From the age of 25 women feel far more stress than men, research suggests. Photo / 123RF
If being too obliging is leading to a stressful life of people-pleasing, it’s time to add some tunnel-vision into your world view.
“They were so generous, we must send a card,” I say to my boyfriend Mike after dinner with his friends. He looks at me as if I’m mad. “Fine, if you want to, but I’ve never sent a thank-you card in my life.”
There are quite a few things Mike has managed to edit out from his life – sending birthday cards, sponsoring friends on charity runs, buying tickets to friends’ plays. He’s a great hands-on dad to his kids, and was the union rep at work for years, but he rarely worries about social niceties. In my heart I know he’s right – duty is a very different thing from generosity. But how does he get off scot-free?
On the whole men are good at prioritising the things that are truly important to them, says psychotherapist Phillip Hodson. They don’t sweat the small stuff or worry about being “selfish”. It may irritate their female partners, but it’s good for their long-term health.
“Women are nicer than men, and it’s not good for you,” Hodson tells me. “Men have defects for a reason. Those common male faults include deleting emotion from a crisis, tunnel-vision, not listening, declining to multitask, not minding the mess they make in order to complete a major job – these are defects, in many ways, but they’re also serviceable if you want to survive a period of high stress.”
Not bothering to send cards is a minor example of the different ways men and women manage stress, but actually this gender gap can have a huge impact on our lives. Women are more likely to self-report anxiety, stress and depression, in part because of juggling the responsibilities of work and caring.
From the age of 25, women feel far more stress than men, and this continues throughout their working lives, according to figures published by the Health and Safety Executive in 2016.
Worriers have weaker immune systems, making them more susceptible to infections. Although women have a longer life expectancy, we spend more of our life in ill health. If the stress response for women is endlessly switched on across the day, it dramatically impacts our bodies, says nutritional biochemist Libby Weaver, author of Rushing Woman’s Syndrome and The Invisible Load.
“With burnout comes a host of biochemical changes that disrupt blood glucose regulation, predisposing us to insulin-resistance and Type 2 diabetes, and with all that extra cortisol that we’ve made it can change our metabolism and immune responses. It can have an impact on inflammatory markers in our bodies. A lot of mechanisms of degeneration get set off when we live with the constant and relentless production of stress hormones.
“Men are good at focusing on the case in hand. Women let things bleed into other areas of their life,” Weaver adds.
So would it benefit women to think more like a man? Here we ask health experts to identify the best male coping strategies and what women might learn from them.
In a crisis, says Hodson, men understand the importance of psychological triage, where you work out the priority of needs. “I’ve got a very simple approach,” he admits. “By and large, what matters in life is health and children, the rest is admin. If you’re stressing about the wrong shade of paint, it simply doesn’t matter.”
Adam Borland, a psychologist specialising in burnout at Cleveland Clinic, adds: “Men are good at compartmentalising. ‘This is work. This is family. This is personal time.’ They put them into separate boxes.”
Men are good at ring-fencing their time, whereas commitments can leave little time in a woman’s schedule for friends, exercise or hobbies. “Don’t just save ‘no’ for 999 occasions, but get into the habit of prioritising your own needs,” advises Natalie Lue, author of The Joy of Saying No. “Try saying: ‘I don’t want to say yes and then let you down, so it’s a no this time.’”
Scientists at Columbia University Irving Medical Center examined the effect of long-term mild sleep deprivation on women’s blood vessels and found that oxidative stress levels increased by 78 per cent after sleep restriction in healthy women. Over time, this can lead to cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis and high blood pressure. “Take a power nap,” suggests Hodson. “Men are very good at power-napping as a stress management tool.”
“In a post-feminist age, we have the ability to choose what we give a damn about,” says Dr Judith Mohring, founder of The Natural Psychiatrist, a team of experts in mental health and resilience. “Men are better at focusing on what’s right in front of them rather than preparing for all the ifs and buts,” says Weaver. “Women tend to focus on what is urgent and not always on what’s important.”
“It’s difficult, but we have to step back and allow things to fall apart a little bit to allow others to step up and take responsibility,” says Weaver. “Teenage children can learn how to cook dinner and that’s going to serve them really well when they leave home. We make time for whatever we prioritise. So when we say we don’t have time for something, what we’re really saying is that it’s just not a priority right now.” Dr Mohring adds that if we delegate a task, it won’t necessarily be done in the same way, and that’s OK.
Being able to reduce a situation to a much simpler equation may come down to evolutionary biology, says Hodson. “One of the reasons why men are perhaps able not to be sensitive to other considerations is that if you’re in combat and you’re about to kill somebody, it’s not a good idea to worry about whether his wife will be bereaved if you succeed, because in that moment of hesitation your own wife could be bereaved. Short-term suppression is a good idea.”
If you receive a note from your boss which reads: “Come and see me now” don’t immediately panic. It may be something in their own life that is causing difficulty. “We don’t hear what someone says, we hear what we think they meant,” says Weaver. “If a colleague phones and says: ‘Where’s that work? I needed it yesterday’, we hear their request for the work, but what we also unconsciously do is create a story about how they must perceive us for not having done that work. We can create a huge amount of stress for ourselves because of how we think, and that’s the part we can change.”
“When I’m talking to our female founders, I tell them to channel their inner bloke, to have that absolute confidence and authority,” says Sarah Turner, co-founder and CEO of Angel Academe. “Tell them you’re going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread because that’s what men say – and get away with.”
Men look at things in terms of challenge, dare and risk, says Hodson. “Ask yourself what is the evidence for your fear, your conviction that everything’s going to be awful, if you do X, Y or Z? Just try it once. And if, as you supposed, it turns out to be the worst disaster in the whole of your human experience, well fair enough. But if it’s not, give us some credit and let’s see what else we can change.”
Women often end up poorer in old age even though we live for longer. “Men think the money they earn is their money, whereas women see it as the family’s money,” says Turner. It’s because men tend to take more risk in their investment portfolios that they out-perform those of women. Of course, a lack of recklessness around money and thoroughness is a good thing, she adds. “Women are more risk-aware. They’re more aware of what they don’t know; they’ll do their homework. They don’t just spray their money around. But it can also lead to procrastination.”
“Men understand how winning works, and that only one person can win,” says Hodson, “and therefore that you’ll lose more often than not. And men can cope with that. It’s about acceptance, ultimately, without saying: ‘I’ll never win again’ or ‘I’m useless’.” Weaver thinks we need to trust more that things will go well – a typical male trait. “A lot of women think the opposite of stress is calm. But I’d say the opposite of stress is trust. Men think: ‘Maybe it will be OK, maybe it won’t, but I’m not planning beyond the weekend.’”
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