Keeping an animal around for companionship has been a trend for hundreds of years, and it has long been known that owning pets can have health benefits such as reducing stress or lowering blood pressure. They are great to have in homes that have children because they can decrease the likelihood that allergies will develop. We keep several pets within our home, but the pet that I feel helps me the most with my anxiety is my cat, Elliot.

There are several ways in which Elliot has helped reduce my anxiety just by being around the house. He isn’t always a lap cat, but if I have the right blanket over my legs, he does occasionally come up and sit on me. The pressure emitted has a similar effect to the pressure of a weighted blanket in that it can reduce levels of cortisol, particularly in individuals such as myself whose levels of cortisol don’t easily lower back down to normal levels. As you can guess, this is also useful when I am trying to sleep and I have found that I sleep a lot better when Elliot is sleeping on my legs. He also has a loud, rumbly purr, which also has a calming effect. Studies have shown that a cat’s purr is at a good frequency to promote all sorts of healing in the human body. But one of my favorite things about him is the way that he tends to follow me around from room to room. This was particularly comforting back while I was attending university and living on my own, as he was a gentle reminder that I was not alone, and thus I stopped feeling quite so lonely. I find this habit so endearing that for a short time, I was documenting it on Instagram. I have submitted a gallery of some of those pictures below for you to see in hopes that you will be amused.