Stressed? Women Talk, Men Shut Up

We all have stress in our lives.  It may all be relative, but it definitely has an impact on all of us.  As we have heard before, women tend to talk about the fact that they are stressed more than men do.  It isn't necessarily that they are more stressed.  They are just more willing to talk about it.  So it seems the main gender difference is the willingness (or unwillingness) to communicate about the fact that we're stressed.  I find it concerning that men are less willing to talk about their stress.  Certainly bottling that feeling up cannot be good for anyone, least of all the man enduring the stress.  The release one would get from actually expressing one's feelings about being stressed has to be in some way therapeutic.  Does this mean that women cope better with stress than men?  Well, it's hard to say with this data.  It could be that men do not need to express their feelings, but women do.  I'll have to see if I can find any studies on that.  I think that would be interesting.

How do you handle stress in your life?  Do you express it or bottle it up?  Does that correspond with this study, that women express and men keep it in?  Does it change for you based on the situation or company or even environment?  Please feel free to share!



http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2010/gender-stress.aspx

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• Women are more likely than men (28 percent vs. 20 percent) to report having a great deal of stress (8, 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale).
• Almost half of all women (49 percent) surveyed said their stress has increased over the past five years, compared to four in 10 (39 percent) men.
• Women are more likely to report that money (79 percent compared with 73 percent of men) and the economy (68 percent compared with 61 percent of men) are sources of stress while men are far more likely to cite that work is a source of stress (76 percent compared with 65 percent of women).
• Women are more likely to report physical and emotional symptoms of stress than men, such as having had a headache (41 percent vs. 30 percent), having felt as though they could cry (44 percent vs. 15 percent), or having had an upset stomach or indigestion (32 percent vs. 21 percent) in the past month.

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