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Anxiety Looks Different in Men

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Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#41

Post by pizza »

nness wrote: post #25
psweber wrote: post #6

Many anxious men (and women) aren't suffering from an anxiety disorder. Their anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to the life they are living. I'm fine with therapy, meditation, and medication as long as they aren't used as tools to make it bearable to stay in a bad situation.

This comment couldn't be more counter-productive. The article makes it clear that a feeling of anxiety at certain times is completely normal; it is when that anxiety is affects your daily life, causing you distress, or leads to depression or harm should it be concidered an anxiety disorder. The article notes that men can react to or present with anxiety differently; and that representation is ignored, leading to a re…

The GP's comment merely says that your environment can have a huge detrimental impact on your mental health. In no way is that dismissive of seeking help. They even applaud the use of the 'normal' tools.

In fact, the scenario that you describe of a person exhibiting symptoms of anxiety disorder because every day is distressing is pretty much exactly the same scenario the GP is saying about a life-setup that is causing you harm.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#42

Post by RickS »

goostavos wrote: post #36
jdsfighter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was only recently diagnosed with anxiety after spending thousands and thousands on an emergency room visit and visits to a cardiologist, and I work for a healthcare company with free access to GPs! I had a variety of symptoms and none of them immediately seemed to shout "anxiety" to my physicians. I was given dozens of blood screenings, X-Rays, CT Scans, EKGs, Echocardiograms, stress tests, sleep studies, only to b…

Have you had any mood / behavioral changes from the lexapro? I similarly stacked up a ton of doctor visits due to dizziness, chest tightness, blood pressure spikes, etc... My doc is leaning towards the same generalized axiety /panic disorder, but were currently experimenting with just taking an antihistamine to calm down. "Real" medication is the next step, but, honestly, the thought of having to take something "alte…

Lexapro preserved my personality shockingly well. A friend who took it said the same thing. We felt like ourselves the whole time, just without so much anxiety. If you drink caffeine or consume sugar, the "altering" thing is already out the window. And it doesn't have to be your whole life. I'm off it after a few years.

The only downside to lexapro was that my anxiety and depression were partly if not primarily the result of a bunch of poor mental models and resulting poor life choices. I believed a bunch of mean shit about myself, and so looked after myself with a commensurate neglect. On the meds, I kept living poorly; I just wasn't so acutely distraught about it.

It did work to alleviate my anxiety, and in the process train me to catch panic attacks early and think myself out of a spiral. I'm glad I took it when I did, because it helped and I didn't have the courage or wherewithal to go to therapy that early in my life. But I'm also glad I'm off it.

Unless your anxiety is seriously debilitating, I would suggest you spend 6 months in CBT / talk therapy, before going on medication. Or go on em but also do therapy simultaneously.

Either something in your mind is generating this anxiety, and it's worth it to get under the hood and treat the underlying issue. Or it's truly random, and it's a good idea to train your mind to be resilient to such things.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#43

Post by nostrademons »

chubot wrote: post #32
rabidrat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the anxiety seems to come from a place of the entire human society being out of balance? I pretty much think if you're not feeling anxious, you're not paying attention.

Do you think that society is more out of balance now than it was 30, 50, 70, or 100 years ago? If so, I’ll be glib and say you haven’t paid enough attention to history :-) To pick a random anecdote, in the past senators have been physically attacked and maimed by their colleagues on the senate floor , i.e. while at work. Campaigns were dirtier than they are now. Politicians would accuse each other of being murderers…

Standards are higher now. We're more aware of more potential emotional triggers.

I've observed that with the Internet increasing our potential access to information by > 1000x, the adaptive emotional response to any given piece of information needs to be toned down by a factor of 1000x to maintain emotional stability. Wouldn't make me very popular at parties to say that the proper emotional response to kids getting murdered at a festival is to shrug your shoulders and say "By the numbers, your odds of getting killed in a mass shooting are still one in a million, which is less than when we were kids", but that's both a true and a rational statement to make.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#44

Post by smithmayowa »

jpernst wrote: post #29
koboll wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had almost exactly the same problem, down to identical symptoms -- same side of my body, etc. My guess it that it's due to some supplements I was taking years ago (chiefly 5-HTP and magnesium) causing chest pain and/or heart palpitations, and the experience of that etching trauma into my psyche in a way that makes me experience physical symptoms. The worst part is that it feeds on itself, until I was sitting on a sid…

Similar experience, including multiple trips to the ER fearing my imminent death. Still waiting for the bill on the latest one. The first time it happened I had dialed 911 on my phone but stopped short, fearing the impending life-ruining debt it might plunge me into. Thankfully it wasn't actually a heart attack, but the fact that people even have to stop to make a risk assessment like that is dystopian. As for the sy…

It is saddening to hear that the fear of resulting financial debt due to hospital bills, stopped you short from dialing 911 in such a precarious situation.

