Playing Defense

Sex, age and defensiveness may predict your cardiovascular health when under stress.   

Sex and age affect how our bodies react to stress, says a Canadian study that examined the link between defensiveness and physical reactions to stress in adult men and women. Older men who were low in defensiveness and younger women who were high in defensiveness were most likely to suffer cardiovascular effects of stress, the study found.

Researchers defined defensiveness as “a trait characterized by avoidance, denial or repression of information perceived as threatening.” The study, involving on 81 healthy working men and 118 women, was conducted at the Université de Montréal.

"Our findings suggest that women who are more defensive are at increased cardiovascular risk, whereas low defensiveness appears to damage the health of older men," Bianca D'Antono, a professor at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychiatry and a Montreal Heart Institute researcher, said in a public statement.

Experts agree that there are clear sex differences in how we respond to stress, especially when defensiveness is involved as a factor.

“Men and women do respond differently,” human behavior expert Patrick Wanis, PhD, who was not involved in the study, agrees. “It wasn’t until the last ten or fifteen years that studies have begun to recognize and identify the differences.”

“The fight or flight syndrome is a male response to stress,” he explains. “For women it is more an emotional response that triggers a different part of the brain—the limbic system—and they tend to tend and befriend, need social contact and need to talk it out.”

The study researchers say that the need to belong is universal, and the key to understanding the reasons behind the differences across sex and age in terms of defensiveness.

"The sense of belonging is a basic human need," D'Antono added. "Our findings suggest that socialization is innate and that belonging to a group contributed to the survival of our ancestors. Today, it is possible that most people view social exclusion as a threat to their existence. A strong defensive reaction is useful to maintain one's self-esteem faced with this potential threat."

There are three stages following such a threat, Wanis explains. The first is alarm: the initial reaction or the actual response to the stressor. This is followed by the adaptive resistance stage, during which the body adapts and slows down to heal itself.   

“In today’s society, we skip stage two and go to stage three: exhaustion, where the body just can’t take it anymore,” Wanis says. “We skip over stage two because we don’t give enough priority to the body and to the mind and to our energy. That’s why we see so many breakdowns.”

Stress reduction expert Diana Fletcher agrees that we don’t take time to listen to our bodies and minds. “Because we are all living with constant stress, we don’t even recognize it anymore,” she maintains. “Your body can take this for only so long.”

Wanis says that Americans in particular don’t take enough vacations to allow themselves time to heal from stress. “Elsewhere, people take holidays and long weekends, but here in America people feel they can’t turn off this or that, add more stress, and we are not giving our body, mind, and psyche enough time to relax and equalize processes that happen when our body and mind respond to stress,” he explains.

Our culture doesn’t honor relaxation, Fletcher also notes.

“Older men and younger women are at their most insecure,” she says. “Since men identify themselves with their work, as they get closer to retirement the power of their identity diminishes.”

Women have different obstacles, but they are no less challenging, Singer adds.  

As men age, they face health issues, making stress more difficult to handle, Wanis adds. “Men at an older age don’t have the same capacity to handle stress, so they have a lower threshold because they are not physically, emotionally or mentally as healthy.”

“Men may hold things in more because they are not as used to letting out emotions,” Fletcher says.

They also handle stress differently than women, Wanis adds. While they may let more things “roll of their backs,” he explains, when they do experience stress, “men don’t speak about their emotions, they don’t recognize their depression. They say they can’t sleep, they are irritable and they are angry.”   

The study findings are particularly interesting because they focus on a very specific stressor, Wanis says, the threat to self-esteem.

“The study focused on self-esteem and social bonding, looked at being judged or criticized, so that is not as broad, like the stress of rushing through traffic, the stress of losing a job or breaking up,” he tells demo dirt. “We would need to look at the whole study to make a broader, more accurate conclusion.”

Women, Wanis adds, are particularly vulnerable to perceived threats to self-esteem because of social pressure to fulfill so many roles.

“Women are judged on so many different levels, society has greater expectations of women than it does of men,” he maintains. “Men are expected to have a good job, house, money and career. Women are expected to have all of that and then be young, good looking, and be a great mother and be a great housewife. It doesn’t stop.”

These multiple expectations make women more competitive with other women, and more vulnerable, Wanis adds.

“Women compete physically, in terms of career, husband, family and the house,” he notes. “Women never feel that they are good enough.”

Compared to men, Wanis says, women many more expectations to fulfill. “Men feel good enough in simple ways: [they say to themselves] ‘I’ve got money and a good job.’”

“Women move through life in terms of their relationships, a woman’s happiness or lack thereof is often determined by the quality of her relationships,” he explains. “We all need to be liked and accepted and validated.”

There is a great danger to one’s self-esteem when depending upon others’ opinions. “When you are making yourself vulnerable to how other people respond to you, you will be much more sensitive, threatened and weaker because you can be hurt much more easily,” Wanis says.