Relationships October 13, 2016
Do you feel as if you and your female friends are the only ones dealing with the occasional panic attack? Well, you might be onto something. Scientists recently conducted research in order to find out exactly why women appear more susceptible to stress in their lives than men.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Westminster City Council have published a study in the journal Brain and Behavior that analyzed 48 previous reviews of the prevalence of anxiety disorders among different groups. What they unearthed was shocking.
According to Motto, not only are anxiety disorders common – with estimates that they affect between 3.8 and 25 percent of the world population – but they frequently affect women in particular. It is estimated that 5.2 to 8.7 percent of women in the world suffer from anxiety.
“Women are almost twice as likely to be affected as men, with sex differences persisting over time and across high and low resource settings,” researchers noted. It was also found that those who suffered most were young adults, men and women with chronic diseases and individuals from Euro/Anglo backgrounds.
But the true question remains: Why are women prone to suffer from overwhelming anxiety while many men remain relatively unfazed? Research revealed that women have twice as much to worry about. The New York Times noted that “Child care and other forms of unpaid labor can certainly stress a gal out, plus there’s the little fact that we get paid less than men for the same work. We also navigate these obnoxious waters with a brain that some neuroscientists believe is optimized for analytical and intuitive thinking, allowing us to anticipate (and worry about) future risks.”
And that’s not even the end of it. Other experts believe that because women have a tendency to multitask, as well as “use more of their actual brain than men do,” which means that women physically require more sleep than men. But thanks to those additional stresses and inherent brain chemistry, women don’t sleep as well as men.
In addition, experts from Harvard Health Publications found that women are more likely to suffer from major depression, season affective disorder, bipolar disorder and chronic depression. The authors of this study concluded that these factors often encourage women to turn to alcohol.
Although more and more women are now choosing to “have it all” with a career and a family, it seems that they are still affected by the wage and parental gaps that glaringly exist between men and women. With additional stresses such as unaffordable child care, lack of sleep and a proclivity for mental illness, it is no wonder that women are experiencing anxiety at a far greater rate than their male counterparts.
