Can You Tolerate Pain? Resilience is the Same Whether You're a Man or a Woman

It turns out that pain tolerance levels are pretty much the same--whether you're a man or a woman. Scientists have found that resilience, which is the person's ability to overcome adverse conditions and is the main quality associated with pain tolerance, is about the same for both genders.

Previous studies have actually shown that there are gender differences when it comes to the susceptibility to pain through illness, effectiveness of medications and recovery after anesthetic. In fact, these studies seemed to support the idea that women can tolerate pain better than men. That said, it seems as if this latest research proves otherwise.

In order to test pain tolerance, the scientists examined 400 patients with chronic spinal pain-190 men and 210 women. They found that the ability for women and men to come to terms with chronic pain was about the same.

"More resilient individuals tend to accept their pain, that is, they tend to understand that their ailment is chronic and they stop focusing on trying to get the pain to disappear, to focus their energy on enhancing their quality of life, despite the pain," said Carmen Ramirez-Maestre, the lead author of the new study, in a news release. "In this regard, patients who are able to accept their pain feel less pain, they are more active on a daily basis and have a better mood."

That's not all the scientists found, though. The researchers also noted that patients that feared pain also experienced significantly more anxiety and depression-and this is where the genders differed.

"However, this fear was only related to a greater degree of pain in the samples of men and this was the only difference found between the sexes," said Ramirez-Maestre.

The findings are published in The Journal of Pain.