Anxiety and depression in men: A closer look
What happens when men suffer from depression and anxiety at the same time? Is that possible too? Well, the answer is yes. You may have depression and anxiety and it can be debilitating.
One of the worst feelings in the world is being a man between depression and anxiety. Often when we hear these terms we think someone is suffering from one or the other. They are either depressed or suffering from anxiety.
These are separate disorders, but they can affect you together at the same time. Anxiety can be a symptom of depression. It is also quite common to have depression caused by stress.
How Does It Feel?
With depression and anxiety, it’s often not the situation that directly affects how you feel and what you do, but your perception of the situation. It is what you think and sometimes what you think can be distorted.
You see, everything you feel is true, but not everything you think is true. Sometimes, we misinterpret information, ignore or overgeneralize the issues we face. It’s not your fault, you just think differently.
Related: 7 Mental Toughness Skills You Can Develop
When you are depressed and anxious, you may have distorted thoughts about yourself, the world around you, and the past, present, or future. One of the founders of cognitive behavioral therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck believed that people who suffer this way have a lot of repressed hostility toward themselves. It’s called retrospective hostility.
You can recognize this in your life if you are overly self-critical, have negative thoughts about yourself, or even feel suicidal. Feeling down from time to time is normal. Even feeling anxious occasionally is normal, but when you have these symptoms for weeks and weeks, you may be suffering from depression and/or anxiety.
You may have loss of appetite, insomnia or low energy levels. You might be thinking “just stay in the cave, hibernate and don’t come out, do nothing, nothing will ever work”. This is the stress side of the equation that makes you want to just disappear or do nothing. You may feel like you want to freeze time or step outside of it altogether.
Another symptom is disturbing dreams.
Do you have dreams where you are scared, alone and always the victim? Well, Dr. Beck examined the dreams of depressed patients and found that they often experienced unpleasant events in their dreams and upon further analysis and reflection found that they had a strong need to suffer.
It’s a symptom that you may be stuck between depression and anxiety.
What’s going through your mind?
There is something called the cognitive triad that I want to share with you. The cognitive triad is a therapeutic framework for analyzing key elements of a person’s belief system. This was first formulated by Dr. Aaron Beck in his book Depression: Causes and Treatment (see Amazon).
It happens like this – a person experiences negative opinions about himself. It leads to negative views of the world around them. This leads to negative views of their past, present or future. This process starts all over again with greater intensity. It spins and gains power with every turn.
Positive ideas and information are blocked from your mind and negative ideas are reinforced and reinforced. You begin to attribute negative events to your own flaws, even when the facts may indicate otherwise. This only serves to reinforce your negative core beliefs.
Positive information no longer fits your context, no matter how relevant or true it is. In fact, positive information is reprocessed inside your mind and reshaped to look like something negative, and that’s the only data your mind accepts.
Getting help with depression and anxiety
If this all sounds too familiar, then you don’t have to go through this alone. Actually, you are not alone. According to the American Psychological Association, men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women. Men are more likely to hide their feelings and turn to drugs and alcohol as a way of coping.
Related: 10 Ways Drinking Makes Depression Worse
You shouldn’t lose hope and you shouldn’t try to deal with failing mental health on your own. It’s not a sign of failure to talk to a counselor, therapist, or mental health professional. Some treatments don’t even involve medication.
In more than 100 documented case studies, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been found to be as effective as medication for treating depression and anxiety.
Part of what a CBT therapist or counselor does is help you create a dialogue between what you think in your head and how you feel in your heart. The goal is not to create a good feeling or 100% happy thoughts, but to create a sense of balance that you can manage.
Related: 5 good stress coping skills
Other ways to deal with depression and anxiety
To combat your depression and anxiety, it can be helpful to schedule activities that you find enjoyable. Your mind may be telling you not to do anything, or you may not want to move, but that’s exactly what you need to do.
You should think about things that brought you joy before the onset of your depression. What activities did you enjoy? Make a list of things you can do to create a sense of wholeness. Then see if you can’t slowly start getting back into those activities.
To combat anxiety, it can be helpful to gently begin to face the things that trigger your anxiety and think about how it makes you feel. If you suffer from social anxiety, then you can explore ways to interact with other people in ways that feel safe to you.
You might join a small book group or rekindle an old friendship through social media. It may help to think of social anxiety as a bathtub or pool of water that is too warm. If you start slow and slip on your toes, then your feet, then your feet… before you know it, the water isn’t that hot.
Surround yourself with positive ideas and affirmations. You can use sticky notes or write in your journal. You can text yourself on your smartphone or follow social media profiles that regularly post positive messages. The goal is to get out of the bubble of negative thoughts that dominate the way you process information.
There are many other ways to get out of that stuck feeling of depression and anxiety. It helps to talk to someone who can listen to your experience and use their experience to help you feel and think better.
