Starting in the ’90s, alcohol companies launched products like Smirnoff Ice that were meant to appeal to young women. A book in the early 2000s promoted the idea that a thin, fabulous, European lifestyle allowed women to drink wine with almost every meal. In her 2019 book, Quit Like a Woman, Whitaker describes drinking alone after a night out, feeling proud to have had “only” a bottle of wine in a day, and carrying airplane shots of liquor around in her purse. Sometimes, she would start drinking in the morning and go until she passed out.
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Women were more likely than men to report and show sadness and anxiety following stress.What they found — As you might expect, all the participants who were exposed to the stressful situation consumed more booze than the control group.The present study examines gender differences in emotional and alcohol craving responses to stress that may relate to this gender divergence in disorders.I prefer to drink them straight up, ice cold in a fancy cocktail glass but others have pointed out that they make a great mixer as well.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.
I prefer to drink them straight up, ice cold in a fancy cocktail glass but others have pointed out that they make a great mixer as well. A 2023 study shows that alcohol-related deaths are rising faster in women than men. While males are still more likely to die from alcohol-related complications, the gap has narrowed. Between 2018 and 2020, annual alcohol-related deaths increased by 12.5% for men and 14.7% for women.
Environmental correlates of underage alcohol use and related problems of college students
Alcohol has slid along a similar trajectory, with the industry assuring women that all they need to get through the day is a glass of something. In the 1970s, women’s magazines advised readers that wine could be part of an “Anti-Tension Diet,” as the journalist Gabrielle Glaser writes in Her Best-Kept Secret. More than a decade ago, when Holly Whitaker worked a director-level job at a Silicon Valley start-up, insecurities haunted her.
Stress at college: Effects on health habits, health status and self-esteem
While these effects can occur regardless of gender, the societal perception and consequences may differ between men and women. Short-term and long-term health consequences for men and women differ significantly. In the short term, women tend to experience more severe hangovers and are at higher risk of alcohol poisoning due to their body’s different response to alcohol. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to engage in risky behaviors while under the influence, such as drunk driving or getting into physical altercations.
Participants rate on a 5-point scale the extent to which each word describes the way they feel at the present moment.This means that alcohol is less diluted in a woman’s body, leading to higher blood alcohol concentrations even when consuming the same amount as a man of similar weight.These cultural differences can significantly impact how men and women approach alcohol as a stress-coping tool.The gender divide in stress drinking is a complex issue rooted in biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors.
Stress Drinking Has a Gender Divide
Research staff was unaware of imagery condition and the content of the personalized imagery scripts assigned to each laboratory session. Studies of subjective emotion experience find that women report greater sadness (Brebner, 2003; Fischer et al., 2004) and anxiety/fear (Feingold, 1994; Fischer et al., 2004; Ollendick et al., 1995) than men. The few existing studies show that women express greater sadness and anxiety behaviorally and in their bodies than men while interacting with a spouse (Barnes and Buss, 1985) or viewing a sad film (Rottenberg et al., 2002). These data suggest that men and women respond to stress differently, with women experiencing greater sadness and anxiety, while men show a greater integration of reward motivation (craving) and emotional stress systems. These findings have implications for the gender- related divergence in vulnerability for stress-related disorders, with women at greater risk for anxiety and depression than men, and men at greater risk for alcohol-use disorders than women.
Comparative Effectiveness of Brief Alcohol Interventions for College Students: Results from a Network Meta-Analysis
Women were more likely than men to report and show sadness and anxiety following stress. Further, negative emotion was related to alcohol craving for men but not women. Men and women’s different responses to stress may have implications for the known divergences between men and women in vulnerability for stress-related disorders. Women’s focus on sadness and anxiety may lead to risk for depression and anxiety, disorders which are more common in women than men. Men’s stronger integration between negative emotion and craving may contribute to risk for the development of alcohol-use disorders, disorders which are more common for men than women. If this is true, it would have implications for the prevention and treatment of depression/anxiety and alcohol-use disorders.
The lack of gender diversity means there is a lack of good data on what tips people to problem drinking. 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. But what if you didn’t need the alcohol, because child care was ubiquitous and affordable, health care was cheap, and gender norms were more balanced? On a day prior to the laboratory sessions, participants were brought into the testing room in order to acclimate them to study procedures (e.g., rating forms) and to train them in imagery and relaxation, as described in Sinha (2001b) and Sinha et al. (2003). Both men and women received 1 hour of training in imagery and relaxation techniques. 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.
Stress, depression, irrational beliefs and alcohol use and problems in a college student sample
Our measure of behavioral/bodily arousal largely tapped anxiety (e.g., restlessness) or sadness (e.g., crying) behaviors and bodily sensations and thus may best be considered a behavioral or bodily indicator of anxiety/sadness. Taken together, these findings for subjective and behavioral measures are consistent with past findings that women report experiencing and expressing more sadness and anxiety than men (e.g., Brody, 1999; Levenson et al., 1994) and extend these findings to personally relevant emotional stress situations. Correlations were performed to ascertain the relationship among subjective emotion, behavioral and bodily responses, HR, BP, and craving in the stress and alcohol-cue conditions, separately for males and females.
Stress, by itself, can lead to excessive drinking in women but not men
I’ve tried dozens of non-alcoholic drinks but none have delighted me the way Kally does. Whereas other wine stand-ins often lack the complexity that makes it enjoyable in the first place, Kally is just the opposite. The sophisticated blends of verjus (a juice pressed from young tart chardonnay grapes), decaffeinated tea extracts and botanicals create layered flavors that are unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. Even more impressively, they linger in your mouth, making each one a total experience.
“There was just an inability to be with myself,” she told me, “and that manifested as fear.” She often sought comfort in alcohol. The Women and Alcoholism relief would start even as she anticipated drinking; at the first sip, she began to feel warm and right; numb, but also energized. Though rates of alcohol misuse are higher in men than women, women are catching up. Women also have a greater risk than men of developing alcohol-related problems. Men who experienced the same stress only drank to excess when they had already started consuming alcohol.