Anxious man

An insight into how a man with anxiety is often overlooked

For over three years now I’ve been struggling with anxiety. More specifically, health and social anxiety but in this piece I’m just going to talk about health anxiety.

Quite recently my dad had some serious heart surgery, it was a massive shock to my family and still affects each of us in many ways. As someone who already experienced health anxiety, this was massive for me. I’d often catastrophize about having a heart attack even though I’m a very healthy twenty-one year old.

I have a very photographic brain and when I hear about medical details I find it hard to detach what I’m hearing to my own physical experiencing. It’s a strange phenomenon and often it gets worse during high periods of stress. I know my thoughts are irrational but they can be very hard to control sometimes.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can usually tell someone I’d rather not talk about something if I know it will trigger my anxiety. To my surprise, people often don’t accept that I feel uncomfortable about discussing medical details.

For example, if someone is telling me a story about about an injury or a physical illness and I ask them to be more sensitive they’ll chuckle or look at me like they don’t believe me.

I’ve been laughed at more times than I can remember for being squeamish when I see blood or something.

I just find it quite contradictory because I’ve been seeing more and more online about men’s mental health awareness but often I see how traditional masculine traits are still very much reinforced.

This dismissal of my mental distress reinforces two of the four factors which David and Brannon (1976) coined as the four defining factors of traditional masculinity. These are ‘rejecting femininity’ and ‘never showing weakness’.

• If you’re wondering what I mean by rejecting femininity, it’s because I think anxiety is still largely viewed as a feminine trait. Therefore, I think dismissing men’s experiences of anxiety reinforces this idea that they should steer clear of anything related to femininity.

Personally, the dismissal of my anxiety makes me feel unable to speak about it.

I fear I will be judged or mocked by others which is a sad reality.

As we all know, the massive issue surrounding men’s mental health is that they don’t speak up enough. However, it’s quite obvious why they don’t speak up when we think about the traits of traditional masculinity which are still very prominent in most climates.

Luckily, for me I have a very supportive network of close people who I talk to daily, but it saddens me when I think about men who don’t have a network like I do.

If you take anything from this blog post, please consider how you respond to men when they talk about their struggles, however big or small.

Side-note: These are just my opinions and my own experiences, I’d love to chat if anyone has any thoughts surrounding this topic.

Have a great day, until next time,

Theo.