Stress
Is life harder for women than it is for men? Whether it is or not, women have more intense responses to stress and anxiety disorders, says Margaret Altemus of Cornell University Medical School.62 The reasons are women's hormone reactions and the way the neurons operate in women's brains:
We release greater amounts of cortisol (stress hormone) from the adrenal glands.
Our brains trigger greater physical responses in the automatic nervous system, such as breathing changes, increased heart rate, stomach tension, and sweating.
Estrogen increases production of corticotropinreleasing factor (CRF), a brain protein that tells the pituitary gland to send out stress messages to the adrenal glands.
You’ll learn what stress does to your body and brain, and how to handle it, in chapter 5.
Pain
Being a woman is a pain—and that's not just an expression.
Researchers at Florida State University combined the statistics from over eighty different pain disorders and found that, compared to men, twice as many women suffered from pain disorders. “The burden of pain is greater, more varied and variable for women than men,” says pain expert Karen Berkley, PhD, distinguished research professor of neuroscience at Florida State.63 One reason that women have more pain is unsurprising: disorders of the uterus can radiate pain.
Another reason is that women's XX chromosomes “lead to a fair number of painful diseases that men simply would not get,” says Donald Pfaff, PhD, author of Man and Woman: An Inside Story.64
A third reason for more pain in women is surprising: women are more likely than men to have low blood pressure (59% of women have low pressure versus 43% of men), according to British physicians’ research.65 In general, the lower the pressure, the greater the sensitivity to pain.
Men and women's brains also receive and act on pain signals differently. It's a complex story of neurons and receptors, but here's the simple version: there are neurons that cause partial amnesia to moderate pain, and males have more receptors for these neurons.
And then there is how hormones affect pain. The good news is that during childbirth, estrogen and progesterone combine to stimulate opiumlike particles and receptors on the spinal cord and significantly reduce a woman's perception of pain.66 The bad news is that in ordinary life, estrogen has different receptors. Some decrease and some increase pain, and they are all scattered throughout the nervous system.
Women are not whiny wimps when it comes to pain. Men just have more resources in their brains to help them “suck it up” and ignore pain.
Are We More than our Hormones?
We're swimming in a sea of hormones, and they have some strong currents. Because of hormones, your baby clock might start to tick as you approach age thirty. You might snap at your husband, then sincerely apologize the next day when you get your period. You could cringe at even the thought of a migraine, or you might have to deal with a weird autoimmune disease that destroys your blood platelets.
Still, hormones are not all you are. You have choices when it comes to dealing with the ebb and flow of hormonal currents, such as learning to be content with or without children, finding a different way to express your emotions, feeling joyful when you wake headache free, and managing your autoimmune disease with diet or medicine.
And underneath these choices, you know that you are more than your illnesses, children, and emotions. That's not often easy to remember in daily life, but knowing you're more than what happens and how you feel allows you to step back, relax into the life you have, and experience a changed perspective on the flow of all that estrogen, progesterone, oxytocin, and whatever else is dancing in your brain and body.
Keep reading to learn more about what that dance is like for women, and some choices that may make life easier.
Chapter 4
The Brain During Menstruation and Menopause
If men could menstruate, clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much. Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammad Ali's Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields—“For Those Light Bachelor Days.”
Gloria Steinem, feminist, journalist, and activist
There is no more creative force in the world than the menopausal woman with zest.
Margaret Mead, pioneering anthropologist
When Sherree read about menopause or hormone supplements, she became anxious. Everything seemed to say that (1) menopause was hell, (2) life without estrogen was barely manageable, and (3) hormone-replacement pills increased the risk of developing breast cancer, heart disease, blood clotting, and dementia.67
Still, her female coworkers in their late fifties seemed fine. She overheard some of them saying that they weren't on hormone replacement therapy (HRT, they called it), though one of them said she had less brain fog and felt much saner and happier when she began HRT.
Sherree, age forty-four, wished she knew what was in store for her. She didn't know if her mom had had an easy or rough menopause, since she had died right after Sherree got her first period, at age twelve. And even if Sherree did know about her mother, would menopause would be the same for her as it was for her mom?
Science always has more to learn, but there are some things we do know about hormones, our bodies, and our brains—how they work monthly and throughout our lives.
Estrogen, the Wonder Hormone
Sherree had always been told that estrogen was the female plague, making her moody, bloated, and covered with zits every month. Actually, it wasn't estrogen that caused these discomforts, but the fluctuations of hormones and how they balanced with each other—or didn't.68
Still, estrogen itself is quite a phenomenon. It plays a large role in directing our entire nervous system, which can affect the heart, stomach, liver, pancreas, and immune system. Our brains can operate without estrogen, but not as well as they do with it. Think of estrogen in the brain like toothpaste when you brush your teeth—makes them cleaner than just the toothbrush itself.
Estrogen multiplies the synapses between neurons,69 keeps synapses flexible, and supports the growth of dendrites (the twigs on the synapse tree that conduct electrochemical stimulation).70 That helps when you learn a new language or how to do a handstand in yoga.
Estrogen assists the dopamine neurons, helping stabilize brain activity, regulate the flow of information between parts of the brain, and control movement and balance, as well as making you feel happy. It also protects your neurons from degenerative diseases, like Parkinson's.71