By Marla Paul, Content provided by Revolution Health Group

"I told you not to put those cans in the garbage! Now it's too heavy to lift," I growled at my husband. He raised his eyebrow at me - his normally pleasant-tempered wife, who was doing a pretty good imitation of a witch. Later, I groused at my teenage daughter for leaving umpteen pairs of shoes all over the house.

Why was I so cranky this morning? When I sat down in my office to work, it hit me. Tethered to my computer due to mounting deadlines, I hadn't seen a friend for weeks.

I should know better. After all, I wrote a book about the importance of making time for pals. But when several called to have lunch, I put them off. "Let's wait till next month. I'm crazed right now," I said.

It seems logical enough: Work really hard for a month, then reward yourself with coffee with a buddy. But friends aren't meant to be enjoyed sparingly, nor are they a special-occasion luxury. If you want to live a long and happy life, you have to wedge them in.
Friendship's benefits

Study after study shows that people who have close confidants have feistier immune systems, stronger cardiovascular health and less depression and anxiety - not to mention the fact that they have more fun.

Spending time with a buddy should be a no-brainer. But busy women, logging monster hours at work and maybe racing home to make dinner and ferry a kid to soccer practice, often shove friendship down to the bottom of the list.

Chris Essex, 52, co-director of the Center for Work and the Family in Rockville, Md., doesn't buy the excuse that women are too tired to see pals. "If you have the right friends, they give you energy," she says. "Friends are a good stress-management tool. Busy people need a place to let their hair down and vent."

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., 60, a psychologist, inspirational speaker and author, is no stranger to a crammed life. Zigzagging across the country for speaking dates, Borysenko, who wrote Inner Peace for Busy Women: Balancing Work, Family, and Your Inner Life (Hay House, 2005), sometimes struggles to find inner peace herself: "I start to feel deprived. I start to whine," she says.

"I have the most loving husband in the world; however, he's not a woman," says Borysenko. "Men want to solve the problem. A woman knows you just want to let off steam."

So after several weeks of back-to-back business travel, she clocked out at 12:30 one Friday afternoon and met a gal pal for lunch and then bargain shopping at T.J. Maxx.

So how can you carve out time for pals? You have to put a date on the calendar.

"If it's not scheduled, it doesn't happen. Otherwise you're this cliche in the mall saying 'We must get together for lunch' " and never doing it, says Essex.

Pencil in a weekly or monthly get-together. Essex has a sacrosanct breakfast date with a friend every Saturday. They follow their ritual meal - a veggie omelet and wheat toast - with an hourlong walk, so there's plenty of time to chat. The Saturday meeting means "we don't have to schedule it over and over," she says.

"I try to do the things I have to do anyway with a friend. I have to eat, so I may as well do it with a friend. I have to exercise, so I do it with a friend," Essex explains.

Toni Kayumi, 43, a marketing manager and on-air host for a radio station in Fort Wayne, Ind., meets one buddy for a weekly Pilates or yoga class and walks her dog with another friend and her pup. A reformed workaholic, Kayumi learned to make girlfriends a priority when she realized how much happier she felt with them in her life.

Her husband of two and a half years follows suit: On Thursday nights, he plays basketball with his buddies while she hits a restaurant with hers.

"It's important to add balance to your life and not forget who you were before you got married," she says. With an adoption in her future, Kayumi is already hatching plans to retain her "friend time" once the baby arrives. She's found a YMCA with child care so she and her husband can continue working out with their respective friends.

New York-based magazine editor Joanna Goddard, 27, sometimes toils 50 hours a week at her desk and then races to work-related events at night. In her limited free time, she multitasks to see friends, often inviting them to run errands with her. "We'll just walk around stores, have coffee and buy a bath mat. It sounds really boring, but it's fun," she says.

Goddard also watches her favorite TV show, "Project Runway," with a group of similarly obsessed pals.

"We'll bring wine and go over to our friend's house, watch the show, then hang out," she says. "It's nice to have a show or a games night where there's an activity. Then, instead of just hearing the details of someone's life, you have something else going on. It brings out their personalities more. You have something else in common.

"If you can't hang out with people for three weeks, when you see them, you feel like you're just reporting on your life," Goddard adds. "It's 'What's your update?' and then you leave. You start losing things you have in common. It doesn't feel like you have stuff you're doing together."

Group get-togethers also allow Goddard to catch up with a lot of people at once.

More strategies for staying close

Even if you can't see each other as often as you'd like, keeping track of people's lives and sharing the details of yours is critical to staying close.

"E-mail is really a godsend," says Harriet Mosatche, 57, vice president of a nonprofit agency in New York. She even zips e-mails to women on her block.

"I have a number of friends who live near me that I don't get to see very much because I don't have a lot of time or our schedules are different, but in between we e-mail each other," Mosatche says.

"I think it's really important to keep up with little things, even if they're short notes. To me it's a way of saying, 'I really am thinking about you.' I feel that when I get the note. That way when you do get together, it's not like this long time has gone by. They know what's going on in your life."

Essex regularly updates 25 good friends with a global e-mail. "I don't have time to write them each their own little version," she says.

Impromptu gifts are another way to remind friends you're thinking of them. Cheryl Cooper, 49, an ophthalmologist and mother of three from Highland Park, Ill., recently picked up a sunflower-shaped cake pan for a friend who likes to bake and a ladybug pillow for a pal's daughter with a ladybug collection.

Cooper has a birthday and anniversary book to remind her of special dates in her friends' lives. "I turn the pages every week," she says. During the drive to her office, she dons a headset and chats with girlfriends.

Busy women say they need people who accept their limitations. "My dearest friends understand I can't always get back to them and might not talk to them for a couple of weeks. They understand it's just my lifestyle," Cooper says.

Ditto for Borysenko. "I make it pretty clear in the beginning that I'm the kind of friend [who], if they need me, will be there in a heartbeat, but I don't keep in touch regularly," she says. "They know it's not personal. People recognize the effort that I do make."

That includes a spontaneous phone call to invite a friend to meet her at the nail salon. "I'll call a girlfriend and say, 'I'm going to the nail salon at 4:30. Want to meet me there?' We'll sit in adjacent pedicure chairs and visit."