These allergies are killing me. I'm on a rather lethal combination of drugs in order to hold them at bay, a combination which should have me sleeping 'round the clock but only serves to put me to "sleep" from 8 AM until about 2 in the afternoon and wake me up again at 4 AM. Hope fully I don't say anything too stupid while I'm at work "asleep"...but then again I'd probably never notice so what would I have to be embarassed about?

In any event, a good friend of mine sent me this article. I don't know what the generally accepted way of posting articles is on JU, so I'm just going to post exerpts and let you read the rest if you are interested. It's a VERY interesting read IMO. Emphasis mine.

By Gale Berkowitz
A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special.
They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriages, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis.

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 Cousino Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. "It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just "fight or flight." "In fact," says Dr. Klein, "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 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."

The article goes on to state:

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!

And finally:

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them?

Why indeed? I know this is certainly true of myself, and while my closest female friends are 2,000 miles away (which makes things difficult) how hard is it to actually write an e-mail? I find I censor myself in my e-mails because I don't want to sound like I'm just complaining all the time. Which begs the question, is it really that hard to write about the happy stuff?

Anyway, I e-mailed my friends, they e-mailed back and I..well, feel better. If you haven't contacted your friends in a while, you should try it. It does a body good.