Are Women More Stressed Than Men? How to Tell and What to Do About It

The morning begins, innocently enough, perhaps the sun is shinning. You may not be as rested as you’d like, but, with a little coffee, you’ll make it through the day just fine. And then it starts. Your older child refuses to get out of bed. The coffee maker overflows onto the floor. Your husband had to leave for work early, leaving you to handle the baby and make the lunches and get the kids off to school. Just then, the baby starts screeming. She’s broken out in an unexplained rash. You’ll have to call in sick for the third time this month. To add insult to injury, on the way to the doctor’s office, there’s an unbelievable traffic jam.

Like a Boa Constrictor, it creeps up slowly but steadily. Wrapping itself around your body, it begins to squeeze harder and harder until you feel you’ll pop! Stress feels like that sometimes. One stressful moment is added to the next until, before long, you feel so constricted by the pressure, you completely lose control. Before you know it, you’re yelling, or saying things you don’t mean, or clutching a glass until it breaks, or driving unsafely.

“Well everyone has stress,” you rationalize “that’s just part of life.” That maybe true. But, unless you learn to cope with stress and find your inner “release valve” your mental and physical health will be seriously undermined. The National Women’s Health Information Center reports that “…stress triggers changes in our bodies and make us more likely to get sick.” It can also make existing conditions worse, including: sleeping disorders, headaches, intestinal irregularity, eating disorders, asthma, skin problems, infertility, anxiety and depression, among other conditions.

Are women more prone to stress than men? Well actually, research suggests that women have an advantage over men in that we have a “built-in hormonal stress barrier (oxytocin) that helps to calm us down in part by reducing the effects of the stress hormone, cortisol. It all works great when our systems are working in optimum order. However, this hormone can be interfered with by other hormonal fluctuations such as our menstral cycle, menopause, certain medications, and other factors, rendering the calming hormone ineffective.

We apparently have another advantage on our side. According to the most recent research, women have very different methods for coping with stress than men. Studies done at UCLA by Shelley Taylor, PhD and colleagues, suggest that the “fight-or-flight” response to stress is more common among men than women. Taylor posits that women, through evolutionary necessity, became the primary caregivers and that this fact has caused us to develop more of a “tend-and-befriend” response to stress. That hormone, oxytocin, again comes into play as it promotes the female behaviors of caring and nurturing babies and children. As for the “befriending” aspect of the equation, Taylor’s research (and probably your own as well) suggests that females seek out social support when stressed.

These two responses, “tending and befriending” can, in a perfect world, help prevent us from experiencing the ill effects of stress. Indeed, holding our baby and staring in her little eyes while she coos is a very rewarding and relaxing activity (I’ll bet just thinking about it puts a smile on your face.) Equally relaxing is having lunch and laughing with a best friend who is honestly supportive and thinks the world of us. But, what if the source of a woman’s stress is her screaming baby, or her defiant teenage daughter? And what if the friend we go to for support brings us down even further by blaming, complaining, admonishing us, or just being generally negative?

Can we women find a way to uncoil the boa constrictor of stress that threatens to choke off our very life? Yes, we can. And we must.

And, while we’d all like to have regular spa vacation retreats (or even a day at the spa) unfortunately, that’s not always possible. Also, we want to be able to notice the snake before it wraps itself around our limbs…to avert the stress before it has a chance to take hold. Here’s how:

1. Breathe deeply to the count of ten. Yes, your mother, father or teacher may have told you, years ago, to count to ten before you speak. They were partially right. But you don’t want to just count to ten fuming with the anger and frustration that caused the reaction in the first place. The key is to take slow, deep breathes. Breathe into your belly, allowing it to expand as it fills up with air for the first 5 counts, then breathe all the air out completely from count 5 to 10. Repeat in your mind the word, Peace, or any other word that evokes a calm feeling within you. Repeat as needed.

