Friends Help Keep You Healthy!
April 13, 2008
At the 1972 Grammy Awards recognizing 1971 musical achievements, Carole King, songwriter, won the Song of the Year award and James Taylor, performer, won the award for Best Pop Vocal Performance-Male. Both awards were for the song "You’ve Got A Friend."
The world was a pretty stressful place in 1971, and I think an important statement was made about the needs of the people when a ballad about friendship was chosen as the most important musical accomplishment of the year.
Just how important is it to have good friends? Pretty darn important, as recent research has shown. A study completed with older Americans found that lonely people actually had blood pressure levels thirty points higher than non-lonely folks. This led to the theory that loneliness itself can increase the risk of stroke and heart disease.
In younger people, it was once believed that men and women both reacted to stress with the "fight or flight" response. As it turns out, this reaction is more a male response than a female response.
Men often respond to stress with a surge of adrenaline and aggressive or angry behavior. The metabolism is stimulated to fight if that seems the best way to deal with the stressful situation, or flee if that seems the prudent course. Of course, in today’s man, the "flight" is more figurative than literal even though the body's reaction prepares one to physically escape any threatening dangers by actually running away. When a man comes home from work all stressed out, the first thing he usually does is isolate. He takes himself off to a quiet place in the house and relaxes alone, away from any family hustle and bustle. A man who is unable to isolate typically responds with anger toward his wife or children. Even though men have a reaction tendency that leans toward isolating, they do still benefit from the presence of a friend during stressful situations.
It has been discovered that women have quite a different response. The phrases "tending and befriending" and "nature and nurture" have been coined to describe how women deal with stress. Rather than turn to fight or run away, women "circle the wagons," they call friends, they get together, they snuggle with the children, they interact with others.
Some researchers believe this difference in response to stress has to do with the different ways men and women react to the presence of the hormone oxytocin. This hormone is released in both sexes as a calming response to stress, and generally has an anti-anxiety effect. However, normal male hormones seem to reduce the efficacy of this stress-fighting hormone while normal female hormones enhance the effect. The reason could be that oxytocin leads to maternal behavior, the natural reaction of the female to protect and nurture her children in moments of danger or distress.
I believe that the differences in how men and women deal with stress is the reason that men are often more vulnerable to stress-related illnesses like high blood pressure or stroke, thought women are quickly catching up to men in the area of stress-related illnesses. Due to the befriending way women deal with stress, they are able to reduce the levels of stress hormones and recover more quickly from stress reactions than do their male counterparts. However, since women have moved into the corporate world, I believe they have less opportunity to exercise the "befriending" response, and this may explain women's increasing vulnerability to high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. They are not able to relieve stress in the normal, natural way women have done for millennia
For both sexes, laughter is one of the best stress-reducers in the world. Friends who can make you laugh are worth their weight in gold.
In the meantime, click the link below to enjoy a very funny rendition of "You’ve Got A Friend" performed by Vincent Price with a variety of monsters from "The Muppet Show." Even better…watch it with a friend!
Vincent Price and Muppets sing "You've Got A Friend" 0:02:46
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xal8G-BRelU
By Michelle Wood
Be Well With Michelle ~ Naturally!
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