The cause of anxiety in women has been found

Scientists reveal the secret of gender differences in anxiety: women trust their sensations less

A scientific team led by Olivia Harrison from the University of Otago has made a real breakthrough in understanding anxiety states. Researchers discovered an amazing fact: women with increased anxiety experience a significant drop in confidence in their own bodily sensations, although the accuracy of perception remains at the same level. No such pattern was found in men. The results of this revolutionary study were published in the prestigious European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN).

Scientists studied interoception - a person's ability to perceive internal signals of the body, such as breathing, heartbeat, and hunger. This system plays a key role in regulating physical and emotional states. Until now, there were only theories about the effect of anxiety on interoceptive awareness, but there was no specific data on differences between sexes.

The large-scale experiment involved 175 volunteers from four European laboratories with an almost equal ratio of men and women. Participants performed a special task on breath perception. They periodically breathed through a device that created minimal resistance during inhalation. The task was to determine the presence of this "barrier" and assess their own confidence in the answer.

The results of the analysis were striking: anxious people generally trusted their sensations less, despite their actual accuracy. However, when dividing the data by gender, it turned out that the decrease in confidence and the ability to correlate it with real accuracy is characteristic exclusively for women. In men, anxiety had almost no effect on "metacognitive awareness" - the ability to adequately assess the reliability of one's own sensations.

Interestingly, the general abilities to perceive respiratory changes and the basic level of confidence did not differ between the sexes. Differences manifested precisely in the influence of anxiety on self-reflection regarding bodily sensations.

The study also showed that chronic anxiety and symptoms of depression are associated with reduced metacognitive awareness in all participants, but without clear gender differences. This emphasizes the special role of situational anxiety in reducing trust in bodily sensations specifically in women.

"We want not only to better understand the mechanisms of anxiety, but also to develop more accurate, individualized methods of treating it," emphasized the study leader Olivia Harrison.

The results obtained open new perspectives for creating personalized approaches to the treatment of anxiety disorders, taking into account the gender characteristics of patients.