It’s a myth that women worry more than men, but being more communicative than men, women do tend to talk about their worries more. And while talking about our worries can ease them, it can also reinforce them as we hear about the troubles and concerns of others. So how can women break the cycle of worry—or from a mental and physical health perspective, stem the damage that can occur due to unrelenting anxiety, especially in a time of such dire economic difficulty? Since worry seems to be rampant right now, we thought we’d answer some of the most common worry-related questions that we hear:
Q: How can women stop worrying so much?
A: It takes a great deal of self-awareness to realize that you are a chronic worrier. The trouble with worry is that our culture tells us that responsible people are supposed to worry, so if we’re not worried, we feel as though we’re ignoring problems. However, worry accomplishes nothing. It is a useless emotion. One way to stem the tide of worry is to be aware of the uselessness of worry, but one of the best ways is to find ways to relax what Buddhists call the “monkey mind,” the racing thoughts that lock us in a maze of anxiety like rats. Meditation is wonderful for this.
Q: Is worrying “contagious”? Is there any way to avoid catching it?
A: It can be, if you let the worries of others start you worrying about the same issues. This can be a sign of a generalized anxiety disorder, in which people worry about extremely unlikely events. One of the best ways to avoid the worry “contagion” is just to avoid spending time with people who are chronic worriers.
Q: Are people born worriers, or made?
A: A little of both. People who worry constantly about even the most remote possibilities may suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, a medical condition that we think can be inherited. But worry is also a habit, and women who grow up in an environment where one or both parents worry about everything and instill fear of the unknown in their children may see that as a normal way of thinking and regarding the world. So worry appears to be part nature, part nurture.
Q: What do people do when they worry—eat more, drink more, etc.?
A: There’s no single pattern of behavior. Look at your own friends: some are probably “stress eaters,” who eat more when they’re worried, while others lose weight during stressful times because they can’t eat a thing. Where we become concerned as physicians is when someone begins doing something potentially self-destructive because of worry, like self-medicating with drugs or alcohol.
Q: Have any studies or polls been done on worry?
A: Yes. One of the more recent ones was a study of global poll results done by the University of Kansas working with the Gallup Organization. It found that the link between positive emotions and good health is very strong. You can find more about the study at www.news-medical.net/?id=46535 or at the University of Kansas website, www.ku.edu.
Q: Do people worry more today than in the past? Did people worry a ton during the Great Depression?
A: There isn’t much hard data about worry rates from today versus 60 years ago. But the consensus is that people today tend to worry more than their parents and grandparents did because of global media and the Internet. For example, during the Depression there was no TV or Internet. Most people’s worlds were confined to their neighborhoods or cities. So while they may have worried about their own economic situation, there was probably less of that “the sky is falling” anxiety that we find today when every news report talks about rising unemployment and the moment a financial collapse occurs, it’s all over the Internet in minutes. With more knowledge and more awareness of the world come more reasons to worry, if you’re looking for them and if your emotions overcome your rationality.
Q: Can worry impact your looks? If you’re constantly furrowing your brow, can it cause wrinkles? I’ve heard that if you force yourself to smile, you activate areas of the brain that make you happier, plus you avoid those worry wrinkles to boot. Is this true?
A: Worry can indeed impact your looks, but not as directly as you might think. Frowning and furrowing your brow can certainly imprint lines in your face over time, but wrinkles are really caused by the natural effects of aging as our skin becomes less elastic over time. You can’t avoid them. The more direct impact of worry comes when worry causes you to neglect your self-care: to eat poorly, not cleanse and moisturize your skin, abuse alcohol, take up smoking or fail to protect your skin from the sun. Also, keep in mind that frowning and worry affect your Inner Beauty, too, as people perceive you as someone negative who is not enjoyable to be around, regardless of your looks. As for smiling, it’s always a good idea, because smiling tells your brain to release serotonin and dopamine, the feel-good neurochemicals that improve mood.
Q: What worries have you struggled with in the past and how did you cope?
A: We all struggle with the worries that come with aging: parents becoming ill, our own bodies starting to show signs of age and the loss of some of our youthful beauty, and certainly right now, economic worries. In general, we find that no matter what the worry is, the “Three Ps Rule” really helps us handle whatever comes along: 1) Perspective. Step back and get some perspective on the situation. Is it really as bad as you fear? What are the facts? 2) Plan. What scenarios could play out and what will you need to do to be prepared for them? 3) People. Don’t try to deal with things alone. Share your fears and talk to the people who care about you. It’s amazing what a difference support makes.
