Women and Tears

Have you ever wondered why you feel like crying during a well-executed AT&T advertisement, even when you know you're being emotionally manipulated? Do you think you cry more often because you were socialized growing up to feel that emotions mattered and women are more naturally care-givers? Sure, society certainly plays a role in how we develop, but perhaps more importantly, women are, biologically wired to cry more. We have higher levels of the hormone, prolactin, which controls, among other things, the development of tear glands. That means that we are 4 times more likely to cry than men. And our tear glands are even constructed differently from men. According to Dr. William Frey, who studies tears, when men cry 73 percent of the time tears do not fall down their cheeks  they get misty-eyed. Tears, on the other hand, almost always flow down women's cheeks.

Are there times at work when you've cried and you wish you had not?

The Female Brain At Work

I've always thought of myself as a pretty well informed progressive woman. But reading Louann Brizendines, The Female Brian, my sense of self-awareness was blown right out of the water. We are all aware of the prevailing viewpoint that men and women respond to events in different ways the whole men-from-mars-women-from-venus dichotomy. But I was unaware of the profound neurological and biochemical differences between the genders. After all, I came of age in the feminist 70s, when we were meant to understand and spread the word that women were not inferior to and therefore, more or less, the same as -- men.

According to Brizendine, The female and male brains process stimuli, hear, see, sense, and gauge what others are feeling in different ways. Our distinct female and male brain operating systems are mostly compatible and adept, but they perform and accomplish the same goals and tasks using different circuits Under a microscope or an fMRI scan, the differences between male and female brains are revealed to be complex and widespread. In the brain centers for language and hearing, for example, women have 11 percent more neurons than men. The principal hub of both emotion and memory formation the hippocampus is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This means that women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression.

Have you ever had an experience when you knew that a negotiation was falling apart because you correctly read the emotional character of the room but your male colleagues thought you were over-reacting?

Aging With Grace

FIGURING OUT THE CHALLENGE of aging with grace is a tricky business. If you had to bet who was happier with their body, a 40-year-old woman or a 50-year-old woman, which would you guess? Most of us would immediately assume the 40-year-old. And we'd be wrong. How we handle aging with grace is different for each of us. But some information I picked up from a book called The 100 Simple Secrets of The Best Half of Life, What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It gave me new insight into how I could think about the aging process

What appealed to me about the book was the notion that I could use objective scientific data to help me improve the quality of my life and handle aging with grace.

One chapter in particular resonated with me. According to a 2000 study, People become about 1 percent more likely to hold a positive image of their bodies with each year of age after forty.

I know this is true. After years of highlighting my hair, when I turned 40 I was so uncomfortable about being old I dyed my hair jet black. God, what a disaster!

Aging with grace was the last thing on my mind. What I didn't have the perspective to know at 40 was that our fifth decade is unquestionably the toughest to get through with any sense of physical self-esteem. Everything begins to sag and lose its vibrancy

Our 40s are the official no-man's-land of age, neither old nor young. It's confusing: should we cling to trying to look like we're still in our 30s or should we give it up, join our elders and embrace the challenge of aging with grace

I think why we get comfortable with aging that we become happier with our body image as we get older. We discover that it's not all or nothing. At 50 we know we're actually more than half way through the game and that pretty much no matter what we do, we look our age (even if we're lucky and we look like a good 47)

Other stuff, like staying alive, begins to matter much more than whether our bodies are hot.

There's a middle way. Like most things, it's not a black and white choice. We can do the things that matter for our health, such as exercising more, stopping smoking, or reducing our caffeine intake, and manage the things we do for pure vanity.

It's Body Over Mind

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? OK - the bad news. Every eight years you become twice as likely to die. Yup, you heard me. I came across this cheery little fact (derived from insurance companies' actuarial tables) buried in an article describing how solidly middle-aged people are now being marketed products for "middle youth."

But no matter what euphemism marketers use, the very hard truth is that in the remaining 28 years of life that I'll be lucky to live if I live to an American woman's average life expectancy of 79.5 I can also expect that the odds of my dying will increase dramatically the older I get.

Whoa. Did I just use a specific number of years to define how much longer I might have to be on the planet? And a number less than the 30 years my husband and I have already spent together?  What a seriously sobering thought.