2. Humor. The other day, I was so mad at my daughter I just wanted to strangle her. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, so I got directly in her face and crossed my eyes and made a silly face. She erupted with laugher, and in a moment, so did I. The tension broke and suddenly the issue didn’t seem so important anymore.

Thank God for humor. It’s our natural built-in release valve. Have you ever been so angry when you were arguing with someone, that your use of the English language just eluded you? You suddenly forgot proper sentence structure and sounded like a 5 year old? Instead of trying to cover up your mistake, just let it come out funny. Crack a joke like, “I’m so angry I’m turning into a character from a bad alien movie,” and laugh at yourself. It’s likely he or she will begin laughing too.

Another trick, when you’re in bad traffic (I live in LA, so I know from bad traffic!) is to turn on the comedy station. If you’ve got satellite radio in your car, they’ve got some great comedy channels. If not, listen to your favorite amusing radio dj’s. If you’re at home with a baby and/or small children, get out a Dr. Seuss book and read it out loud to your kids.

You get the idea. Many of us have a tendency to take life so seriously. Learning to lighten up and laugh at life’s craziness will do wonders for relieving our day-to-day stress.

3. You got to move it, move it. Whatever physical activity makes you happy, do it. It may be dancing like a happy idiot to rock music in front of the mirror in your bathroom (this might have the double effect of making you laugh at yourself!) It may be taking a ballroom dancing class. It may be tennis. It may be running until you’re a big ball of sweat. Whatever it is, you must make time for it at least four times a week.

4. Pet your dog, cat or fish (just kidding about the fish, although staring at an aquarium works too.) Giving your pet love and attention is proven to lower blood pressure and reduce stress hormones. This might come under the category of “tending” with the added benefit of a pet’s unconditional love. Why do you think they bring therapy dogs into the hospital for patients to pet? Because it reduces stress, which help one heal faster. So, take a break in your busy day and pet your dog or cat.

5. Resist not. I believe the cause of much of our stress lies in our perception of events. In this department women might be at more of a disadvantage than men. Let’s face it, we’re just more sensitive than guys. We tend to take things more personally. And we tend to wish that, whatever the source of our stress, it would just go away. When we resist what is, we are increasing our stress response to it. Think about the last time you were late for an important meeting and were sitting in traffic. Think about the last time you walked into your child’s room only to find a hurricane had hit. Think about the last time your boss asked you to do something that involved hours of unpleasant work.

Rather than resisting the experience and having our stress hormones shoot through the roof, we can choose to experience it differently. We are in charge of our experience, not the conditions in our world, and we alone determine how we will experience it. We can face the experience head-on, breathe through it and say to ourselves in effect, “Okay, this is not as I’d like it to be right now, but it has no control over me. I refuse to let it effect my wellbeing. I refuse to make myself miserable over it. It will not kill me. It’s temporary. Moreover, I am determined to find something good about it!” You never know what untold good a situation will bring you unless you look for it. Which brings up my final point…

6. Gratitude. Either at the beginning of the day, or the end while you are getting ready for bed, make a mental list (or even better, write it down) of at least 10 things for which you are grateful. It can be as little as the tree in your yard that gives blessed shade on a hot day, or the food in your pantry, or the flower that just bloomed in your yard. It could be as big as that fact that your children are safe and in their beds, or that you have a job, or that you have your health. We often take for these things for granted.

It doesn’t have to be an act of thanking God, in particular, if you are not religious. You can simply express gratitude to the universe around you. Just the act of expressing gratitude is one of the best ways I know to release tension, flood your body with wellbeing and put you in the flow of more things to be grateful about.

There we have it. Following these six simple steps will have an immediate effect on your stress level and keep the snakes at bay. And, it will eventually change your relationship to stressful events by empowering you to have authority over your reaction to conditions in your life. Write these steps down on a piece of paper and put it in your purse. Stick them to the bathroom mirror. Put these tips anywhere you will see them to remind you of your power over the stressful moments in life.