|
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 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 released, as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers
the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend to 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 ninety percent 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 six-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over
a nine-year period cut their risk of death by more than sixty percent. 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 confidantes 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.