Thanks for Dropping By

Thanks for dropping by and checking out my blog. I like to paint, knit, crochet and take a lot of pictures. I hope you enjoy looking at them and just maybe you can share some of your thoughts and ideas with me.
Thanks,
Karen

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Good For Your Health

We need to remember how often we need to exercise like this:

They teach this at Stanford University.

  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 friends,
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.

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