STRESS RELIEF THROUGH FRIENDS

Friends help us to keep healthy and to live longer and better lives.

Are you finding enough time for yours?

A landmark UCLA study on friendship among women* suggests that women respond to stress differently to men, which has significant implications for our health. The discovery was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee and bonded. (Sound familiar?) When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own.

Until this study, it has generally been believed that when people experience stress, they trigger hormones that prepare the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible. This study however suggests that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. 

It suggests that as part of the stress response in a woman, the released hormone oxytocin buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her instead to tend children and gather with other women. And when she actually engages in this tending or befriending, more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect.

This calming response does not occur in men, because testosterone, which men produce in high levels when under stress, seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin, whereas the oestrogen in women seems to enhance it.

The tend and befriend notion developed in this study may explain why women consistently outlive men. Many studies have found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol. In one study, for example, researchers found that those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. The Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight!

Friends help us to keep healthy and to live longer and better lives.

Are you finding enough time for yours?

* UCLA Study on Friendship among women By Gale Berkowitz