Tending and Befriending

by Paulette Avery, R.N., M.S.N.

The research I'm sharing this month comes from a UCLA study published in 2000 in the journal Psychological Review. It looks at friendship among women and the female response to stress. Apparently, 90 percent of the research done on stress has been done on men. It is from this research that information on the fight-or-flight concept has come. That is, when we are exposed to stress, our bodies respond by flooding us with hormones, including adrenaline, that allow us to stay and fight the threat or to flee. Two female researchers who at the time were both at UCLA, Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., and Shelley Taylor, a professor of social psychology, began looking at women's response to stress. There was a joke that when things became stressful at the lab, women came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee and bonded with each other. Men under the same stress tended to hide out somewhere on their own. As the researchers began thinking about this, they realized that it was important to look also at women's response to stress. They gathered colleagues in varying disciplines to look at the issue and soon discovered that, as has been found in regards to heart disease, women respond very differently from men.

According to the study, titled Female Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight, women behave with a broader range of responses to stress. One of the hormones released, in what scientists call a hormonal cascade, is oxytocin. The effect of oxytocin is to buffer the fight-or-flight response and, instead, to encourage women to tend to their children and seek out the companionship of other women. These tending and befriending activities, in turn, lead to another release of oxytocin that results in a calming effect. In women, the calming effect of oxytocin increases further because of the influence of estrogen. This response does not occur in men because under stress they release higher than normal levels of testosterone, which counters the effect of oxytocin.

Further research in this area may find additional ways in which oxytocin affects women's response to stress and how it encourages the tend-and-befriend behaviors. But already this research may help to explain why women consistently outlive men. Many studies have demonstrated the importance of social support to health. People with strong social ties have lower blood pressure, heart rates, and cholesterol. One study found that those with no friends are more likely to die. The results of another study found that those with the most friends over a nine-year period cut their risk of death by 60 percent. Additionally, the well-known Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School (in which I am a participant) has found friendship so significant that the researchers concluded that the absence of friends was as detrimental to health as carrying too much weight or smoking.

The clear implication I see from this research is that all of us, men and women, can live longer, healthier, and more joyful lives by seeking love and support from our friends. Yet how often, when we are stressed, do we curtail our time with friends to deal with work or family responsibilities? It appears that making time for our friends can be one of the best stress-busters available!

Paulette Avery is a registered nurse and a freelance writer who specializes in health issues.