Our Girlfriends Keep Us Healthy

A thought  to share…and sooooo true…

I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture
was on the  mind-body  connection-the relationship between stress  and
disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at  Stanford) said, among other
things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is
to be married to a  woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she
could  do for her health was to nurture her  relationships with her
girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.

Women connect with each other differently and  provide support systems
that help each other to deal with  stress and difficult life experiences.
Physically this  quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create  more
serotonin-a  neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create  a
general feeling of well being.  Women share feelings whereas men often form
relationships around activities. They rarely sit  down with a buddy and talk
about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are
going. Jobs? Yes. Sports?  Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf?
Yes.  But their feelings?-rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share
from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently  that is very good
for our health.  He said that spending time with a friend is just as
important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

There’s a tendency to think that when  we are “exercising” we  are doing
something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends,
we are  wasting our time and should be more productively  engaged–not
true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal
relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as
smoking! So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat
yourself on the back and  congratulate yourself for doing something good for
your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. So let’s toast to our
friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it’s very good for our health.

Original source http://womenssuccesscoaching.com/2010/08/our-girlfriends-keep-us-healthy/