Women in the Economy

This is a fabulous article about women in the workplace and their movement and progression forward and what blocks them.

http://online.wsj.com/public/page/women-04112011.html

Happiness Project

What if we gave each month a theme, like marriage, relationships, money, sex, friendship, fun, girlfriends, passion and we took small steps every month to make ourselves happier by adding small, easy changes to our everyday routine?  Gretchen Rubin wrote a great book on happiness called the "Happiness Project."  Want to try it out now thru end of May? I'm going to pick relationships as my happiness project.

Group Price

My friend Cindy Loughran of New Leaf Touchstone turned me on to Group Price. Group Price negotiates massive discounts off leading local business svcs, software, apps, & supplies for a limited time to help your small business cut costs and grow, and deliver thousands of new customers to our merchant partners.

More Magazine Social Gaming

According to More Magazine, the average social gamer is a 43 year old woman. Chocolateville, Mother-in-Law Wars and Bespanxed seem to be favorites. I'm into Words with Friends myself, how about you?

Eckhart Tolle TV Meditation

This is an awesome quick meditation you can do right at your desk. Click here.

Girlfriends are good for you health!

There was a lecture recently at Stanford University 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.


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 the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, 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!

A recent UCLA study indicates that friendships between women soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill emotional gaps, and help remind us who we truly are.

And, they may do even more. Hanging out with women counteracts the stomach-acid stress many experience daily as we juggle life's demands. This landmark study suggests 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 turned five decades of stress research (most of it on men) upside down.

Women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; in fact, when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of a woman's stress response, it buffers fight or flight and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in "tending and befriending", more oxytocin is released, further reducing stress to produce a calming effect.

We are indeed very very lucky.

So let's toast to our friendship with the women in our lives. Evidently it's very good for our health.