Stressed women love not fight: neuroscience supports sisterhood.
Stress is bad for you and you should try to relax. An advice heard time and again these days for any issues we face in this complex world regarding our health, both physical and mental. Just relax, don’t stress. Easier said than done as this type of advice usually makes me more stressed.
When trying to understand how stress works in our bodies, we often refer to so called flight or flight response and how today’s world, full of stresses that we cannot fight of run away from physically create a lot of unresolved tension in our bodies, which can lead to a chronic stress states and could cause a myriad of physican and mental health conditions. Although throughout the history until mid 1990s majority of research of stress response was done on males* the flight and fight response predominantly exhibited by males is widely accepted as human response to stress. But what if I told you that fight and flight is a response specific to male bodies and the stress response of women actually works on a very different principle? Only in year 2000 a research covering the gender differences in stress response, focusing specifically on female brains, discovered a major difference on how we, women, deal with stress. Instead of fight and flight response, motivated by release of hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, women bodies release oxytocin, the hormon of love, in the times of stress and their coping mechanism is tend and befriend. Instead of fighting of running away, we are turning to each other for support and help.
When the proverbial tiger came to chase us, we don’t abandon our loved ones and run for our lives, we get together and bond and find solutions which will not leave the vulnerable people in the community to the tiger. So at times of stress, while it helps our males to go do some weights and kick a heavy sack, what helps us women relief stress is to get together with others, share our burden, ask for help.
Asking for help has been a major issue for me most of my life and i believe it is for many women around. We are strong, we can do anything, we work hard, we find solutions, we help our loved ones and we help even those we don’t really like. Superwomen, wonderwomen, do it all and have it all. Asking for help has always felt redundant for me. I don’t really need help, what are you talking about! But hell yes, the amazing power of vulnerability and revelation to others that sometimes you really cannot do it all and things suck. Especially after becoming a mother, getting together with other women has become life saving.
What can you use help with today? Who can you offer help today?
*Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Taylor SE, Klein LC, Lewis BP, Gruenewald TL, Gurung RA, Updegraff JA, Psychol Rev. 2000 Jul; 107(3):411-29.
– research investigating the fight-or-flight response had been done primarily with males, females only constituting 17% of the participants, researches considering the hormonal fluctuations due to menstrual cycle as obstacles in using female participants in studies and the cause of the the inconsistency in results on female subjects. https://scholar.harvard.edu/marianabockarova/files/tend-and-befriend.pdf