They Teach It at Stanford

These are the girls in my family - we share genetics but most of all we share friendship.

I receive this email last night and I just had to share it!

"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 βgirlfriend 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."