Stress, by itself, can lead to excessive drinking in women but not men

Finally, a neutral/relaxing script was developed as a control for the stress and appetitive/alcohol-cue scripts. The neutral/relaxing script was developed from the participants’ individual experiences of commonly experienced neutral relaxing situations, such as a summer day relaxing at the beach, taking hot shower or bubble bath, and a Fall day reading at the park. Participants consumed alcoholic beverages in a simulated bar while experiencing stressful and non-stressful situations. Stress led women, but not men, to drink more than intended, a finding that demonstrates the importance of studying sex differences in alcohol consumption. The gender divide in stress drinking is a complex issue rooted in biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors.

Secular trends in the lifetime prevalence of alcohol dependence in the United States: A re-evaluation

“Alcohol marketing plays a causal role in young people’s decisions to drink, and to drink more,” says David Jernigan, a health-policy professor at Boston University. Just as the addictive dangers of Valium became unignorable, Eli Lilly invented Prozac. Though the blockbuster antidepressant was marketed toward both genders, “there were some explicitly gendered Prozac ads that had to do with pitching Prozac to help women handle the double workday.

• The strain of keeping up with the Joneses depends on which Joneses you’re keeping up with.
• After that, all participants were allowed to drink however much they wanted (up to a certain BAC limit) for 90 minutes.
• Research has also linked alcohol to several types of cancer, including an increased risk of breast cancer because it heightens the levels of estrogen and other hormones related to the disease, and also damages DNA in cells.
• A 2023 study shows that alcohol-related deaths are rising faster in women than men.
• Women and men are at risk for different types of stress-related disorders, with women at greater risk for depression and anxiety and men at greater risk for alcohol- use disorders (Kajantie and Phillips, 2005; Kessler et al., 1993).

Study discovers a key gender difference in how people react to stress and alcohol

In the end, the gender ratio of antidepressant prescriptions was similar to that of Valium. In the early 2000s, Prozac’s makers repackaged the drug, literally, in a pink-and-purple capsule; rebranded it as Sarafem; and marketed it to women to treat PMS. Sexist doctors were “more likely to just see women as making annoying complaints that were about things that were all in their heads. And it was delightful to have a pill that seemed to take care of that, from the doctor’s point of view,” says David Herzberg, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Happy Pills in America.

• It is unclear without longitudinal study whether these women’s depression histories lead them to be more sensitized towards sadness/anxiety following stress or whether their sadness/anxiety responses to stress preceded their development of depressive disorders.
• Though rates of alcohol misuse are higher in men than women, women are catching up.
• Some participants’ first drink contained roughly three times the amount of alcohol you would typically find in a drink.
• As stated above, all correlation analyses used difference from baseline scores.
• “Alcohol marketing plays a causal role in young people’s decisions to drink, and to drink more,” says David Jernigan, a health-policy professor at Boston University.
• According to a comprehensive survey conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), men are more likely to engage in stress drinking compared to women.

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• Understanding these differences is crucial for developing effective strategies to address alcohol-related issues and promote healthier coping mechanisms for both men and women.
• Similarly, a beer or two can, at least temporarily, help you tolerate a day on which day care is closed, work is nuts, your husband is playing video games, and an elderly relative is having a health scare.

However, it’s important to note that these statistics may not tell the whole story, as women are often underrepresented in alcohol-related research. Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth include young people whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. Many TGD youth, due to their minoritized status, are subjected to victimization, discrimination, invalidation of their gender, and transphobia. This kind of binge drinking can lead some down a path toward alcohol use disorder, a condition characterized by uncontrolled drinking and preoccupation with alcohol. But who ends up with the condition is down to a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environmental factors, and occupational stress.

The study took place in a research laboratory designed to simulate a bar, complete with a bartender, bar stools and lively conversations. They were randomized into different groups, with some experiencing a stressful situation and others a non-stressful situation. Next, half the participants received an alcoholic drink that was equivalent to three cocktails, and the other half received three non-alcoholic drinks.

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“Anytime I felt anything I didn’t want to feel, I used outside things to manage that, and alcohol was very effective,” she said. The next day, she would feel shaky and even more stressed—and still be facing the demons she drank to avoid. A pulse sensor was attached to the participant’s finger and connected to the Dinamap Monitor to provide a continuous measure of pulse.

• They had bar stools, a bartender, and allowed the participants — 105 men and 105 women — to intermingle.
• If they had difficulty imagining these situations clearly (i.e., they rated the scene’s clarity below 7 on a scale from 1 to 10), further training was given.
• While it might not be immediate relief, there are lots of long-term benefits from not drinking, like improved sleep and decreased general anxiety, which can help with overall mental health.

Gender differences in college binge drinking: Examining the role of depression and school stress

A mixed design was used with gender (male, female) as the between subjects factor and condition (stress, neutral/relaxing, and alcohol cue) as a repeated measures factor. The 3 conditions were presented on separate testing days with only 1 stimulus presentation per day. Condition order was assigned randomly and counterbalanced across participants by gender.

Women may be more likely to label the same or lower physiological arousal as sadness/anxiety related than men or may experience it subjectively and express it behaviorally with greater intensity. Women may also focus cognitively on sadness/anxiety more than men—-for example, women are more likely to ruminate on sad and anxious emotions than men whereas men are more likely to distract attention away from these emotional states (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1999). Rumination has been linked to depressive and anxious symptoms, symptoms which are more common for women than men (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000). Alternatively, as hypothesized by Taylor et al. (2000), it may be Women and Alcoholism that cardiovascular arousal and the traditional “fight” or “flight” response is not a prominent domain of stress experience for women. The alcohol-cue script was based on individual situations that included alcohol-related stimuli and resulted in subsequent alcohol use (e.g., buying alcohol, being at a bar, and watching others drink alcohol). Alcohol-related situations that occurred in the context of negative affect or psychological distress were not allowed, e.g., when participants went to a bar after a fight, or were feeling depressed and called a drinking buddy.

Freelance journalists, actually employed by pharmaceutical companies, wrote articles for popular magazines about how sedatives “could cure everything from the blahs to sexual frigidity … every kind of a la mode problem that women experienced,” Herzberg adds. Women were twice as likely to be prescribed the pills as men; at one point, a fifth of American women were taking Valium. Problem drinking has risen fastest among women in their 30s and 40s, the age at which many are squeezed between careers, motherhood, and aging parents. This may seem odd because high-income women should be better able to afford help with child care, chores, and other responsibilities that can cause stress. But although this group has more resources, the standards for child-rearing, housing, and career achievements in this cohort are also ratcheting ever higher.

Women and men are at risk for different types of stress-related disorders, with women at greater risk for depression and anxiety and men at greater risk for alcohol-use disorders. The present study examines gender differences in emotional and alcohol craving responses to stress that may relate to this gender divergence in disorders. The Differential Emotions Scale (DES) -Revised short form (Izard, 1972) was used as a measure of subjective emotional experience. The present study used 5 subscales from the DES—sadness, anger, joy, fear, and anxiety.