A woman’s female friends actually matter *duh*

A recent study finds that women’s need for female friends is biological, and the presence of those friends can be scientifically proven to improve a woman’s health.

As a very indirect response to this recent community post , I thought you all might appreciate seeing this article titled, “UCLA study on friendship among women.”   The article itself could use a fair amount of criticism, as it has been written as a kind of flimsy, feel-good piece about women.  However, the topic of the article is kick ass.  Here I’ve chopped it up for you so that you get the good bits and the full gist:

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.

Dr.Klein says, 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 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.

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 six-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a nine-year period cut their risk of death by more than sixty percent. 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 confidantes was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight!

However the piece also somewhat blindly pointed out that women tend to ignore their need for female friends:

“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.”

This comment totally ignores the social expectation that women are the ones to give up any extras to compromise for the people around her.  Her children, her spouse, her family never compromise their lives in order to accommodate her.  (Think simple compromises too, not just major ones.  Sarah Haskins gives a great example in this video.)