Tell all your girlfriends

I just had an email from a doctor friend and she asked me to pass it on to all my friends. Well, I don't like sending group emails so I will pass it on here.

Interesting.... we do it instinctively but now I guess this is the theory behind it all.
They teach it at  Stanford
 "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. Sooooo let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our  health."

The helpful comments on the previous post about insomnia are evidence of just how much support women friends give to one another. My friend has adopted a new slogan "Gossip saves lives." Pass it on to your girlfriends too.