Do women work harder when they are anxious?

About one in seven people in the world will experience anxiety disorder. If excessive anxiety is not relieved for a long time, it will cause serious mental problems. Although anxiety can play an important role in dealing with emergencies and disasters, long-term anxiety may not play a positive role in helping people get rid of the difficulties of study and work in a modern society that does not need to face the scourge of disasters, and women may be the bigger victims.

Recently, Dr. Tim P. Moran of Michigan State University in the United States and others studied the changes of brain waves when people face stress, and found that the brain activities of men and women are different when they face stress.

The researchers asked 150 ordinary people to sit in front of the computer screen and distinguish whether a string of characters on the screen is completely consistent. For example, EEEEE is completely consistent, while EEFEE is inconsistent.

By analyzing the EEG signals of the participants, Dr. Tim found that male participants and female participants behaved differently on a specific brain wave - error related negative potential (ERN). As the name implies, error-related negative potential is a brain wave after the error response, which originates from the anterior cingulate gyrus region of the brain. When people do not respond to a thing as they should, the signal becomes particularly strong. Therefore, when the participants accidentally press the wrong key, the ERN will appear and be recorded by the precise EEG instrument. In short, error-related negative potential can be considered as a kind of brain activity to monitor mistakes. Although up to now, what determines the size of the ERN has not been decided in the academic community, many brain scientists believe that the larger the ERN, the more ashamed the person who makes mistakes, and the harder he wants to do well.

Dr. Tim's research results found that when women are nervous, the error-related negative potential caused by making mistakes is significantly larger than that of men who are not nervous, but the accuracy rate is not improved; However, whether men are nervous or not, there is no change in ERN. In addition, the more nervous the participants are, the lower the accuracy rate and the worse the performance. That is to say, although anxious women are similar to men in task performance, their brains need to spend more energy, and failure will bring them a greater blow. Anxious women need to spend more energy on completing tasks because they have more worries and fantasies. As a result, their brains are exhausted because they think too much, leading to failure in study and work.

In another study, scientists from Cambridge University surveyed 433 middle school students to observe the relationship between their ability to solve math problems and anxiety. Although girls have more anxiety about math, their actual math performance is not worse than that of boys. This also means that girls can reduce anxiety, and their math scores may be better than boys.

In fact, women are much more sensitive to anxiety than men because of the influence of estrogen, and their risk of anxiety disorder is twice that of men.

Dr. Robert Leahy, a famous American cognitive psychologist, proposed six simple methods to help deal with daily anxiety.

Identify useful and useless anxieties

First, judge whether your anxiety can help you solve difficulties. If the answer is "Yes, anxiety is useful", please make a list of how to solve difficulties step by step; If "anxiety can't help me", please use the following methods to deal with useless anxiety.

Use your schedule to record your anxiety

Write down the things you need to worry about all day, and set a specific time period to think about it. For example, if you have to make a report after a week, and you are anxious about it every day, set the time to 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., and this half hour is devoted to anxiety about the report. By 6:00 p.m., you may find that you are not too obsessed with this matter. Many people think that they urgently need a matter to be solved immediately, but in fact, it doesn't matter if they postpone the matter for a while. They can still live well.

Learn to accept uncertainty

Anxious people often find it difficult to accept that they cannot fully control their lives. Try to repeat a worry (such as "I may lose my job") silently in your mind for 20 minutes, and your worry will be weakened unconsciously. Most people will even feel bored during the process of repetition, and even hold on for less than 20 minutes.

Concentration

Mindfulness comes from Buddhism. It exhorts people to live in the present and experience the current mood with their heart, even if the mood is negative. Try to immerse yourself in the music you like or talk with friends heartily, and put the anxiety behind you. Try to breathe deeply, relax your muscles and live in the moment.

Reshape your worries

What if the worry really happens? If you lose your job or are abandoned, will the sky fall? Changing your evaluation of a thing can change your frustration. Try to ask yourself positively: What have I learned from this failure? Make a list of the experiences you feel grateful for.

Review anxiety

Looking back on the previous anxiety, is it difficult to remember? This is probably because the imagined disaster has never really happened, or you have enough ability to overcome and forget the difficulties.