Interacting with a pet<\/a> lowers cortisol \u2014 the stress hormone \u2014 and raises oxytocin \u2014 the feel-good hormone. It also lowers blood pressure and eases loneliness and depression. Don\u2019t have a pet? Walk a friend\u2019s dog, volunteer to cat-sit for a vacationing neighbor, or volunteer at a shelter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Winter is a prime time for seasonal blahs. If you could use a little mental-health boost, here are some simple ways to get started HEARING HEALTH AND MENTAL HEALTH HAVE A CLEAR CONNECTION. In fact, untreated hearing loss increases your risk of depression, anxiety, social isolation, and more. Winter is also a prime time for seasonal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hearing-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/longhornhearing.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}