Sometimes, pop culture and science meet in ways that are pretty ridiculous. The latest example is the renewed attention being given to a study conducted in 2005 by doctors Leif Nelson and Evan Morrison and published in the February 2005 Psychological Science (the abstract of the study can be found here). The study says that in essence, when economic times are hard—or in what the researchers called “times of resource scarcity”—men prefer women who are heavier by a whopping two or three pounds. So ladies, the strategy is clear: hit the Hometown Buffet near you every night for a week, then hang out at the unemployment office and you’re sure to meet that future Mr. Right…or Mr. Sort-of-OK.
All kidding aside, is this science? It seems like the worst kind of pop sociology to us—data applied liberally to a barely-known aspect of human behavior and then broad stroke conclusions drawn. But Dr. Terry Pettijohn II has a theory about what might be at work here. He’s a psychologist who has done research in the same vein and his opinion is that when men are flush, they are attracted more to women who are childlike: slender, willowy, nubile. But when times get rough, men become more like women, who are hard-wired to gravitate toward strong men who can be good providers for them and their offspring. Pettijohn thinks that a few extra pounds make a woman seem sturdier, tougher, more able to survive hard times. Translation: when money is short and jobs are insecure, men want a woman whom they don’t have to “take care of.”
So what does this mean? That the recession is going to be a boom time for women with normal bodies of all shapes and sizes and the decline of the size-zero waif? Probably not. Studies like this inevitably overreach, and this one is probably no exception. We suspect something else may be at work here: low self-esteem on the part of economically depressed men. We live in a culture where men in particular are defined by what they do for a living and how they provide for their loved ones. After all, men can’t make babies. Instead, they build, create, innovate and invent (women do those things, too, but bear with us). When they are unemployed or in dire career straits, men feel less attractive because society tells them they are less desirable. So they unconsciously set their sights lower, figuring a truly “hot” woman wouldn’t be attracted to them because perhaps their financial desperation is written on their faces, their slumped shoulders, and their worn shoes.
That makes as much sense to us as any theory and ties in perfectly with our beliefs about Inner Beauty: when you feel confident, you are beautiful to yourself and others. With so many millions of men and women feeling powerless in this terrible economy, it’s going to be a challenge for this generation to find their own inner beauty and self-esteem…and it’s better if they ignore questionable pop-culture science like this.
No surprise here: women differ from men in the way our brains respond to beauty. In yet another blow to the attempts to create a gender-neutral society where men and women are basically identical reflections of one another in different clothing, a new study has discovered that when they see beauty (as in a painting in a museum), men’s brains light up in the areas linked to absolute spacial location, while women’s brains activate in areas connected to determining relative location. It’s a subtle difference that may reflect the evolutionary differences in the two genders.
The study, which can be found here, was conducted at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears and published on February 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was small but provocative. Ten men and 10 women looked at images of modern and classic paintings, as well as photographs of landscapes, artifacts and urban scenes, while the researchers recorded their reactions with a magnetoencephalograph, which monitors real-time neural activity by measuring magnetic fields generated by electrical currents in the brain. This is superior to using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which reads blood flow to brain areas and has been somewhat discredited recently.
Across the board, beauty produced coordinate-processing activation in both men and women, and category-processing in women exclusively. The reseachers speculate that from an evolutionary and survival perspective, this may stem from differing roles that males and females played in hunter-gatherer societies. Men were the hunters, and so had to develop strong spatial senses to find and kill prey. Women, meanwhile, had to survey the landscape for safe tubers, roots, berries and nuts to gather, and so had to use comparison-centric parts of their brains more adept not only at location but memory and analysis. Fast forward 5000 years and you get different brain responses to beauty.
Interestingly, the differences don’t seem to affect how men and women preceive or react to beauty. Both sexes described their perceptions in the same way and described beauty as pleasurable and stimulating. So from a Beauty-Brain Loop perspective, what does this mean for us? It does suggest that we women are wired to find beauty on more relative, subtle terms in both men and women—it isn’t as absolute as a perfectly chiseled chest in a man or a long pair of legs in a woman. We’re more apt to think in terms of beauty in categories and to find different types of beauty in our environment, while men’s definition is more narrow. Hence the male role in the dating scene as the hunter, the search-and-conquer soldier on a mission.
