HEALTH: Documentation that women naturally tend, befriend and heal other women - through friendship.

[Guest guest]

Thanks for being my friends!

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Documentation that women naturally tend, befriend and heal other women -

through friendship.

 

UCLA STUDY ON FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN

By Gale Berkowitz

 

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special.

They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our

tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and

help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

 

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually

counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on

a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to

stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and

maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has

turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside

down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed

that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that

revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible,

explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of

Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's

authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we

were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

 

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral

repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems

that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress

responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and

encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead.

When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies

suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress

and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in

men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high

levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of

oxytocin. Estrogen; she adds, seems to enhance it.

 

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made

in a classic " aha " moment shared by two women scientists who were

talking one day in a lab at UCLA. 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, says Dr. Klein. When the men were

stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to

fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research

is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew

instantly that we were onto something.

 

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist

after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs.

Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress

research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women

respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for

our health.

 

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that

oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other

women, but the " tend and befriend " notion developed by Drs. Klein and

Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after

study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering

blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr.

Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

 

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no

friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another

study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their

risk of death by more than 60%.

 

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed 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. 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!

 

And that's not all! 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. Those without

friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress

that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us

healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time

to be with them?

 

That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson,

Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and

Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press,1998). Every time we get overly

busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of

friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them

right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are

such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And

we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of

talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing

experience.

 

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R.

A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000).

Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight " ,

Psychological Review, 107(3),41-429.

 

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