Even though I usually find it helpful to think clearly about statistical probabilities, this one is a doozy. But instead of curling up in a ball and freaking out, or ignoring the reality of it, I decided that naming that hard number was, in fact, and somewhat counterintuitively, deeply clarifying. It drove home for me how important it is to take as good care of myself as possible, so I can savor all that I can of the remainder of my time here (and maybe beat the odds by a few bonus years).

Ready for the good news now?

The last few decades don't have to be bummer. There really are things that can improve the quality of those years, and they are neither expensive nor daunting.

The Alliance for Aging Research recommends lots of physical movement. Their data indicate that activity represents the greatest promise for reducing the risks of chronic disease. They project that 160 million Americans - half the country and more than half the adults - will suffer from some kind of chronic illness by 2040. So it looks like most of us need to get out there and move.  Right now.

In the context of my recent statistical wake-up call, I thought it might be helpful to review a few of the known and obvious things that exercise will do for you:

• Improve your circulation, which will help your blood pressure and help prevent further heart disease. For a healthy heart, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends at least 15 minutes of aerobic exercise at least three days per week, during which you should reach a heart rate of at least 60 percent of your maximal rate (which is 220 minus your current age). And walking 30 minutes each day is a great start.
• Build your bones and help prevent osteoporosis. In a recent study of women aged 50 to 70, the women who strength-trained gained 1 percent more bone density in the hip and spine, while the group that did not lift weights lost 2.5 percent bone density. Those who trained had strength increases between 35 percent and 76 percent above the control group, and improvements in physical balance averaging 14 percent.
• Help keep your weight under control, which will help prevent or control Type II diabetes.

And the benefits of exercise are not purely physical. Scientific American Mind reported in their June/July issue that according to Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University, "physical exercise might be a very effective way to ameliorate age-related memory decline."

Need more encouragement? A fifth of the runners who finished the Boston Marathon this year were 50 or older, and the 50-and-up entrants are growing by 10 percent a year. I've never run farther than five miles at any one time, but I'm thinking about setting a goal to run the New York City Marathon in 2008. Why not? Time's short.

Is Lack of Sleep Making Your Kid Stupid?

My youngest child is slogging through the most sleepless year of her life. She’s a senior in high school trying to keep her head above water – like all kids her age, she’s got SATs and college applications and extracurricular activities and regular old classes. It’s intense and unrelenting and robs her of sleep every single night. I often wake up to find her light still on, the poor kid asleep with her books open. After five or six hours of sleep, she gamely tumbles down to breakfast and is out the door before 7 a.m. to get to school.

And she’s no different from most high school kids across the country. According to a recent piece by Po Bronson in New York Magazine, it’s a national crisis.

Even though most parents think their kid is getting enough sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation, "60 percent of high school students report extreme daytime sleepiness."  And in a different study, some 25 percent of kids believe their grades have dropped because of a lack of sleep.

Bronson reports that from elementary school through high school, kids now get about an hour a night less of sleep than they did in the 1970s, when I was in high school.

"Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults."

A survey of 7,000 high school students conducted by Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota, and a different study by Mary Carskadon of Brown University of 3,000 Rhode Island high school students, found that kids who got A's averaged about 15 minutes more sleep per night of sleep than the kids who got B’s and B students averaged about 11 minutes more of sleep per night than those who got C’s. Who knows how much is cause and how much is effect, but that is a very big deal.

Some school systems are getting smart about sleep deprivation and starting school days later. In Edina, Minnesota, the results were mind blowing. "In the year preceding the time change" from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., according to Bronson, "math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. 'Truly flabbergasting,' said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results."

A school district in Lexington, Kentucky, that moved their start time an hour later was able to report a 16 percent reduction in teenage car accidents.

I knew my daughter wasn’t getting enough sleep but I never imagined how much it might be costing her. Instead of tutors, all our kids might need to excel is a little more sleep. How refreshing that something so elemental has such a big benefit.   Too bad I hadn’t read the piece before my daughter’s recent battery of SATs.

