Stressors and Female Health
KEY POINTS
- Stress Impacts Women’s Health: High stress can lead women to unhealthy coping mechanisms, affecting both physical and mental health.
- Physical and Psychological Symptoms: Women often experience stress physically and mentally, manifesting as hair loss, muscle tension, anxiety, or depression.
- Biological Differences in Stress Response: Women and men respond differently to stress due to hormonal differences, affecting their overall stress management.
Women are prone to experience a lot of stress. There are so many challenges and expectations forced on women that many of them succumb to unhealthy coping mechanisms to manage and beat those stressors. Experiencing excessive stress regularly can increase the likelihood of developing substance abuse.
Not having access to a suitable outlet for stress is detrimental to human health, and for women, the same is true. Stress also has a significant impact on physical health as well. Stress is associated with heart disease, weight gain, and improper digestion.
How Stress and Female Health are Linked
Stress is often very unpredictable, no one knows when it’s going to show up and how it’s going to affect them. It can come and go in minutes or stick around and build up over time. While stress affects everyone at various points in their lives, most women tend to experience stress more physically.
This can look like excessive sweating, hair loss, headaches, and muscle tension that can sometimes be remedied through exercise, self-care, or a gratitude practice.
But when stress is experienced mentally, it can lead to addictive behaviors, anxiety, depression, and other emotional and mental expressions that can benefit from a women’s intensive outpatient program. Regardless of how the stress manifests, it must be effectively managed to reduce further avoidable stress and improve overall health.
Psychological Effects of Stress
Mental stress is often manifested as insomnia, an imbalance of hormones, fatigue, or mood swings. When stress is experienced psychologically, the brain has to figure out how to deal with higher levels of hormones and chemicals.
This can lead to cognitive decline, loss of focus, and a deficit in decision-making. These symptoms can sometimes give way to women seeking an unhealthy desire for release, like alcohol or drugs.
When psychological stress is a frequent occurrence and a release is sought more often, an addiction is likely to develop. That’s why the right care is critical to combatting the psychological effects of stress.
Stress and Biology
Women and men are very different from one another despite being the same species. Female hormone composition is far different than men’s, which translates to different chemical concoctions being released in the body in response to stressors.
While men tend to experience more adrenaline and cortisol when encountering stressors, women tend to produce more oxytocin, the happiness hormone. The elevated levels of oxytocin can interrupt the brain’s ability to interface with the cortisol and adrenaline that is also produced.
Biologically, women can better withstand multiple stressors at once, but overwhelm is easily achieved because the feel-good hormones are more quickly depleted.
Both men and women will indeed experience stress many times in their lifetimes, but there is no denying that the way the two genders experience stressors is different. Managing these stressors is extremely important in living a healthy lifestyle and having a good quality of life.
There are many ways to deal with stress that will leave you feeling full, optimistic, resolved, or even-tempered.
If you need help exploring healthy options or addiction treatment, please reach out to your mental health or healthcare professional today.
