our bodies produce various responses including producing oxytocin, the emotional bonding hormone. This makes us feel good around our loved one. That heart-warming feeling means that we want more of their company. And so the cycle goes on bonding us together.

Interesting that most of the comments are very hostile. I agree it's a bit of a stereotype that he wants sex, she wants to cuddle, but certainly mismatches in how much sex people want are not uncommon.

Oxytocin Hype and Backlash

I read New York magazine, and they have a regular item called something like "We ride the shifting curve of expectations." They chart where cultural events like books and films fall on the cycle from hype to backlash against the hype.

In the past couple of weeks, I've watched oxytocin follow a similar path. Because I look at every news article and study regarding oxytocin, as well as all the blog posts discovered by a couple blog search tools, I can see what studies spark news coverage, and what kinds of memes spread.

Oxytocin hype has been rampant for the past three weeks. As far as I can tell, it got started with study led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich showing that inhaling oxytocin increased people's willingness to trust other players in an economic game, even after they'd been shafted once. This is the team at the University of Zurich that did the very first human oxytocin studies showing that oxytocin increased trust. (Read my blog post about the previous research here.)

In this study, "We find that subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust."

Some genius copywriter translated this to, "Oxytocin Makes Us Trust after Betrayal," leading to a spate of stories about how "Spray Said to Turn People into Pushovers." And it also led to my appearance on the Fox Morning With Mike and Juliet show.

Not to be outdone, Markus Heinrichs, who leads the Zurich team, talked to reporters (but did not, I believe, actually publish anything new) about their work using oxytocin to treat social anxiety disorder, which has been under way for several years. That sparked another news rush.

They mostly followed the lines of this one, Scientists Find Childbirth Wonder Drug That Can Cure Shyness, kindly sent to me by Blaine. Is that a sexy headline or what? The articles finally recognized the work of Paul Zak, who has been giving oxytocin to humans for several years, without a lot of notice. I didn't blog all these articles, partly because they were so ubiquitous and partly because I was finishing the manuscript of my book, ta daaa!

Already, though, oxytocin hype has faded into the final cycle, backlash. In part this is simply because news reporters have to come up with new stories every day. Once you've written a story hyping the prospects of oxytocin -- or worse, when your competitors have and you haven't -- where do you go from there but to write another one decrying the first. Ideally, at least in the olden days when I started my career as a journalist, you were supposed to find naysayers to quote in every story. But that was then.

The Neurocritic links to an ABC News story now insisting, "Researchers Balk at Media Reports Hyping 'Love Drug' Hormone's Effects."

And Paul Zanucci of American Sentinel calls it, "The Oxytocin Nightmare to Come -- Drugging America." I agree with his premise, and have been saying for a while that oxytocin will be the next Prozac. That is, while oxytocin-based or oxytocin-like drugs will be developed for social anxiety disorder and ASD, it will eventually be prescribed for much milder psychological situations. Zanucci writes,

Every time someone blows their nose, there’s a new prescription written for nasal sprays and antihistamines even though products like Zyrtec can now be bought OTC in generic form.  Every time someone is stressed out by work, another prescription is written for anti-anxiety medication.  People are happy as clams to pay $30 to $50 for the latest in pharmaceutical living, not considering that their insurance is paying another $300 behind the scenes and that their cost for insurance is going to go up again next year.

Nevertheless, I think calling this a nightmare is way too anti-hyperbolic. I'd much rather we revise labor, birth and parenting practices to allow individuals to form a healthy oxytocin response naturally. But our society is probably too sick and mechanistic for that. In which case, a nation of loved-out citizens who inhale oxytocin several times a day would be preferable to our extant war-mongering, paranoid, crabby society.

At any rate, I think we can shortly expect oxytocin to fall off the news cycle for at least a few months.

Partying Hearty on Oxytocin in India

 Oxytocin is the new party drug in India, according to this story from the Times of India.

I've seen previous news stories about police seizing illegal oxytocin or counterfeit versions, and wondered if this was a mistranslation and they meant oxycontin, the pain reliever. And evidently farmers often inject cows with oxytocin to increase milk production, an effect noted by Kristen Uvnas Moberg, the Swedish researcher who was the first to understand this hormone/neurochemical's powerful effects on our moods and ability to bond.

The Times explains that kids inject the oxytocin.

According to a pharmacy expert, the drug induces a numb state of mind. "After a period of intense activity and enjoyment where the addicts are numb to pain, effect of the drug wears off and the users drop, literally. It leaves the addicts’ nervous system in a mess and the users need time to recover," he said.

I dunno about this numb state of mind. They may, rather, feel very calm and connected to each other, similar to the way people who take ecstasy at raves say they feel. (It's been shown that this drug causes a release of oxytocin in the brain of mice.) Oxytocin certainly does reduce sensitivity to pain, and the "mess" side effects have been seen in people who take ecstasy frequently.

The authorities may be overstating the negative effects, as they sometimes do. Nevertheless, I do NOT advocate using oxytocin recreationally. First, because it acts in so many ways to regulate the body, messing with the natural system could have unforeseen and not pretty consequences. Second, it's dangerous to inject anything into your body if you don't have sterile equipment and know what you're doing -- especially if you can't be sure of what you're injecting.

How to Get Oxytocin Right NOW

The Mike & Juliet Show was mostly an attack on Liquid Trust. The manufacturer refuses to say how much oxytocin is in the product, but it won't get into your body - or anyone else's -- if you spray it on your clothes or even skin.

There are plenty of ways to experience a natural oxytocin release without buying anything. In my book (The Chemistry of Connection, April 2009) I explain the oxytocin response, why we don't all have a healthy one, and talk about ways of building it up.

But all of us do have a hypothalamus and all of us do release oxytocin; without it, we'd die. To get the social benefits, try one or more of the following. If you can, set aside at least 15 minutes to do this and nothing else:

• Cuddle
• Sing in a choir
• Hold a baby
• Stroke a dog or cat
• Perform a generous act
• Pray
• Make love
• Have an orgasm (alone or with someone else)