A happy marriage eases a working woman's stress

Jan 2 2008

According to new gender research, a happy marriage is more likely to reduce a working woman's stress levels than her husband's.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest this is because happy couples share chores and childcare more equally, making it easier for busy wives to unwind.

Psychologist Darby Saxbe who led the study, says as far as women are concerned, being happily married appears to bolster physiological recovery from work.

Saxbe says women in unhappy marriages return home from a busy day and often lack the support of a partner who pitches in to help with chores.

He says women in chronically unhappy marriages can often be on a "roller coaster ride" of stress levels that rise and fall so frequently that eventually the body stops being able to relax easily.

When a person is under stress the hormone cortisol is released by the adrenal glands and cortisol levels are considered to be a reliable marker for showing response to stressful situations.

Levels which normally start high in the morning, decline steadily throughout the day and the rate of this fall is believed to be linked to feelings of well being, with steeper drops indicating better health.

Long-term elevated cortisol levels have been linked to extreme tiredness, depression, a weaker immune system, osteoporosis and even cancer.

For the study the UCLA researchers questioned 60 married parents on their satisfaction with their marriage and how busy they were at work.

The team also collected saliva samples from participants in the early morning, late morning, afternoon and evening to measure cortisol levels and they found that women in happy marriages were shown to have stronger declines of the hormone than those in less blissful unions.

But for men the state of their relationship with their wife appeared to have little influence on levels of cortisol, which were far more affected by how busy they felt at work.

The research is published in the American Psychological Association journal Health Psychology.