Live from the Lenser Summit: Men Are From Mars, Women Are Stressed Out

San Raphael, CA—Men and women have different ways of reacting to things, according to Dr. John Gray. While that statement hardly comes as a shocker, Gray–author of 15 books, including the 1992 best-seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus–explained to attendees of the Lenser Client Summit a few reasons why men and women are so different.

For starters, women have 10 times more connecting tissue to different parts of the brain, which means they can listen while they’re thinking. “Women have superhighways from the left to the right sides of the brain,” Gray said. “With men, it’s more like back roads with stop signs—we can’t listen while [women] are talking.”

A women’s emotional memory is twice as big as a man’s, he said, and as a result, women tend to obsess more than men. “Women have the never-ending to-do list,” Gray explained. “Men don’t work that way.”

Men want to forget stressful things, especially if they can’t fix them, Gray said. So a man is likely to react to a stressful day by retreating to his “cave.” That’s why many men turn to TV (or books, magazines, and newspapers) as a distraction from stress at the end of the day.

Women, on the other hand, want to discuss the source of their stress, he noted, because communication hopes them cope better. For women, discussing problems actually stimulates the production of Serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood and provides a feeling of well being. “All dissatisfaction is linked to low Serotonin,” Gray said.

What does any of this have to do with multichannel marketing? Nothing really, but it was interesting. At one point, Gray told the audience “to a certain extent, everybody that’s buying from your catalogs is depressed.”