Women and Stress

[thirdchild]

Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:12:55 -0800 (PST)
UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women
By Gale Berkowitz
10-29-06

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 Cousino 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 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." 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 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 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 un
pressured 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. "Female Responses to
Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight",
Psychological
Review, 107(3), 41-429.