Women get over pain quickly

Though women are more sensitive to pain than men, they get over their discomfort more quickly than men do.

It is not clear how males and females cope with pain over time and how sensory and emotional qualities fluctuate from moment to moment. To explore this, researchers from Canada identified 32 adults and exposed them to a moderately painful stimulus - a heat-producing probe placed on the skin. They assessed multiple pain dimensions - both sensory and emotional, over a period of time and obtained continuous ratings of pain, burning, sharp, stinging, cutting, and annoyance evoked by repeated prolonged noxious heat stimuli.

Though women were initially more sensitive to pain, after the first 20 seconds, women reported a decline in both the intensity of the pain and their annoyance with it - until they were actually less bothered than men. Men, in contrast, showed no similar adaptation. 

The sex disparity was also seen when the study participants were exposed to the heat a second and third time - with women feeling less pain and annoyance than their male counterparts throughout.

The results seem to throw a wrench into past findings suggesting that women generally have less tolerance for pain. A key limitation of those studies was that they gauged people's initial reactions to a quickly removed pain stimulus while participants in the current study withstood the heat for 30-second intervals. The study findings reveal a prominent sex difference in the time course of pain. Women adapt to the situation more readily than men and show habituation that allows them to experience less pain over time.

Exactly why women and men differed in their ability to adapt is unclear and requires further research.