We won’t suggest that a study like this defines anything about how we ultimately see beauty. First of all, it was small and needs to be replicated on a larger scale. Second, we don’t believe in being so reductive about women, men or beauty. We are partially shaped by our hard-wired brains, of course, but also by our experience and our choices. How we choose to define beauty is ultimately what determines the beauty we see in others and ourselves.
It’s not often that we give shout-outs to other websites, but we’ve simply got to do it for this one: AdiosBarbie.com. It’s a site for women of all body types who want to love their bodies and thumb their noses at the “size zero is beautiful” obsessions of pop culture. Created by editors Ophira Edut and Pia Guerrero, who collaborated on the book Body Outlaws: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, the site is all about healthy body image, debunking disrespectful and objectifying media images of women, and promoting community and sharing of personal stories about dealing with everything from self-esteem issues to eating disorders.
We love the message and spirit of this site. After all, in The Beauty Prescription, we devoted part of a chapter to talking about the negative power of Barbie to foster realistic stereotypes of women. Basically, a team of Canadian researchers applied Barbie’s proportions to a real woman and determined that if she was flesh, Barbie would have a colon so small that she would die of malnutrition. So much for Ken, Skipper, that cool Corvette and all the other accessories. They don’t help much if you’re so thin you’re dead.
That’s the importance of websites like Adios Barbie. They seed the soil of our popular mindset with the idea that it’s good to be different, confident and daring—and bad to obsess over every single ounce while despising your reflection in the mirror. Part magazine, part blog, part social network, part store and all saucy resource, this is a web resource that we can’t recommend too highly.
Documentary films are held to a different standard than the latest summer box office fluff or even the “serious” films of November and December. Because they are journalistic in nature, docs are allowed to be quirky and relentless and violate taboos that would never wash in a typical Big Hollywood film. For example, take any romantic comedy. Are the main characters ever homely? Even remotely? We’re not talking about the quirky sidekicks; they’re allowed to be goofy-looking and have zero fashion sense. But the leads, especially in a film like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are uniformly gorgeous. When you look at films and TV series that all feature great-looking young guys and gals, you start to wonder if beautiful actors and actresses are a finite resource that we’re about to run out of.
But we digress. The point is, Hollywood rarely does ugly, and it certainly doesn’t do deformity. That’s why it was so wonderful to see the film “”Smile Pinki” win the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject. The 40-minute film, which follows a poor girl in India who receives free surgery to correct her cleft lip, brings the viewer a microcosm of a larger world in which thousands of children from impoverished areas receive free surgery each year to correct cleft lips and cleft palates—birth defects which, in their own cultures, can mark them as pariahs and open them to discrimination and misery. The film is so deeply touching because Pinki, the young girl whom the film follows, is so beautiful even before she receives her new face from plastic surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh. Her smile is radiant throuhout the film, before and after.
But “Smile Pinki”’s victory highlights something more subtle than the hopeful trend that Hollywood will reward inner beauty as well as outer beauty. The film and the efforts to help the more than 4 million children around the world born with cleft lips and cleft palates reveal to us that beauty matters. These children, by and large, are otherwise healthy. Why make such a fuss over a face that doesn’t conform to our innate beauty standards? Doesn’t character matter more than anything else?
No, though it should. We haven’t come that far yet and perhaps we never will. We are still swayed by beauty and repelled by those who don’t fit the ideal, and this is especially true in the Indian provinces we see in the film, where children born with a defect are often shunned. Beauty does matter. It still suggests virtue and worthiness to us, and while we would never suggest that children born with a visible cosmetic problem should just live with it, the question should be, “Why is it so hard for them to do just that?” That’s not just a question for the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but for the U.S. as well. We don’t exactly reach out to our disabled—the people who remind us that we’re all just a genetic dirty trick away from a missing limb or a cleft lip. We don’t make movies about them, and we should. We should celebrate their beauty, which is just as great as Kate Winslet’s or Hugh Jackman’s. Maybe one day, someone else will make a movie like “Smile Pinki” that wins Best Picture. Until then…
