Health Benefits of Kissing
Kissing not only feels good, it's good for you. It relieves stress and releases epinephrine into your blood, making it pump faster, which may result in a reduction of LDL cholesterol. Kissing may even be a novel way to receive certain hormones, like testosterone:
1. Reduce Your Blood Pressure
Kissing helps to dilate your blood vessels, which may help lower your blood pressure.
2. Relieve Cramps and Headaches
The blood-vessel-dilation effect described above also helps to relieve pain, particularly from headache or menstrual cramps.
3. Fight Cavities
When you kiss, saliva production increases in your mouth, and this helps to wash away plaque on your teeth that may lead to cavities. That said, cavity-causing bacteria can also be transmitted via a kiss, especially if the person you're kissing has poor oral habits.
4. Release Your Happy Hormones
Kissing prompts your brain to release a happy elixir of feel-good chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin. This isn't only important for your happiness, it also may also help to strengthen your relationship.
5. Burn Calories
It's not going to replace your workout session… but a vigorous kiss may burn 8-16 calories. Not too shabby for a kiss.
6. Boost Your Self-Esteem
One study found that men who received a passionate kiss before they left for work earned more money.8 This suggests the kiss (and perhaps the happy home-life it suggests) makes people happier, boosts self-esteem and, ultimately, more productive at work.
7. Tone Your Facial Muscles
A vigorous kiss helps you shape up your neck and jawline by working out a number of facial muscles.
8. Check Out Your Partner's Compatibility
A kiss can be a powerful measure of your initial attraction to a person, so much so that the majority of men and women surveyed reporting that a first kiss could be a turn-off. Women, in particular, place more importance on kissing as a "mate assessment device" and as a means of "initiating, maintaining, and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner."
