Most of the men I see wouldn’t tell you they have anxiety; they’d tell you they’ve got a lot going on.
They are the ones other people ring when something needs sorting. They are capable and organized, two steps ahead of what’s coming. Underneath all that, they haven’t properly switched off in years.
When one of them does get in touch, it’s rarely because he feels anxiety in men. Moreover, it’s because he isn’t sleeping. Additionally, his patience has gone somewhere he can’t find it. Finally, somebody at home has said something that went in deeper than it was meant to.
Anxiety in men quite often doesn’t announce itself as anxiety at all. It turns up wearing the clothes of competence, and because competence gets rewarded, he keeps taking on more, whilst saying nothing.
What if I can’t cope
The questions sitting underneath are usually some versions of what if this goes wrong, what if they realize, I’m not as on top of things as they think I am, what if I can’t hold it all together.
No mind can answer a what if about something that hasn’t happened yet.
In a reality full of infinite possibilities, it keeps trying anyway.
Because trying feels like doing something, it seems to prefer action to not knowing.
The thought produces a feeling.
That feeling is taken as evidence of a real problem.
Then it goes around again with slightly more conviction than before.
That’s the loop.
Thus, anxiety in men makes many feel overwhelmed and exhausted.
They juggle too many balls, afraid to drop any, fearing what it says about self-image.
Why anxiety in men takes shape
Like so many of the problematic behaviors we adopt, they started out as patterns that were rewarded.
A boy who finds the solution gets approval for it.
A boy who’s more emotionally reactive is told to man up and not make a fuss.
After thirty years of that you have an adult with one extremely well-developed way of living, coping and validating his self-worth.
So, when something arrives that can’t be fixed through an outdated way of thinking, such as a feeling, a fear, or a situation that requires a more intuitive response, he reaches for the tool he trusts and applies it over and over to the one thing it was never going to work on.
You can’t think your way out of a feeling.
Emotions aren’t problems to be solved, they are experiences that need to be felt and allowed to move.
Additionally, if e-motion is energy in motion, that energy has to go somewhere.
A man who never learned how to let his feelings move through him continues to think his way out.
This is why the thinking doesn’t stop and where the confusion sets in.
The pressure from within
Underneath the overthinking there’s almost always a standard, and it’s invariably one he set himself.
It sounds like I should be able to handle this, other people seem to manage, and if I needed help it would say something about me I’d rather not let others see. The expectations most men are laboring under aren’t really coming from their boss or their partner or their father; those people set the standard once, a long time ago, and he’s been enforcing it on himself ever since, far more harshly than any of them ever did. That’s why reassurance makes so little difference.
You can tell a man he’s doing well, and he’ll accept it politely and go straight back to the internal audit, because the person marking him isn’t you.
The inability to say no belongs here too, because saying no means somebody might be disappointed, and disappointment means the standard has been missed, so he takes on more instead, and everything he takes on becomes one more thing filling up his stress bucket to the point of overflow.
Why the overthinking doesn’t switch off
Ask a man when his mind goes quiet and you’ll usually get a long pause, and then that it doesn’t, or that it used to. It isn’t quiet in the car or in the shower, and it’s certainly not quiet in bed, which is the one everybody notices in the end, because the lights are off and there’s no task left to hide inside and the mind finally has the floor to itself.
This is generally where the body starts sending the bill, and unfortunately it hardly ever gets read as an emotional problem. Broken sleep gets put down to a busy week, the short fuse to the people around him, the flat appetite and the missing libido to getting older and low testosterone, and the tightness across the chest to nothing in particular.
Men are far more likely to come forward with the physical symptom than the emotional one, partly because the physical one feels permitted; a bad back is allowed, whereas lying awake at two in the morning with your jaw clenched is not something to share with others.
My own version of it
I’m naturally analytical. Fifteen years as a personal trainer, computer programming before that, and I’m very much a solution-focused hypnotherapist now, so I’ve always liked finding the pattern and getting to the answer. For years that same quality quietly fed my own overthinking, because a mind that’s good at solving things doesn’t stop politely at the problems that can actually be solved.
What changed it wasn’t more thinking. It was coming out of my head and into my body, slowing down, breathing, putting my attention deliberately onto what I could see and hear and feel, and observing what was genuinely going on inside me rather than narrating it.
What helped me was to place a hand on my heart and to ask questions from that place in my body away from the mind. This was when I started to realize the peace and space you create, when you stop trying to figure it all out from thought alone, and allow your intuitive senses to start speaking up.
Where it actually begins
As I review a client’s timeline with him, the overthinking is rarely where the story starts.
Often the earliest details reveal the real trigger.
There’s usually an earlier experience sitting underneath it, and more to the point a story he’s carried about that experience ever since. Something went wrong at a point when he wasn’t in any position to control it, or being wrong at home carried consequences. The story that attaches itself is some version of if I stay ahead of everything then nothing can catch me out, which is a remarkably good strategy for a frightened child and a full-time unpaid job for a man of forty-five.
That story is the direct reason the anxiety exists, and it runs on its own without ever stopping. It’s also why insight on its own so often fails these men. They understand their own pattern perfectly, they can usually explain it rather better than I can, but you can’t solve a problem using the same tools that created it in the first place.
What helps
Two things, and they work at different depths.
The first is interrupting the loop while it’s running, which means getting out of the head and into the body through the breath and the senses, both of which only exist in the present moment, which is precisely where anxiety doesn’t. Anxiety lives in the anticipation of what’s coming. Slowing down feels wrong every single time, because everything in the pattern is telling you to speed up and get on top of it, and that is exactly how you know you’re doing the opposite of the thing that hasn’t been working.
The second is the deeper more patient work on the story underneath, and that’s where hypnotherapy earns its place, because it works at the level where that story is actually formed rather than the level where it plays out.
Most of the men I sit with aren’t trying to become somebody else, they want to go back to the version of themselves that was freer and lighter. They’d like to get through a Thursday without their mind providing a running commentary on it, and to be in the room with the people they love rather than away in their heads trying to solve a problem that can’t be fixed with their thoughts alone.
If your mind has been working on overdrive for a long time, that isn’t weakness; it’s a sign that you’re human. Saying what’s going on, asking for help and learning to say no won’t make others think less of you as a man but it may just prevent you from silently imploding, then you’re no use to anyone.
If you’d like to talk this through, you can book a free 45 minute call with me.
