There Is A Gender Stress Gap And Not All Men Get It
Stress happens to all of us, but women have it worse than men. Here are effective ways to cope.
One of the things my dad told me about stress is that it’s all in your head. It’s obvious of course but it also implies that how we deal with stress is all internal as well. If you can control your stressors and how you respond to them, you have better odds of not being stressed.
It’s a simple solution but one thing that came to my attention was that researchers found links between cortisol — which is caused by high-stress levels — and brain shrinkage and impaired memory.
More importantly, though is that this effect is more notable in women than in men.
Naturally, there is more research that’s coming out on effective ways of handling this stress and reducing tension. But this phenomenon reminds me so much of what the self-improvement industry has become and that others on this platform have been pointing out.
Namely, that female writers are looking at prominent white men in the self-improvement industry and saying they just don’t get it.
In this instance, they are more correct as men can’t fundamentally understand what women are going through in these stressful situations.
So to help us men actually get it, here is what I’ve learned.
First, The Basics
To understand how we experience stress differently, it’s important to know how stress affects our brains in the first place. And a lot of that has to do with what our brains have become over the thousands of years.
When humanity first existed, our brains were primitive and as we advanced through the ages, a lot of the primitive parts of our brain remained intact and still do to this day.
It’s those particular parts that are now susceptible to things that cause us stress. Things like negative emotions and mental fatigue.
Another notable factor is how quickly our lives have become. With everything happening so quickly all the time, this creates a lot of stress for ourselves. After all, our brain is unable to keep up with everything that’s happening.
Combine all of that with life throwing all kinds of things at us and the fact we have too little time — and resources — to address every single thing, we get a sense that we have no control over our lives. That continues to drive more stress onto ourselves.
This is where my dad’s advice can come in handy because a lot of this is all perceived within ourselves. We are creating our own stress. So if we have more control over ourselves and how we handle stressors, we have more control.
But again, that’s not so simple. And for women, this isn’t the right piece of advice. It’s akin to the idea of telling someone who is depressed to smile more. It’s tone-deaf and it shows that the person offering help really doesn’t get it.
Dr. Sood described various traps in his book Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century that we can mentally fall into. Three notable ones are:
- Focus problems — with so many things to do that demand our attention, our minds now tend to wander more and thoughts pile up. This leads to us being unhappy as we spend too much time distracted than solving our problems.
- Fear — Fear creates a negative bias as our brain records that information since something bad happened to us. This is the reason we pay more attention to bad news than good. It’s also why we remember bad things more vividly than good. Because we’re overwhelming ourselves in negativity, we’re more unhappy and we create more stress.
- Fatigue — Many parts of our body can keep functioning on low energy but our brain isn’t one of them. If you’re working hard, you need sleep. If you’re doing a boring or intense activity, your brain is going to get tired. Unfortunately, our hustle culture pushes the ideology to work harder and not care about our own mental health. This causes us to be more tired, more overwhelmed, and more stressed out.
Why Women Feel The Stress More Than Men
What I said above are things that can happen to all of us regardless of gender and it’s here where self-improvement gurus tend to focus their efforts on handling stress.
And broadly speaking, that advice does work. However, that advice might not be the best for women — especially midlife women. Especially if the advice is offered by men.
The reason for that is that men’s brains are different. And by extension, women who aren’t midlife are in different living situations in most cases.
Midlife women have it the worse because they are dealing with a triple threat to their brains. And women in general are vulnerable to strain and pressure more so than men.
Women’s brains by nature are more sensitive to stressors and a perceived lack of control. Their limbic areas — the part that controls emotions and memories — are incredibly active. This is the reason women have a better memory about past pains and slights than men do.
Worse, women can stew over these things again and again and struggle to let go of those things. This results in the brain developing more negative emotions, creating a negative bias which results in more stress.
On top of this, midlife women have it worse because of parenting. Even though society today is shifting less away from gender roles, they are still lingering. As such, women are still tasked with keeping the house in order with men only now maybe contributing a little to it.
Between looking after the house and parental instincts kicking in, there are higher odds that all of these things pile up into fear, focus problems, and fatigue that women are just dwelling in stressful situations.
While men on the other hand are utterly oblivious to it.
Men Also Process Stress Differently
Another point where men just don’t get it is the fact we process stress in different ways. Tension doesn’t play out in isolation either, it affects how everyone in the world interprets the world.
This also results in how conflicts get started. For example, have you ever had this happen to you?
If you’re a woman, think about the time you had a disagreement or an annoyance at work. When you talked about this with a man in any fashion, did you notice his eyes glaze over and him saying something like “At least it’s over, how about you drop it and talk to them about it tomorrow?”
How did that make you feel? Hurt? Angry? Dismissed? Probably. And in some cases those emotions can lead you to turning the conversation into either a heated argument or you retreating to mull it over and deal with it yourself.
That scenario happens all too often and a lot of that has to do with the fact that depending on your gender, we interpret stress in very different ways. It’s this disconnect that leads to boilerplate remedies that are too broad that self-improvement gurus push. It leads to these conversations where one person is trying to destress and the other doesn’t understand what’s going on.
There are more studies that are looking at this thankfully. One notable one at Yale University School of Medicine found that when imagining a personalized, highly stressful event, men were processing it with action and planning-oriented parts of their brains.
Women on the other hand were using cognition and emotional processing.
The second part of the study looked at anxiety and when they were experiencing anxiety, the parts where women’s brains were active, those same parts were inactive in men.
What this means is women are more caught up processing stress and are more prone to mulling it over than men ever would.
This behaviour would also explain that when helping people men are the ones who are more likely to offer advice or something tangible like money or physical help. Women on the other hand would focus on emotional support.
Ironically, what both genders want in the end is actually emotional support.
How Can We Bridge The Gap?
Because of how our brains work, both genders perceive what’s stressful differently. What this results in is that when someone is stressed or tense, the other isn’t always motivated to offer support.
This is especially the case if they’re thinking “If I were in this situation, this wouldn’t be a big deal.”
So the question really becomes how do we get people onto the same page? Here is how to do that:
- First get them to listen. Listening results in validating the other feelings. Even saying something like “you’re taking this in a rough way” can be validating.
- Second, explain that you get defensive when they dismiss your experiences. Devaluing anyone's emotions causes a lot of mental pain and can result in the person never coming to terms with certain emotions. As an adult, it gets worse as it causes more stress and again leads to arguments. The other person doesn’t feel seen or validated at all.
- Third, treat yourself with compassion. Women will have more self-critical tendencies than men. Especially around their inability to control emotions. Learning to negotiate conflicts all around will make things easier. This is on top of finding ways to deal with distractions, fears, and fatigue that your brain will naturally accumulate.
How To Have More Control Over Your Stress
There are thousands of articles out there on how to have more control over your stress. Some will encourage ideas like eating healthy, exercising regularly, and getting sleep. Those are good options of course, but there are some other strategies to consider.
- Give your brain RUM. No, not alcohol. It’s an acronym for Rest, Uplifting emotions, and Motivation. This is designed to bring your brain and head off fatigue. When you’re engaged in a task, spend 3 to 5 minutes every few hours to pause for those three things.
- Practice gratitude. Gratitude is something you don’t want to overdo, however there are ample of studies that show practicing a little bit of it can really help with your working memory and injecting more good vibes in there.
- Being present. Meditation is still a great stress-relief for many different reasons and it allows us to bring our attention to the here and now.
- Be kind. Even the nicest people are quick to judge, teaching yourself to not jump to conclusions — especially when someone is different from us — can help.
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