say yippie: Female Therapy.

Last night I hosted Craft Club. My friends E and M came up with idea a couple of months ago after we had spent an afternoon discussing all of the projects on our *to-do* lists.

Last night marked our second get together and it couldn't have been more fun! Great company, great conversation AND I managed to get a very big project on the go.....

As I fell into bed in the wee hours of this morning, exhausted and knowing I had a looooong day ahead of me after a very late night, I thought about an email a friend had sent last week. It was a tribute to girlfriends and time spent connecting with other women. The email outlined a study that proves our time spent with female friends is as important to our health as food or exercise or meditation (which I actually plan to start doing today, most likely, I hope.).

Anyways, it was a great reminder that it's okay to need time to yourself, time with friends, time doing the things you love. And it totally made me feel better about staying up until 1am!

Here's the article:

The Power of Girlfriends
Unknown Author

"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 "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.
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."

Have I seen the study? No. But do I really care? Nope.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and believe that my girlfriend time is imperative to my health....even if we are drinking wine and eating chocolate!