Girls more afraid of pain or boys more afraid of pain

The perception of pain is different between men and women, and women seem to be more afraid of pain.

What is this for?

One reason is that the perception of pain seems to be related to the secretion of male and female hormones in the brain. We know that endorphins in the brain can play a role in pain relief.

When we feel the physical pain or feel the great psychological pressure, the brain will secrete endorphins to improve our tolerance threshold, so we will feel less pain or less pain.

The scientists found that women at different times in the circadian cycle were not responsive to the pain of the brain.

In one experiment, the participants were given saline injections to give them a brief dose of pain, a time when the amount of endorphins secreted by men increased markedly, but there were two cases of women involved in the experiment. When the girls in the early period of the physiological cycle, that is, the follicle is not mature, then feel the pain of the female endorphin secretion will be reduced, they will feel significantly pain, pain than the boys reported a much stronger.

And their subjective feedback was more painful than the boys.

But when these girls were stuck with estrogen patches for 10 consecutive days, let the body feel that they are in a state of pregnancy, this time when the women feel pain in the amount of endorphins secretion will increase, the subjective report of the pain is also significantly lower, and become similar to boys, and even less than the boys reported pain.

Scientists believe this is because women have different needs at different stages of the physiological cycle. In the immature stage of the follicle, women need to protect their bodies to reproduce, so this time even a little bit of pain will be magnified to protect themselves from environmental damage.

When a woman is pregnant, because the body will undergo a lot of changes, women need to have a higher ability to endure pain, to allow themselves to endure the pain of pregnancy and production, so the pain threshold has risen.

Male hormones, such as testosterone, also affect the animal’s sense of pain.

Scientists have found that depriving young male mice of testosterone can make them feel more strongly about pain, similar in strength to normal female mice.

And when they become adults, if they are added testosterone, two weeks later, their perception of pain falls to the normal male mouse. If testosterone was injected into the female newborn mice, they would have a higher tolerance threshold for pain than the average female mouse, and they would become as likely as normal male mice to endure pain.

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