Feeling Stressed? Call a Friend

Scientist studying the body’s response to stress have long focused on the “fight or flight” model – that animals sensing danger release hormones that speed things up or either fight foes or flee, fast.
But this view is incomplete, says Shelley Taylor, a University of California, Los Angeles, psychology professor. Her theory: Women have potent stress-fighting system based partly on oxytocin, the “cuddling hormone”.
Known for being produced in women during childbirth and lactation and in both sexes during orgasm, oxytocin has also been shown to boost bonding in rats, sheep and prairie voles. And one study found that giving male and female rats daily shots of it cut blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol while promoting wound healing and possibly, weight gain.
Though women’s blood may not hold more oxytocin than men’s, it does have more oestrogen, which increases the available oxytocin’s effectiveness. To Taylor and others, this shows that women naturally cope with stress not just by fighting or fleeing, but by finding comfort in friends too.
Most intriguing is how, by acting as a cause and a product of animal bonding, oxytocin may feed a kind of self-perpetuating loop of stress reduction.
So, when stress hits, call a friend. If you don’t have one, make one. If all else fails, cuddle up to a prairie vole.

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