Even More Researched Reasons for Women to Eliminate Negative Self-Talk

Gender differences in the experience of stress and coping with stress have been mentioned previously in this blog. A brief summary:

• Women experience more stress than men; meaning they say they feel stressed more often and more intensely than men.
•  Men's coping techniques, logical problem-solving and detachment, work more effectively than women's coping techniques of emotionality and avoidance.

Here's a link to a previous post about the topic.http://intelligentwomenonly.blogspot.com/2011/03/writers-gender-differences-and-stress.html

In the last 5 years, the neuroscientific research involving brain imagery adds a new dimension to what we know, or thought we knew. A study called, "Gender Difference in Neural Response to Psychological Stress" is one such study.

The article quotes findings of past studies:

• Men show higher physiological stress reactivity than women, which may be reflected in their increased aggressiveness and greater frequency of cardiovascular disease; also in their standard fight or flight response to stressors.

• Women benefit from the buffering effect of estrogen which perhaps accounts for their lower than men's physiological stress reactivity. Also they tend to use a "tend and befriend" coping approach rather than a flight or fight response.

• "It has been proposed that women are more likely to be negatively affected by interpersonal events than men — a tentative factor underlying the emergence of gender differences in depression." Exception: When a social rejection task was adopted as the stressor instead of  an achievement task, women seemed more physiologically reactive than men.

Another finding from the current study was that the lasting physiological stress response (lasting — compared to men) in females might reflect a greater degree of rewinding (melancholy thinking) or reflection on one's own emotional traits in females, consistent with the tendency for ruminative thinking in women. "A somewhat related cognitive style more common in women than men that increases the risk for depression is ruminative thinking — repetitively and passively focusing on symptoms of distress and their possible causes and consequences."

OK. Now we know for sure practically, realistically, common sensically, psychologically, physiologically, brain imagerally, neuroscientifically, that NST is harmful.

Women of the world UNITE! Dump it.