Women and Self-Criticism

Article from Oprah Magazine Women and the Negativity Factor that explains some neurological reasons that women have low self-esteem and are prone to self-criticism.

Fascinating.

Excerpt:

"It turns out there's an area of your brain that's assigned the task of negative thinking," says Louann Brizendine, MD, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of The Female Brain. "It's judgmental. It says 'I'm too fat' or 'I'm too old.' It's a barometer of every social interaction you have. It goes on red alert when the feedback you're getting from other people isn't going well." This worrywart part of the brain is the anterior cingulate cortex. In women, it's actually larger and more influential, as is the brain circuitry for observing emotions in others. "The reason we think females have more emotional sensitivity," says Brizendine, "is that we've been built to be immediately responsive to the needs of a nonverbal infant. That can be both a good thing and a bad thing."

The hormonal surges in the female brain—what Brizendine describes as the rising tide of estrogen and progesterone—make a woman more sensitive to emotional nuance, such as disapproval or rejection.

A study at the University of Texas how easily body image is undermined: A group of adolescent girls were in a room with an attractive woman who complained about how fat she was (the implication being that anybody who was heavier than she would really have something to complain about). There was an immediate impact on the body image of the girls, even though the encounter was brief and the woman was a stranger. "Up to 50 percent of adolescent girls have body image concerns," says Eric Stice, PhD, lead researcher on that study. "Up to 70 percent of girls say they would take a pill to lose five pounds; with males, it's maybe 15 percent. And puberty moves young men toward the ideal male body image, strong and muscled, but moves young women away from the ideal female body image, lean with no hips. It's really sad that adolescent girls look at airbrushed images in the media that aren't even real. They're killing themselves for something that isn't real."