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Women and Stress Most everyone has an opinion about how men and women handle stress differently. And all you have to do is to look at the behavior of males and females, and you can find evidence for your hypotheses, regardless of what you believe. But are there real differences? According to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, when you consider the broad implications of hundreds of studies on stress (human, rodent, and primate studies), it is possible to begin to form a hypothesis that females don't respond quite the same way to stress as males do. Lead UCLA researcher, Shelley E. Taylor, concludes, "Men and women do have some reliably different responses to stress." The primary different seems to be that men isolate themselves and become angry, while women reach out to care for others or to gather friends close to themselves. After a disasterous day at the office, a woman is more likely to sit down with her children, hug them, make contact with them. Or she will reach out to her friends, particularly other females. A man is more likely to go off by himself and become easily angered, likely showing hostility to the very people to whom he is emotionally close. Anthropologists are likely to have a field day with this hypothesis, suggesting that in times of trouble early females made sure the family unit was cared for and protected at the family hearth. Males, on the other hand, allowed their anger to rise, thereby making themselves more aggressive and better able to defend the family. Whatever the early derivatives of this behavior, the impact in the modern world are significant. Anger displayed at the end of the day is virtually useless, and in fact will probably have a negative impact on family cohesiveness. Whereas reaching out to someone else to care for their needs could serve as a good distractor from a difficult stress-filled day. And talking with friends would be a good way to process the stressors one faced during the day. At the same time, if women consistently
use this strategy for managing stress, they fail to deal directly with
the stressors they are facing. Perhaps this is a situation where both men
and women could learn something from each other. Rarely is a strategy most
effective in all situations.
Janelle Barlow, Author
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