There goes my fantasy that in the west at least health care was top notch and affordable compared to Africa.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#45

Post by furyofantares »

I’ve thought about this a bit. I don’t have anger issues but I have anxiety issues and I spent decades not understanding that I experienced anxiety. In my experience, the culture tells men to exhibit strength and show no weakness. What counts as strength/weakness has changed over time and varies depending on your social groups — it’s not just the stuff associated with typically masculine values, but it also shows up in coding skills, or parenting skills, or how much work one takes on in those or other domains without complaint. In Behave by Robert Sapolsky, it’s repeatedly observed that testosterone doesn’t necessarily amplify aggression, but it does drive status-seeking/maintaining behavior, where status is some set of collective values where one member can have more or less of it than another and be seen as above or below the other. To me, this maps very well to generalized sense of strength or weakness.

So, in my opinion, men are both wired and trained by the culture to avoid admitting anxiety, to themselves and others, because it is a weakness.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#46

Post by Kye »

smithmayowa wrote: post #44
jpernst wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar experience, including multiple trips to the ER fearing my imminent death. Still waiting for the bill on the latest one. The first time it happened I had dialed 911 on my phone but stopped short, fearing the impending life-ruining debt it might plunge me into. Thankfully it wasn't actually a heart attack, but the fact that people even have to stop to make a risk assessment like that is dystopian. As for the sy…

It is saddening to hear that the fear of resulting financial debt due to hospital bills, stopped you short from dialing 911 in such a precarious situation. There goes my fantasy that in the west at least health care was top notch and affordable compared to Africa.

The propaganda we export out of the US regarding our wealth is self-delusion. A lot of people here believe many fantastical things that should be trivially dispelled by skimming GoFundMe's Discover page.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#47

Post by jacobolus »

nness wrote: post #25
psweber wrote: post #6

Many anxious men (and women) aren't suffering from an anxiety disorder. Their anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to the life they are living. I'm fine with therapy, meditation, and medication as long as they aren't used as tools to make it bearable to stay in a bad situation.

This comment couldn't be more counter-productive. The article makes it clear that a feeling of anxiety at certain times is completely normal; it is when that anxiety is affects your daily life, causing you distress, or leads to depression or harm should it be concidered an anxiety disorder. The article notes that men can react to or present with anxiety differently; and that representation is ignored, leading to a re…

If you are chronically stressed because you are working a terrible job, have overwhelming family obligations, etc., that doesn’t necessarily mean you have an “anxiety disorder”.

It might instead be that your anxiety is a perfectly natural response to bad circumstances. To fix the problem it would be better to address the causes of the stress instead of trying to just treat symptoms.

At a societal scale, it would be better to e.g. improve worker protection laws, expand the social safety net, subsidize childcare for working parents, crack down on fraudulent business practices, allow people to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy, make sure skilled immigrant workers can switch employers without losing their immigration status, work to reduce domestic violence, reform the criminal justice system, etc. instead of just expanding access to anxiolytic medication or pretending that therapy alone can solve all problems.

For an individual, the proper response might be to quit a job, start saying “no” to demands to work overtime, break up with an abusive partner, sit down and have a frank conversation with overly demanding parents, declare bankruptcy, take a leave of absence from college, let someone else take over maintaining the open source project, ...

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#49

Post by ezekg »

koboll wrote: post #12
jdsfighter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was only recently diagnosed with anxiety after spending thousands and thousands on an emergency room visit and visits to a cardiologist, and I work for a healthcare company with free access to GPs! I had a variety of symptoms and none of them immediately seemed to shout "anxiety" to my physicians. I was given dozens of blood screenings, X-Rays, CT Scans, EKGs, Echocardiograms, stress tests, sleep studies, only to b…

Had almost exactly the same problem, down to identical symptoms -- same side of my body, etc. My guess it that it's due to some supplements I was taking years ago (chiefly 5-HTP and magnesium) causing chest pain and/or heart palpitations, and the experience of that etching trauma into my psyche in a way that makes me experience physical symptoms. The worst part is that it feeds on itself, until I was sitting on a sid…

Why do you attribute this to 5-HTP and magnesium? I take both, and other nootropics, and also experience similar symptoms when I’m stressed.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#50

Post by mjfl »

ggm wrote: post #10

Most sex differentiated medical stories which pop up in my feed tend to be about drug interactions in women being misunderstood because of the overtesting of males. That mental illness is mis-characterised in men, speaks to me of two things: 1) we haven't had a large enough war to produce the volume of war psychosis outcomes which correct for this and 2) women are tragically over-represented in all forms of mental il…

3) We really don't know what mental illness is, outside of what makes people criminally violent.
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