Are you going out with the girls again?! Science says you should!

My Grandmother forwarded this to me a few weeks ago and I just got around to reading the article. No wonder I feel so much better after a chat with the ladies.

UCLA Study of 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 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 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.


Source: 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.