Multiple-Role Stress: Women are likely to have multiple-roles which is stress due to managing many different responsibilities. Common roles include being a mother, wife, professional working woman, and caretaker of the home. These important roles conflict with one another, and women are forced to make tough choices between competing demands. Women overextend themselves trying to do it all. Women suffer disappointment and guilt if they are not able to meet all of the demands of family, home, and work.
Workplace: The majority of women in America today work outside the home. Although some women hold high-status and powerful positions, many more women have jobs with high demands and low control. These jobs can lead a woman to feel helpless in the workplace. Helplessness worsens the physical and emotional effects of stress, and also prevents individuals from even trying to improve their situation.
Financial: Women on average earn less money than men and have a lower overall standard of living. Women often feel pressures from inadequate housing, poor access to healthcare, and fear of unexpected expenses. In such cases, women also have fewer opportunities for recreation and escape from day-to-day stress.
Caregiver: Women are likely to be the primary caretaker in the family. Though many men are taking active roles in parenting, women still provide the majority of childcare. There are great joys in parenting, but it can also be a physically and emotionally taxing responsibility. Women also are more likely to be the primary caregiver for aging parents and ill family members. Providing family care does not end at the close of a 40-hour workweek. Instead, the caretaker sometimes needs to provide 24-hours care on a daily basis.
Headache/Psychological Symptoms
Personality: Headache is not a psychological disorder, and the majority of headache sufferers do not have significant psychological problems. Physicians in the 1800s and early 1900s suggested that headaches were related to a particular personality pattern. Headache researchers have now collected over 200 scientific studies examining the personality and behavior of headache sufferers.
In most studies, headache sufferers tend to have increased daily stress, more difficulty coping with stress, and more mild symptoms of depression.
Depression: Women have a higher risk for depression than men. In fact, women are three times more likely to experience an episode of depression than men are. The reason for the increased risk is not entirely clear, but may relate to a combination of biological and environmental factors.
Depression also is known to occur more often in headache sufferers than non-headache sufferers. The stress of coping with a chronic painful medical condition, like headache, increases the risk of depression. Even low levels of depression can reduce the effectiveness of medication and behavioral or cognitive treatments for headache. Therefore, it is very important to recognize the signs of depression and discuss them with the physician. This information can help the physician select treatments that can relieve symptoms of both headache and depression.
Anxiety: As with depression, women are at a greater risk than men are for anxiety. Anxiety involves a state of tension or fear that occurs without clear cause. Anxiety can lower one's threshold to stress so that even small amounts of stress can be difficult for these sufferers to manage. Anxiety also can increase the level of pain or reduce the pain tolerance threshold during a headache that can undermine the effectiveness of traditional headache treatments. For some sufferers, it is necessary to treat both the anxiety and the headaches in order to get both under control.
Reprinted from the American Council for Headache Education (www.achenet.org)
