As a hormone, oxytocin has powerful, health-promoting properties which start from the moment you are born. Oxytocin is released during childbirth, stimulating the contractions which guide the baby through the birth canal toward delivery. It also promotes the release of milk during breastfeeding and facilitates maternal behavior and bonding between new mothers and their infants, Dr. Joseph Mercola explains.

Only three percent of all mammals are able to form lasting monogamous relationships. This tiny list includes bats, beavers and a few other rodents, certain foxes, a few hoofed mammals, otters, and some primates, including humans.

The Three Stages of Love

Researcher Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, defines three stages of love, each marked by hormones which influence your behavior and feelings:

1. Lust – In this stage, both men and women are driven by the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. This occurs from a few weeks to a few months.
2. Attraction – During this time, the initial lust progresses towards a desire for a specific partner. Romance and commitment develop as the neurotransmitters adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin are at work.  Attraction usually lasts a year to three years.
3. Attachment – Oxytocin and a similar hormone, vasopressin, are at work in this final and most important stage. Oxytocin is released by both men and women during sexual intercourse and steadily strengthens the feelings of attachment and closeness. The bonding which occurs is necessary for a long-term relationship.

Love can start in any one of these stages, Fisher explains. Some people have sex with a new partner and fall in love after. Some fall in love first before becoming more intimate. Others develop a deep feeling of attachment first, then experience romance and mutual sexual attraction.

Studies suggest that the location of receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin, makes all the difference when it comes to long-term social bonding and monogamy, Dr. Mercola points out. The more receptors you have in your brain associated with reward and reinforcement, the more likely you are to fall in love and remain monogamous.

How to Experience the Health Benefits of Oxytocin

Oxytocin’s health benefits stem from its ability to counteract stress. The more oxytocin your pituitary gland releases, the better your ability to handle stressful situations, as it decreases the levels of cortisol and other stress hormones and lowers your blood pressure during moments of anxiety.

This hormone has also been found to reduce the cravings for alcohol, drugs and sweets.

Dr. Mercola believes that oxytocin likely contributes to why people with pets recover faster from illness, why couples live longer than singles, and why support groups work for people with addictions and chronic diseases.

But he is strongly against the use of artificial forms of oxytocin because synthetic hormones can seriously harm you. An exception to this would be in the case of a difficult delivery and labor is not progressing smoothly.

Cultivating warm, loving, intimate relationships, no matter what stage of life you’re in, is the best way for you to facilitate the natural release of oxytocin in your body.

Touch, positive interactions and psychological support are known to increase oxytocin. Here are some tips on how you can experience the benefits of the love hormone:

• Take care of a pet
• Hold hands, hug and kiss more
• Give and receive a backrub
• Nurture others
• Get a massage
• Practice mind-body therapies like breathing exercises and yoga

Having healthy relationships contribute to a healthier you. This is something for you to ponder on this Valentine’s Day.

Your body has the amazing ability to heal itself, so even if you haven’t been eating right, still on the stick and the bottle, or have less than healthy habits, you can still wipe your slate clean, make the decision to start living healthy and never look back.

This year could be your healthiest ever if you want it to be. Here are Dr. Joseph Mercola’s recommended lifestyle changes that will help you take control of your health this 2010:

1. Learn How to Deal with Stress
   Dr. Mercola notes that the vast majority of patients he has treated who were suffering from serious chronic illnesses have previous emotional stress that contributed to their problems. But it doesn’t take serious trauma to cause these changes, because the sum of the normal, emotional situations that you experience on a daily basis can negatively affect your future health. Mercola recommends meditation, prayer, physical activity and tools like the Meridian Tapping Technique (MTT) to help you maintain emotional and mental balance.
2. Get More Sun
   Studies show that vitamin D, which you can get for free by simply getting enough sun exposure, can help decrease your risk of cancer and many other diseases .Vitamin D receptors can be found in almost all of your cells, from your brain to your bones, so its ability to influence your health is simply amazing, Mercola points out.
3. Eat According to Your Nutritional Type
   Dr. Mercola’s nutrition plan is based on natural whole foods and is designed to help increase your longevity. This involves eliminating, or at the very least, drastically cutting your consumption of grains and sugars and at the same time, eating foods that are right for your unique biochemistry.
4. Exercise
   Don’t kid yourself – you can’t be at your peak condition if you don’t work it and sweat it out. That’s because exercise helps boost your immune system, aids in weight loss and weight management, and helps you sleep better, among other benefits.
5. Keep Your Toxin Load Low
   The world is more toxic nowadays and the number of dangerous chemicals lurking around you continues to increase. That is why you need to become an informed and vigilant consumer, Dr. Mercola advises. This means using non-toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, insecticides and other products.
6. Drink More Pure Water
   You can survive without food for weeks but you’d die without water within a few days. Your body needs to be constantly rehydrated as it loses water when you sweat and urinate. Checking the color of your urine will tell you what your water requirement should be. If you notice that your urine has turned deep, dark yellow, it’s likely that you’re not drinking enough water. Installing a quality water filter in your home will provide you pure drinking water and help you remove impurities and toxic disinfection byproducts from your tap water.
7. Get Quality Sleep
   Studies show that disrupted sleep cycles can lead to serious health problems like cancer, coronary heart disease and depression. If you feel rundown or tired all the time, lack of sleep is a big factor because circadian rhythms regulate the energy levels in your cells. Also, the proteins involved with your body clock and metabolism are intrinsically linked and are dependent upon each other.

