Being married or having a stable partner reduces the production of cortisol, known as the stress hormone, as revealed by a study led by Dario Maestripieri, from the University of Chicago and published in the journalStress.
To reach this conclusion, Maestripieri and his colleagues worked with half a thousand students from the Chicago Business School, of whom around 40 percent of the men and 53 percent of the women were married or in stable relationships. . The mean age was 29 years for the 348 men and 27 years for the 153 women studied.
During the study, the subjects took a test that measured their financial abilities, delivering saliva samples before and after the game to analyze their hormone levels. To make the test more “stressful”, each student was told that this test “would have a very important impact on their professional future,” the authors explain.
Thus, the American researchers found that cortisol levels were elevated throughout the sample after performing the test, although women had higher increases than men. The experiment also lowered testosterone in men, though not in women. However, what surprised the scientists the most was that, regardless of gender,“single” people had higher-than-average cortisol increases.
“Marriage itself may be stressful, but it seems that it also makes it easier to cope with stressful situations in everyday life,” concludes Maestripieri.