The Fountain of Youth Index

How much time or effort do you put into trying to maintain a youthful appearance? If you’re anything like me, you probably regularly add things to your inventory, but rarely remove them. How many partially used tubes or bottles of different skin potions, each promising brightening or tightening benefits, do you have in your medicine cabinet? How many torn-out-but-unused new fitness routine tear sheets litter your desk? I don’t know about you, but I’m increasingly interested in simplifying it all.

Nora Ephron first got me thinking about maintenance in her very funny book, "I Feel Bad About My Neck." “Maintenance," she wrote, "is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food….there's Status Quo Maintenance - the things you have to do daily, or weekly, or monthly, just to stay more or less even.

"And then there's the maintenance you have to do monthly, or yearly, or every couple of years or so - maintenance I think of as Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock.”

I’m not insensitive to expense, but for years in the area of “personal maintenance” I had more of an ostrich approach. I knew what I spent, more or less; I just didn’t like to think about it too consciously. I also knew that there were better uses of my time than sitting in the hair salon chair - but hey, it felt good.

So I decided to create a metric to help me calibrate my overall expenditure, what I call the Fountain of Youth Index. And in a national survey I conducted about the issues we face as we age, I asked 500 people to total up how much time and money they spend monthly on the following: exercise classes, gyms, personal training, exercise/sports equipment, exercise clothing, massage/bodywork, makeup, waxing, anti-aging products, cellulite creams, facials, dermatologic procedures (microdermabrasion, Botox, fillers, laser treatments, etc.) skin creams, shampoos, conditioners, salon styling and dyeing.

I tallied the responses; clustering them according to the total amount of money and time the survey respondents spent making themselves look and feel physically better.

This resulted in four basic lifestyle groups – what I call the Skeptics, the Doers, the Followers, and the Perservers.  You can take a mini-version of the survey here and see where you stand.

There is no “correct” approach. If you take the quiz, I hope you’ll have fun and maybe start thinking about time and money management in a slightly different, clearer way.

What Happened to Wellness?

This month more than 4,000 people, primarily health care professionals, will attend the 15th Annual International Congress on Anti-aging Medicine and Regenerative Biomedical Technologies - at which more than 400 exhibitors will be trying to sell them devices and drugs and therapies. When the organization held its first meeting in 1993, 12 physicians participated. The motto of the group is "Adding quantity is not enough: learn to enhance the quality of your patients' lives."

As the organization states on its Web site, "in 1990 it was nearly unthinkable for a respected scientist to suggest that physiologic aging metabolism could be manipulated, slowed, or reversed with drug or biomedical interventions.

"Today anti-aging biosciences are the rage, with great advances in nanotechnology, genomic research, bio-identical HRT, gene therapy, stem cells, cloning, biomarker testing of aging, and human augmentation."

I think we are at a particularly pivotal and exciting point in anti-aging medicine. With two Type I diabetics in my extended family, I emphatically support leading-edge research that explores ways to eliminate debilitating and life-threatening disease.

A hundred years ago those members of my family would be dead; I pray that a cure might be discovered to eliminate the risk to my children. Medical innovation is a thing of wonder to a layperson like me. I am in awe of the potential of science to repair cataracts, or replace hips and hearts. So many people's lives are so profoundly improved or saved.

But on the consumer level, with products increasingly targeting non-chronically-ill people, I think the exploding anti-aging market also has a troubling side - our desire for quick fixes.

Last week at my local bookstore I counted 36 different books with Anti-Aging in their title. And another 21 with Stay Young in theirs. Many of the books used the word secret in their titles.  Many of the titles suggest 24-hour turn-arounds or quick, simple-step fixes for the health issues that plague our country.

In the quest for health it feels like the balance has shifted uncomfortably to anti-age as apposed to pro-health. Doing the proven things that are good for your long-term physical well-being - the duh things like maintaining a regular exercise program and limiting refined carbohydrates - require effort and time.

Wellness in its most inclusive form must embrace both technological innovation as well as personal involvement.

Are You Aging Yourself by Trying to Look Young?

Do any of you think there is anything at all odd about the following? "It's all about freedom of expression.....ask your doctor about BOTOX Cosmetic."

The advertising copy goes on to read:

"Don't hold back!  Express it all!  Express yourself by asking your doctor about BOTOX Cosmetic."

I'm not entirely certain what KOOL-AID the copywriters of this ad were drinking, but BOTOX, by paralyzing facial muscles, does exactly the opposite of allowing a person to "express" herself.

