STRESS & Your Gal Pals!

Think of that word- disease and break it down. Dis (or lack of) ease. Yup.

That’s what unacknowledged, unreleased, unrelieved, unmanaged stress does,

 it makes us uneasy at best, truly sick at worst.

Many of us feel stressed out much of the time and that stress can trigger unhealthy eating, keep us from exercising, and rob us of much needed sleep. It feeds depression and messes with every aspect of our lives. Stress is associated with almost every disease we know, including heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers. It encourages addictions and other unhealthy behaviors by disrupting the part of your brain responsible for self control and decision making.

Just taking a deep breath can be a quick stress reliever. Exercise is HUGE- (consider it “free medicine”, and will help to build up resistance to stressors. Right behind exercise comes doing what you need to do to get enough sleep. Believe it or not, your FRIENDSHIPS are right up there with breathing, exercising and sleeping.

In a Psychiatry Class at Stanford the last lecture was on 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.

 So DON’T GIVE UP ON THE GYM, get your sleep, but also remind yourself that hanging out with friends is NOT a waste of our time! 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!  Every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, you have also de compressed and reduced your stress, therefore you have done something good for your health!

Go ahead, make a date right now with your favorite “stress reliever”!

Thoughts or questions?  Send me a note!  Nancy!