You get constantly stimulated emotionally, mentally, physically and visually on a daily basis physically. Taking a break from this stimulation can help improve your health, natural health expert Dr. Joseph Mercola explains. Meditation allows you to rest your mind and direct its focus on one particular thing, free from any form of distraction, or on nothing at all.

Meditating allows you to become more aware and mindful of the things going on around you. Through meditation, you can strengthen the areas of your brain that regulate attention and memory, detach from thoughts that lead to emotional swings, manage your mood cycles and stress levels, and learn how to do things more effectively.

Aside from the emotional and mental benefits, numerous studies have looked at the physical health benefits of meditation. Every illness is related to stress on some level, Mercola points out, and since meditation is effective at relieving stress, it can also help relieve:

• Chronic pain
• Fatigue
• Gastrointestinal distress and irritable bowel syndrome
• Headaches
• High blood pressure
• Mild depression
• Premenstrual syndrome
• Respiratory problems such as emphysema and asthma
• Sleep disturbances
• Skin disorders and
• Symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis

Meditation can even help boost your immunity. In a study published in Psychosomatic Medicine, researchers found that people who had eight weeks of meditation training produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine. Dr. Mercola doesn’t recommend the flu shot but this shows that meditation can boost the immune system.

Think of good health as a three-legged stool, says Dr. Mercola. The first leg is proper diet, the second is exercise and the third being stress management tools like meditation.

The stool can’t stand up without all three legs. That’s how important meditation and stress management can be to your overall health and wellness. Your survival depends on your ability to handle what life throws at you, the food that you eat and the condition of your body.

Researchers from the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, England, were the most recent to give it a shot and say that kissing is nothing romantic – they believe that it developed to transmit germs.

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a virus which lurks in saliva and other bodily fluids and infects between 50 to 80 percent of American adults. HCMV normally causes no problems but it can be extremely dangerous for pregnant women and can kill unborn babies or cause birth defects, including cerebral palsy and deafness.

In the journal Medical Hypotheses, Dr. Colin Hendrie explains that prior to pregnancy, a woman can develop immunity from the cytomegalovirus through mouth-to-mouth contact and saliva exchange with a particular man carrying HCMV.

The hypothesis proposes that mouth-to-mouth kissing enables women to control when they become infected with a particular man’s HCMV and so protect their offspring from primary infection during vulnerable times in their development. A woman, however, only gains this protection if she also avoids infection by other men. This means that she must only kiss one particular man because kissing the same person for about six months will give her optimum protection from HCMV.

During the first kiss (which is assumed to be chaste and short), the man spreads just a small amount of HCMV to the woman to reduce her risk of becoming ill. As the relationship progresses and their kisses become more passionate and torrid, the woman’s immunity also builds up, and when she becomes pregnant, the risk of her unborn child getting infected by HCMV is significantly lower.

Crying is a behavior claimed to be exclusively human which has remained as an unexplained physical response. Biologically, tears can be classified into three kinds: basal tears, which are continuous and lubricate our eyes; reflex or infant tears, which occur when we chop onions or receive a blow to the eye; and emotional tears, which are psychologically caused.

Laboratory experiments show that emotional tears have 24 percent more complex proteins than irritant tears. The proteins in emotional tears are among those involved in the human stress response, suggesting that crying performs a physical catharsis and expels toxins from your body.

Cellular physiologist Darlene Dartt believes that your nervous system may be responsible for crying. When nerves near your lacrimal gland (the gland which produces tears) release certain neurotransmitters and hormones, tears are released.

According to Dartt, crying began as an involuntary protective response mechanism. Your cornea contains sensory nerves, which send impulses to your brain stem. When dust or debris get in your eye, these sensory nerves signal your brain stem to releases hormones that tell your lacrimal gland to produce tears to wash away the irritants.

The cornea also has nerves which reach further up into an area of your cerebrum that processes emotions and emotional tears. A signal is sent to your endocrine system to release a hormone that generates tears whenever an emotion, like joy or sorrow, is registered in your cerebrum.

Your cerebrum also controls speech, and much like speaking, crying is a powerful form of communication, and was one of our main forms of human communication when we were babies.

The main difference between talking and crying is that the latter is a form of communication that is purely emotional and sort of an uncensored version of how you really feel about something.

For evolutionary biologist Oren Hasson, tears lower defenses and function as signals of submission, serve as a cry for help, and show a mutual display of attachment and a group display of cohesion. As such, crying can help build and strengthen personal relationships, and if you cry when you see someone else crying, it can signal your compassion or empathy, he explains.

Crying may also potentially draw sympathy and awaken the desire to help from others, or elicit mercy from an attacker – responses which could help increase your chances of surviving certain situations.

Shedding tears in public is often frowned upon but it tends to make what the crying person is saying or doing appear genuine or more believable.

Why Men and Women Cry

Another way to look at crying is to note the differences in crying episodes between the sexes.

On average, the ladies cry about 64 times a year, compared to only 17 for the gentlemen.

Studies show that boys and girls cry equally often, but once they enter school, boys begin crying less. This is attributed to the fact that parents and peers tend to come down harder on boys who cry as they grow up.

From an evolutionary standpoint, crying signals vulnerability and necessity. Women tend to share their emotions and tears as a sign of trust, which increases bonding and chances of survival.

Hormonal variances also make women more prone to cry. But mid-life changes even up the playing field. Women begin to cry less, get more assertive and can even display anger more, while men get angry less and cry more.

Whatever the reason for crying, what’s evident is that it’s a powerful form of communication. Crying can help make you feel better, release stress, deepen social bonds, and may even have other undiscovered biological functions that help maintain a healthy equilibrium.