The May issue of Vogue ran a piece by Marina Rust with the title and sub-headline, "Criminally chic. Could you be guilty of crimes against beauty?  And if you were indeed a full-blown beauty victim, would you know it?"

Rust wrote the following:

"'You know what's weird?' says my husband, Ian. ‘Everyone looks the same age now.  Girls in their 20s are putting stuff in their face that makes them look 50.'...It's true.  Everyone is starting to look the same.  Six months ago, photos ran of the beleaguered Miss USA standing beside Miss Teen USA. I couldn't tell them apart.  Pretty, but a dime a dozen. They could have both been working a car show."

Rust and her husband were on to an essential contemporary truth.  Last year I had the good fortune to attend a meditation lecture by Tibetan monk, Sakyong Mipham, and the front row of the lecture was filled by a group of blonde women.

I guessed they ranged in age from 45 to 65, but they all had had similar cosmetic surgical procedures, which ended up making all of them look roughly the same age. As a culture, we've come to expect that women in their mid-40s through their mid-60s are the ones who have lifts and injections, and we usually notice when someone has had something "done." So the net result is that everyone ends up looking the same 60ish.

Natasha Singer published a piece in the New York Times recently in which she detailed the investments three women made in the pursuit of looking their "best" - and by best they meant as young as possible.

The women ranged in age from 47 to 57 and spent between $1,000 and $6,500 a month on their maintenance. And one of the women had spent $60,000 for a presumably one-time-only tummy tuck, thigh, chin, neck, and eyelid lift, plus arm liposuction.

I also just read that 35-year-old Jennifer Garner has been signed to be the new poster girl for Neutrogena's Anti-Oxidant Age Reverse treatment line. If 35 is the new starting point for when a women is beginning to look unacceptably old, no wonder the pressure to "express" yourself has gotten so warped.

Can Your iPod Help You Lose Weight, Reduce Your Blood Pressure, and Alleviate Pain?

The last thing Steve Jobs needs is more hype, but there still may be a market that he hasn't fully tapped. All of us are intuitively aware that music can alter behavioral patterns -- who hasn't experienced that wonderful moment when a soothing lullaby stops a baby's cries or the rousing feeling we get when listening to John Williams' Star Wars score?

I recently discovered that there was an organized field of health care called music therapy. According to the American Music Therapy Association, programs designed by trained professionals and specifically tailored to medical issues (pain or stress management, for instance) can improve the quality of a person's physical, emotional, or cognitive health. And since 1994 Medicare has covered many of these treatments.

But what I find really exciting is that a slew of new studies are providing hard scientific validation of our anecdotal insights.

1.    Music and Weight Loss

Christopher Capuano, the director of the school of psychology at Farleigh Dickinson University, reported that "exercising can be difficult for someone who is obese. Walking to music seemed to really motivate women in our study to get out there and stick with the commitment they made." As part of an overall weight reduction program for women who were overweight to moderately obese (BMIs ranged from 26.1 to 41.7) that included dieting, aerobic exercise, and participation in group meetings, his team also gave a portable CD player to half the women to use when they walked. The other half did not walk to music. The women who played music lost significantly more weight and fewer of them dropped out of the program.

2.    Music and Pain

Dr. Mark Liponis, the medical director of the Canyon Ranch spa, reports in his upcoming book, Ultra-Longevity, on a Korean study that found that music therapy actually reduced the pain of fractures in people with broken legs. He also cites a study in the journal Clinical Research in Cardiology of heart patients who listened to music while undergoing uncomfortable catheterization -- their anxiety levels were significantly reduced if music was played during the procedure.

3.    Music and Blood Pressure

Mark Jude Tramo, a musician and neuroscientist at the Harvard Medical School, is exploring how the biology of music has benefits far beyond entertainment. According to Tramo, "one study showed that the heart muscle of people exercising on treadmills didn't work as hard when people listened to music as it did when they exercised in silence." Other studies have shown that patients in intensive cardiac care units where music is played need lower doses of blood pressure-lowering drugs than patients in units where no music is played.

I personally use a device called Resperate that coordinates my breathing with musical sequences as an aide in controlling my blood pressure.

