Do men and women react differently under stress?
Science has recently been catching up with commonsense. Almost everyone knew, long before the Mars/Venus enthusiasm, that most men react differently than most women either under acute stress or when carrying a long term stress load. Early in the stress process, men tend to get ferocious and angry, then retreating into longlasting, almost unconscious seething, punctuated by brief eruptions. Is it any wonder that mens’ disorders-of-choice focus on high blood pressure, ulcers or alcohol misuse? And, while men provoke more than their fair share of divorces, there is much health and psychological evidence that they recover from it much more slowly than women. Women, on the other hand, have roughly twice the levels of depression, anxiety problems, post-traumatic stress disorders and auto-immune disorders (e.g. fibromyalgia). Why the differences? The core stress mechanisms in the hypothalamic – pituitary – adrenal axis are powerful in both sexes. Yet it can be argued that, in terms of innate
