When some suffers from an Anxiety Disorder they are typically unable to control their fixation on even the simplest most insignificant stress-related issues, allowing them to become monumental.
This condition, which can produce an anxiety attack, is readily prevalent in our society, while much more pervasive and frequently occurring in advanced societies where daily pressure is the norm rather than the exception. However, as recent studies suggest, the problem is much more common in women as in men – by as much as two to one!
This realization that a Generalized Anxiety Disorder or GAD is perhaps more widespread and more life-altering in women is not easily explained. At first it was assumed that women are more prone to be GAD sufferers was written off as being caused by the level of demand placed by society on a woman’s life versus a man’s.
We now know that two significant things regarding GAD and a woman’s case as opposed to man’s experience with it.
1. GAD operates differently in a woman’s body as compared to a man’s. Hormonal balance is a major contributor to the level and complexity of both symptoms and degree of severity in a GAD sufferer. Women are three times more likely to have hormonal imbalance in their bodies as compared to men. This condition is exacerbated by issues such as menstruation and menopause.
2. Women focus on the worry aspect of a panic attack much differently than do men. In a man’s mind, while the level of anxiety maybe significant, the focus is on that issue alone and its resulting negative outcome. In a woman’s mind, the issue in question often causes her mind to spiral off into related or imagined effects elsewhere in her crowded life and that tends to make the next bout with that anxiety point just that much more severe.
Women also report a consistent phenomenon in their condition which is seldom reported by men – namely that a single issue which causes an attack often leads to the seemingly automatic introduction of other, unrelated events or issues which have a “piling on” effect that takes the attack from mild to severe. This appears to be a function of the natural variance in how a woman’s brain performs cognitive problem solving as compared to how a man’s functions.
