We’ve always known there is explanation to feeling so good about being out with your girlfriends. Here may be the explanation we’ve always known or maybe wondered about.
Until recently, 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 as it’s an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by those saber-toothed tigers. Obviously, I remember that!
Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, 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 a woman 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, 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 scientist s 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.
It was this moment that Dr Klein and Dr Taylor, realized and soon confirmed that the nearly 90% of stress research was done on males and 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. According to Dr. Klein, friends are helping us live longer. In one study, 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 no doubt helping us live better and longer.
Anytime anyone gives you a word or two, about spending too much time with your pals, speak up and just tell them it’s an integral part of your health and wellness program.
