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Anxiety Looks Different in Men

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Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#71

Post by cissou »

wpietri wrote: post #66
spaceprison wrote: post #52

This is a great article. For years I didn't know how to handle anxiety so I handled it "like a man" which lead to a pretty decent drinking habit. Now that I've stopped drinking and being open about what's going on with me, my anxiety looks like traditional anxiety which was easy for my gp to help diagnose. Taking the leap to be open and get help was the best thing to happen to me in years.

For this audience, I would add that anxiety is in some sense often a career positive. During the years I spent as a sysadmin, the continuous feeling that something was about to gowrong and I really needed to prepare for it was useful to my employers. Even if it was bad for me, my relationships, and my physical health.

The worst thing about this is that realizing it isn't necessarily the first step to improving your condition. On the contrary, it can lead to cultivating your own anxiety, because it gives you opportunities you wouldn't get with a more healthy work life...

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#72

Post by throwaway94857 »

Kye wrote: post #46
smithmayowa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? We're far wealthier in the US than the vast majority of the world. It's not propaganda, it's data and fact.

Healthcare and education are generally more expensive here than in Europe, but people also get paid more here and keep more of their salaries than in the rest of the developed world. Goods are much cheaper in the US than in Europe and we generally enjoy more material wealth than the Europeans.

You are deluding yourself with your bigotry against the US.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#73

Post by [deleted] »

n_u_l_l wrote: post #68
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…

Thank you for writing this. Last December I started getting some kind of weird 'fog' in my head. I didn't take it seriously when it first started and thought it would go away on its own. But instead it became worse and I got severely cognitively impaired. My speech got slow, I forgot basic words, I forgot names of people I knew, my logical thinking was impaired. It improved a little bit but I'm still incredibly cogni…

[deleted]

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#74

Post by milesvp »

n_u_l_l wrote: post #68
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…

Thank you for writing this. Last December I started getting some kind of weird 'fog' in my head. I didn't take it seriously when it first started and thought it would go away on its own. But instead it became worse and I got severely cognitively impaired. My speech got slow, I forgot basic words, I forgot names of people I knew, my logical thinking was impaired. It improved a little bit but I'm still incredibly cogni…

You may want to attempt to improve your sleep. Foggy head with reduced cognition and memory loss are pretty major symptoms of long term inadequate sleep. They’re very common symptoms that parents of young children complain about, and can have some very long recovery times. Personally it took almost 6 months to recover once my first child started sleeping through the night. All it takes is an hour a night deficit for an extended period of time to really impact mental acuity, but you might not notice because it’s almost enough on a daily basis, and by the time the cumulative effects show up, it’s not always obvious sleep is the culpret.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#75

Post by paul7986 »

spaceprison wrote: post #52

This is a great article. For years I didn't know how to handle anxiety so I handled it "like a man" which lead to a pretty decent drinking habit. Now that I've stopped drinking and being open about what's going on with me, my anxiety looks like traditional anxiety which was easy for my gp to help diagnose. Taking the leap to be open and get help was the best thing to happen to me in years.

I suffered with it from like 19 (came out of nowhere) til my late 20s when I started talking about it openly with friends, family, other people in general and realized wait im not alone were all nuts yet normal.

Wish I talked about way earlier and came to that realization.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#76

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#77

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

In this case it seems like women being usually more open emotionally means that anxiety manifests in a more intuitive way, whereas for men there's another layer of indirection due to emotional repression.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#78

Post by szemet »

ZitchDog wrote: post #61
dleslie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may be so bold as to inquire, what was your path to stop drinking? Do you find you replaced it with another coping mechanism?

Not OP, but I had a similar experience. Getting to the root of things with CBT caused me to completely change my relationship with alcohol. At this point, heavy drinking has become a clear path to increasing my anxiety, and it’s easy to abstain.

Not OP, and kind of cliché (with the common corollaly to seek professional advice instead of internet wisdom), but:

excercise - and for me it was more anxiety+smoking but less anxiety led to less drinking too(which I did not recognize as a problem at the time)

I consciously used it as a replacement: when I was stressed and need of a cigarette, I told myself that I actually feel the miss of a good run - and for me running really helped somewhat, so it was enough to start a positive feedback loop. It is also good that both drinking and smoking makes excercising harder, which I tried to (and many times could) use as a fact against them ("if i now drink i wont be able to wake up early enough to go for a run", "if i smoke it will much harder to breath")

And another internet wisdom cliché ;) regarding anxiety: stop drinking coffee (tea...)...

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#79

Post by throwaway93749 »

dleslie wrote: post #59
spaceprison wrote: post #52

This is a great article. For years I didn't know how to handle anxiety so I handled it "like a man" which lead to a pretty decent drinking habit. Now that I've stopped drinking and being open about what's going on with me, my anxiety looks like traditional anxiety which was easy for my gp to help diagnose. Taking the leap to be open and get help was the best thing to happen to me in years.

If I may be so bold as to inquire, what was your path to stop drinking? Do you find you replaced it with another coping mechanism?

In my case, getting hired by one of the Big Four tech companies.

Always was a high performer, but didn't feel satisfied at other companies. I felt I was worth much more than what I was getting paid. I needed the validation and at least the perception of being with the best. I kept pushing my application since it felt daunting and I had failed Google once. I also made up excuses why a big tech company isn't worth it anyway, and that I shouldn't have to go through whiteboarding. But I'm much, much happier now. Glad I gave it a shot.

Re: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

#80

Post by scrungus »

bitcurious wrote: post #58
jacobolus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> To fix the problem it would be better to address the causes of the stress instead of trying to just treat symptoms. The effect of depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental illnesses is that they prevent you from taking steps to address the addressable issues in your life. To start exercising while depressed, to start socializing while suffering from anxiety, etc., are some of the hardest things to do. That’s…

do you think that, in general, medication is successful in improving the agency of it's users?

i worry that medication harbors a reliance on drugs, and facilitates growth of a society in which drug-use is necessary to participate "normally".

if someone with ADD/ADHD has an opportunity to increase their agency, do you think that would increase their quality of life? the parent commenter suggested that mental illness (in the case of depression) might be the result of someone with healthy brain chemistry in a bad environment. but do you think that someone with healthy brain chemistry can demonstrate an attention disorder as a result of their environment, and would be more able to improve their environment through medication?

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