Men, women have anxiety over COVID pandemic for different reasons. Study explains why

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the anxiety of people all over the world. But a newly published Canadian study found that the risk factors linked to anxiety disorders have differed between men and women.

According to the study, conducted at the University of Toronto and published on Jan. 29, around 1 in 7 Canadians experienced generalized anxiety disorder during the early stages of the pandemic. But anxiety in men was more likely to be driven by exposure to COVID-19 misinformation, whereas anxiety in women was exacerbated by issues like unstable employment.

The study used data from the Canadian Perspective Survey Series and included 1,753 male and 2,016 female participants age 15 and older.

The prevalence of GAD was also “significantly higher” among women in general than among men, according to a news release on the study. Women were also more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders before the pandemic, the study said.

Symptoms of GAD can include feeling nervous, not being able to control worrying, having difficulty relaxing or becoming easily annoyed, the release said. Anxiety disorders are “among the top ten causes of disability worldwide,” the study said.

The lead author of the study, Shen Lamson Lin, attributed the findings in part to the fact that this pandemic is the first to exist in the age of social media, which made it far easier for misinformation to spread. That misinformation could include “vaccine rumors and unproven treatments,” Lin said in the release.

According to the release, men who were exposed to misinformation on COVID-19 at least once a week were three times more likely to report having anxiety than men who weren’t, and men who were exposed to misinformation multiple times a day were six and a half times more likely to report a “clinically significant” level of anxiety than those who saw misinformation rarely or not at all.

Men who were exposed to misinformation and didn’t seek out correct information on the pandemic also reported higher odds of experiencing anxiety, the study said. Men may have been more likely than women to experience misinformation-related anxiety because of the “gender gap in news consumption,” or the phenomenon in which women may consume less news because of the other demands in their lives, the study said.

Meanwhile, women were more likely to be affected by factors relating to employment, such as job instability, business closures, layoffs, mandatory quarantines and COVID-19 infections, the study found. In particular, women who were in an unstable state of employment were three times more likely to experience GAD than those who were securely employed.

Men may have been less likely to experience employment-related anxiety because “job precarity was not evenly distributed among genders,” the release said.

Women are also overrepresented in fields like health care, social care, and the food service and accommodation sectors, where they’re “often underpaid and have a higher risk of exposure to COVID-19 pathogens,” Lin said in the release.

Anxiety could also be influenced by factors like the consumption of alcohol, cannabis or “junk” food, the study said, adding that people of all genders could experience increased anxiety as a result of increased consumption. But the findings overall reflect that “mental health interventions need to be gender responsive” and should address “social determinants of health,” Lin said in the release.

In particular, the study suggested that better management of the COVID-19 “infodemic,” or the spread of misinformation online, would reduce anxiety in men. Individually, men could curb their anxiety by taking breaks from consuming COVID-19 news and relying on trusted sources, including health care professionals, the study said.

The study also suggested that measures like income replacement and occupational justice would decrease anxiety in women — in other words, having more money and more mental health resources tailored specifically to women in precarious states of employment could reduce women’s anxiety overall.

“It is vital to implement gender-specific interventions for an equitable pandemic response,” Lin wrote in the study.

This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 12:18 PM with the headline "Men, women have anxiety over COVID pandemic for different reasons. Study explains why."