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A new study has revealed that girls stress out their brain more than boys do, due to anxiety of a given task. The research also says that this makes girls perform poorer than boys in the long run.

Like getting sweaty palms, working the brain too much is also a sign of anxiety in females.

Researchers carried out the study with electrode caps, which measured the brain activity of 149 students who were given a simple task to do.

The study, led by Jason Moser, PhD, from the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University, was published in International Journal of Psychophysiology.

The task given to the students, of which 79 were females and 70 were males, was to simply identify the middle letter of a five-letter sequence while they were also asked how much they worried, etc.

The results revealed that although there was not much difference between the male and the female students, the brain activity was found to be higher in girls who worried more.

Apparently, the girls who worried more, found the task to be more difficult. Their brain worked harder compared to others and as the difficulty of the tests increased, they were prone to make more mistakes. The anxiety clearly showed affect on their performance and according to researchers, this was due to the fact that their brain was more distracted due to anxiety and had additional pressure apart from completing the task.

This could be a problem faced by students at school and could be the reason for low performance in girls and boys. 

Increased level of anxiety and brain activity in girls could be because of estrogen, explain the researchers. Estrogen affects dopamine, which could be stimulating parts of the frontal lobe that are involved with learning, said the report.

Brain challenges and penning down worries has been recommended by the researchers in order to help reduce anxiety, says the report.