4.    Music and Alzheimer's

One of the most active areas of research is in using music as a tool to help soothe Alzheimer's patients. A month-long music therapy study at the University of Miami School of Medicine discovered that blood levels of melatonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine -- all natural mood-enhancing substances -- rose significantly in all patients during the study. The participants in the study slept better and became more cooperative and active.

5.  Music and Cancer

According to the Ayurvedic practitioner Pratima Raichur, "preliminary studies at Ohio State University have found evidence that the primordial sounds of the Veda [spoken Hindu scriptures] decreased growth of cancer cells in rats."

A study of adults -- humans, that is! -- undergoing highly toxic high-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation, conducted at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's Integrative Medicine Service demonstrated that trained musical therapists could significantly reduce patient anxiety.

When my father was dying of multiple myeloma, a form of bone-marrow cancer, I made sure to supply him with recordings of his favorite music. Had I known then about the benefits of professionally administered music therapy, I surely would have made use of their skills as well. I can tell you one thing -- I'm going to start listening to my iPod in the gym with a new set of ears.

Women As Heroines of Their Own Lives

This month, Anne exchanges email with Nora Ephron, film director and author of the recent play Imaginary Friends.

Anne Before you became a world-famous director of film comedies like Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, but after you graduated from being the most famous female journalist of your generation, you were a screenwriter. You wrote the movie Silkwood about a real-life corporate whistle-blower. So when Time named three women Persons of the Year for their whistle-blowing, I thought of Karen Silkwood. What attracted you to that story?

Nora What made Karen Silkwood a movie was that she was such an unexpected sort of whistle-blower. She was a real piece of work: complicated, difficult, and a bad candidate for industrial espionage, which is what she was engaged in at the time of her death. Sometimes the most unlikely people turn out to be heroes. That's Karen's story, in one of those one-sentence nutshells that studios love so much, and it's what made me want to write about her.

Anne Would any of the recent real-life whistle-blowing stories make a good film?

Nora So far, I haven't read anything that would make me think that their stories were movies as opposed to television movies, which are, of course, different things. Compare Karen Silkwood with Coleen Rowley [of the FBI], for in-stance, whose whistle-blowing is consistent with the way that she has lived her entire life. From a screenwriter's point of view, you don't have the sort of character development that you've got with Karen Silkwood.

Anne In 1996, when you gave the commencement address at Wellesley College, you admonished the young women to be the heroines of their lives. What did you mean?

Nora I didn't mean "heroines" in an epic sense. I meant heroines as protagonists, not supporting actors in the story of their own lives -- women who understand that they have choices and who have enough advantages that there's no one but themselves to blame if things don't turn out the way that they'd hoped. Someone very smart once wrote that the hardest thing for women to give up when they begin to achieve equality will be the habit of an alibi.

Anne We're not postfeminist -- we're post-alibi! You've worked in male-dominated professional worlds: journalism during the 1960s and 1970s and Hollywood during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. How did those fields and eras differ in allowing women to be heroines?

Nora Journalism today is very different for women. When I started out at the New York Post in 1963, there were only two women reporters at the New York Times -- well, maybe three, but the point is that there were hardly any. The movie business has also changed dramatically in the past 10 years. There are many, many more women executives, producers, and agents. And while the number of women directors is small on a percentage basis, there are many more women directing.

Anne Given that you don't make "big" movies, is it more difficult than it was a decade ago for you to make the films that you want to make?

Nora It was hard 10 years ago, and it's even harder now. A studio would much rather make a $110 million action movie with a big star than a $10 million movie with a little one. I wish this weren't also true for the theater -- but it is. Bigger and dumber is better. And it's even true for publishing.

Anne Because big profits in blockbuster-sized tranches of cash are the obsession of the entertainment conglomerates.

Nora The dirty little secret of the movie business is that there are no profits. In fact, italicize that: There are no profits. The entire movie business is a Ponzi scheme that's set up to allow a small number of people to live lavishly. And those people -- many of whom went into the business because they wanted to make good movies -- after a few years, they just want to keep their jobs. They're sort of like Al Gore: They want to stay in office so badly that they've forgotten why they wanted the job in the first place.

Anne Al Gore syndrome: Preventing that chronic illness is something that we all need to do in our professional lives.