Valentine's Day: Can celebrating the occasion make you happier?
mis à jour le 14 July 2015 à 18:32Are you ready to celebrate the day of love or do you not believe in it? Well, here's an experiment that might just sway your opinion.
Valentine’s Day, the day of love, is just around the corner and flowers, jewellery and chocolates are flying off the shelves. But in actuality not everyone thinks that February 14th is a lovely romantic holiday. In Denmark, only 2% of men admit to enjoying and celebrating it, while the remainder regard it as pointless and cliché. This is bad news for women who might desire a small token of love and companies who bet their yearly sales on these special occasions.
In an effort to make men think differently about Valentine’s Day, a Danish chocolate company, Anthon Berg, came up with the hypothesis that when a man is being generous (giving a gift and being affectionate) and his partner reacts positively, the oxytocin ('love' hormone) level increases, releasing feelings of love and happiness.
In order to prove this theory, the chocolatier called on Paul Zak, an American neuroscientist, to conduct a 'scientific love experiment'. To achieve this, Zak isolated and observed 32 Danish couples. He split the women and men and drew blood samples from the men. He then gathered the couples together and asked the men to give their partners a box of chocolates and tell them why they love them.
Zak measured the oxytocin levels in the men's blood before and after, and noticed that the levels rose by an average of 27.5% after they gave the chocolates and vocalised their feelings. This number is just 0.5% lower than a bride’s level on her wedding day. The neuroscientist clarifies,“Oxytocin makes us feel more connected to other people because the hormone is released when one’s own generosity is reciprocated, and when other people’s needs are more important than our own… Oxytocin makes us happier, increases erections and produces more powerful orgasms. This is really powerful stuff”.
To conclude, the more you demonstrate your generosity and express your love to your partner, the higher your oxytocin level will rise and the happier you will be.
So, even if you claim not to be a Valentine’s Day person, at least give it a second chance! It is of course a commercial holiday, but it is also an opportunity to boost both you and your partner’s happiness. “And if you still don’t like Valentine’s Day, fair enough; you can always express your love on any other day of the week, ” says Zak.
Watch the video:
Lindsay POUI-DI
