The cause of anxiety in women has been found

Scientists led by Olivia Harrison from the University of Otago have made a breakthrough in understanding gender differences in anxiety states. Researchers found that women with increased anxiety experience significantly reduced confidence in assessing their own bodily sensations, although the accuracy of perception remains unchanged. Men do not show a similar pattern. The research results are published in the prestigious European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN).

The scientific team focused on studying interoception - a person's ability to perceive internal body signals, including breathing, heartbeat, and hunger. This system is fundamental for regulating both physical and emotional states. Until now, there were only assumptions about the effect of anxiety on interoceptive awareness, but specific data on differences between sexes was lacking.

The large-scale study involved 175 volunteers from four European laboratories with approximately equal ratios of men and women. Participants were asked to perform 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.

Analysis of the results revealed a striking pattern: anxious people generally trusted their sensations less, despite their actual accuracy. However, when dividing the data by sex, it was discovered that the decrease in confidence and ability to correlate it with actual accuracy was 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.

Notably, the general abilities to perceive respiratory changes and the basic level of confidence did not differ between sexes. Differences manifested specifically 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 obvious gender differences. This emphasizes the special role of situational anxiety in reducing trust in bodily sensations specifically in women.

"We want not just to better understand the mechanisms of anxiety, but also to develop more precise, individualized methods for its treatment," emphasized the research leader Olivia Harrison.

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