~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Friendships between women shape health: the more friends the better our health.
This, from a study on friendship among women at the University of California, Los Angeles, did not strike me as news, even though it was on the news page.
Women soothe each other’s lives, help with child-rearing advice and homemaking hints, fill the emotional gaps in marriage and help one another think well of themselves on an intellectual level.
Women respond to stress with a dollop of brain chemicals that causes us to make and maintain friendships with other women that in turn helps us in times of stress. It’s research that’s been going on for half a dozen years or so that has turned five decades of stress studies — mostly on men — upside down.
For years, scientists explained to us that when people stressed, a hormonal avalanche revved the body to stand and fight or flee as fast as possible. It’s the idea of an ancient survival mechanism left over in the primitive part of our brains from the time we were chased by, or chasing, woolly mammoths. And a large part of Freud’s theories on the “hysteria” of women has added to this caveman belief. This is the idea that woman are not each other’s friends but in constant competition with each other for men, apt to become hysterical in times of stress and in general behave in a kind of childlike manner. I think many women at the turn of the last century were possibly like that, what with no vote, no money and no elastic waist jeans.
Now that researchers are actually scientifically studying stressed women of the modern era, they’ve found that we have a larger behavioral repertoire than fight or flight. In fact, 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 “tend and befriend” as opposed to “fight or flight,” 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, which is in both men and women. Estrogen seems to enhance it.
The idea to study how women respond to stress differently from men came from a joke among women researchers at UCLA: when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, made coffee and bonded. When the men who worked in the lab stressed, they did none of those things.
Stress research was centered on males for a long time. This sounds familiar to us: for how for many years was heart disease studied in men but not in women? There was an assumption that heart attack symptoms were the same in women as in men; likewise, there was an assumption that women responded to stress just like men. Lo and behold, wrong again. Women respond to stress differently than men do and it’s probably why we outlive men – we don’t go into war mode when we get a flat tire, we just ask for help.
Study after study has found that social ties – having friends — reduces our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol. We become perturbed, we call a friend and tell her what we’re stressed about, complain about it and talk it over in at least 13 different ways. Then we go on about our lives, perhaps doing the same thing on the same subject the next day. There’s no doubt that having friends is some kind of safety valve on the steam engines that are our brains, hearts and guts; our friends let us let off steam – and thus they really do help us live longer.
I like these studies a lot, for many reasons, one of which is this: old wives’ tales, sometimes mistakenly called common wisdom, say that a bunch of women are so much more difficult to deal with than a bunch of men.
Plus the daily, ordinary scuttlebutt that surely must come from men who get frightened when the wife says, “We have to talk.”
I’ve long been suspect of the repetition of both of these old saws. Women hold hands. Women hug. Women help women. Women help children. Women help men. That’s been my experience. I’m happy to learn that this wisdom is passing into the realm of scientific fact. Perhaps it will lessen the idea of the battle of the sexes – a piece of learned behavior if I ever saw one — and something I’ve always wondered about in a species where it takes two to tango, not to mention carry on the race.
