Having This One Thing In Your Home Is Worth $90,000 In Life Satisfaction, According To Research
Pets are even more beneficial for us than we realized.
Hryshchyshen Serhii | Shutterstock It’s safe to assume that we’d all appreciate some more life satisfaction, and according to researchers from the U.K., there’s one thing that you can do to increase your life satisfaction exponentially. It’s as easy as keeping something specific in your home.
Researchers found that having a pet in your home is worth $90,000 in life satisfaction.
The University of Kent’s Adelina Gschwandtner and the London School of Economics’ Michael Gmeiner co-authored a study that was published in the journal Social Indicators Research. Gschwandtner and Gmeiner set out to discover just how beneficial pets are to one’s life.
They concluded that having a pet, specifically a dog or cat, is equivalent to $90,000, or 70,000 pounds, a year in life satisfaction. Issy Ronald, who covered the study for CNN, noted that this is “a metric economists use to quantify the ‘implicit price’ of otherwise intangible things.”
Using a scale from one to seven, the researchers further found that having a pet increased one’s life satisfaction by a total of three to four points, comparable to the effects of “meeting with friends and relatives on a regular basis.”
Gschwandtner was initially a bit taken aback by the results, but said they made sense after giving them some thought. “First, when I obtained the values, I was surprised; I was thinking that is a lot of money even for me who loves [pets]," she told CNN. "If pets are indeed like friends and family, why shouldn’t that measure be comparable to talking to friends and family once a week? You have your pet every day."
Sources from the U.S. agree that having a pet is very beneficial for humans.
Gschwandtner and Gmeiner noted, “There is a common understanding, and significant empirical support, that pets are good for us both from a psychological and physical point of view.” The National Institutes of Health (NIH) agreed.
“The unconditional love of a pet can do more than keep you company,” they said. “Pets may also decrease stress, improve heart health, and even help children with their emotional and social skills.”
The NIH approximated that 68% of households in the U.S. have at least one pet. They added that interactions with pets can lower both blood pressure and cortisol, known as the stress hormone. It also provides a serious boost to your mood and well-being. Additionally, the NIH is currently studying how pets affect children with different health conditions like autism.
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Not everyone is totally on board with Gschwandtner and Gmeiner’s research, though.
CNN also spoke with Megan Mueller, an associate professor from Tufts University. She researches the connection between humans and animals, and she thought we should be careful when interpreting these results.
“[It’s] a little bit more complex than people think,” she shared. “A lot of us perceive our pets as contributing to our life satisfaction, but depending on how you measure that in the research, it comes out in different ways.”
Mueller was also quick to warn against “anthropomorphizing pets too much” since, no matter how close we may be to them, they aren’t actually human.
Nonetheless, Gschwandtner and Gmeiner’s research is certainly interesting. Perhaps it's time to add a fluffy family member to your household.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
