“That’s what I would have done once. But since I know this condition is a symptom of anxiety disorders, I’ve been trying to deal with it differently,” he says. He got up to break the tension, called a loved one, and grabbed a snack. It allowed him to break the spiral of fear and return to reality.
He also took a photo and posted it on his Instagram profile. He described what was happening to him. He added: “I’m not going to let all this anxiety bullshit take away my joy in life.
A guy can’t be a coward
When I ask him about this post, he answers without hesitation: – When you say fear out loud, it stops being so scary. The fact that among the scientific entries, which mainly consist of my profile, I include those about mental health, is a bit like therapy for me. And I do this despite the comments that “we shouldn’t talk about these subjects out loud”. They show that this is how it should be, because it is still taboo – he says.
He knows how much it helps people. They write that seeing this travel-loving biotechnologist and scientist struggle with mental illness and talk about it out loud, maybe they have nothing to be ashamed of either.
– And I know how many people, especially men, are ashamed. They don’t want to be seen as weak. I had already suffered from depression, so going to the psychiatrist when I was suffering from anxiety wasn’t so much of a problem, he says.
Although he admits that for a long time he couldn’t understand what was happening to him. He thought it was normal to feel fear. Until that fear began to take over his life. He had trouble leaving the house and traveling. Fear could paralyze him while shopping or at work. Things that were once easy for him became difficult.
It goes to your head and gets you down
He learns to recognize where he is coming from. Childhood definitely contributed. Mom, who huffed and puffed every time she did something to herself – this opened the door to health anxiety. Even the slightest pain began to seem like a serious threat, the beginning of a dangerous disease. According to Dawid, the times we live in have also brought about disorders.
– We are surrounded by so many stimuli that our brain doesn’t have time to process them. In addition, expectations about men become difficult to bear. On social media, we are bombarded with images of handsome, sculpted men who have a great career and money. At the same time, they are ideal partners, fathers, who can play with their daughter and fix a leaking tap. This goes to your head and depresses you. It makes you afraid that you will never be like that, says Dawid.
At the same time, she notes that men lack mutual support. Women’s relationships with friends are deeper. And even if they don’t have anyone close to them, women’s groups on Facebook come to the rescue, where they can talk to each other or find a friend to hang out with. “I was looking for such opportunities, and there were no options for men. I can only find a friend at the gym or at work. And it’s unlikely that I’ll find someone who’s ready to talk about emotions,” she says.
According to David, modern men are lonely. And it will remain so until the cultural approach to masculinity changes and the slogan: “Boys don’t cry” continues to apply.
Aggressive male mask
Statistics show that loneliness is a big problem for men. Especially younger men. The report “Feelings of loneliness among Polish adults” by the Generation Institute shows that 65 percent of people struggle with loneliness. Poles aged between 25 and 34 and 57 percent under the age of 24.
This feeling of being alone can lead to anxiety disorders. Until now, it seemed that they mainly affected women. But, as psychiatrist Irena Najbar notes, when you consider the most severe cases of depression, the statistics even out. “It could be similar with anxiety disorders. It makes us think that more women are choosing to seek help at an earlier stage of the illness. And men wait longer, so it may seem that they struggle less with mental health problems,” says Najbar.
Research from the UK health organisation Bupa also suggests that men are increasingly struggling with anxiety. They show that between 2020 and 2022, the number of online searches for “anxiety disorder symptoms in men” increased 13-fold.
Najbar emphasizes that, at the same time, they are more difficult to recognize in men because they can manifest themselves in slightly different ways. – Society allows women and men to behave differently. They can show tears, sadness, fear. Men tend to mask them as aggression or irritability. It can also involve dangerous driving and fleeing under the influence of alcohol and stimulants. It is difficult to ask someone who has died in an accident what happened to their mental health, but there is a suspicion that some of these events are due to disorders – explains the psychiatrist.
Midlife crisis
More and more men are also complaining about the midlife crisis and attribute it to the onset of anxiety disorders. Although this is not a scientific term and cannot be found in psychiatric classifications, Najbar admits that there is something to it.
– According to research, it affects approximately 10% of people in the middle of their lives. The fact that it occurs more often in men may be due to two things. Firstly, there is a social belief that such a crisis is affecting them, so by force of suggestion, we see it more often in them. Secondly, women are more self-reflective – prone to continuously analyzing life changes, piece by piece. Men are more likely to do this all at once, accumulating a lot of experience, which in fact can be difficult and lead to a crisis – the expert emphasizes.
Marcin, 39, associates his symptoms with this crisis. “During the pandemic, I started thinking that half of my life was already over, that I was actually already on a direct path to death. That I was about to start losing loved ones,” he says. He realizes that he is still young, but what do you do when such thoughts take over your life? They were accompanied by chest pain and difficulty breathing. Several times he convinced himself that he was having a heart attack and dying. He also started to feel anxious when there were too many people around or when a work deadline was approaching.
Like a father
– What I do certainly doesn’t help. I work in advertising, from job to job. Deadlines are always tight and clients like to send corrections at the last minute. And I’m responsible for that as the team leader, he says.
He says he also reacts with fear because his father did the same. This was the pattern he learned at home: when something stressful happens, you have to worry to the extreme. His father is still like that. He never asked for help. Marcin also took a long time; it seemed to him that going to the psychiatrist was only for seriously ill patients.
However, he had the courage to start talking about what was happening to him with some close friends. It turned out that they were facing similar problems. And that they were taking medication and going to therapy. It got him thinking.
– Until one day a bomb exploded in my head. I lay on the floor, unable to move. I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I made an appointment with the doctor,” he says.
He feels better, although he still feels that emotionally – as a man – he is in a worse position. – I live in a country where it is commonly believed that a real man should not show weakness. And that still affects me,” he emphasizes sadly.
Allowing emotions
Sociologist Prof. Tomasz Sobierajski is not surprised by such reflections. Although much is changing, the same patterns are still transmitted to the male part of the population.
– Young people cannot be different because they are raised by those who have internalized the toxic masculinity that was passed on to them by their parents and grandparents – he explains. – This is a big problem: people say that these machinist patterns are bad, but no one proposes new and better ones. This is also reflected in the current political situation. On the one hand, we have the Confederation, proposing traditional patterns of masculinity, which in practice weaken men, and on the other, there is the Left, saying that the old ones are bad, but offering no solutions or examples. Even if men want to change, they lack the tools to do so.
Furthermore, messages about talking openly about your emotions are mainly aimed at women. – And even though this content is gender-neutral, its main target audience is women. Culturally, they have always been more accepting of emotionality, says Sobierajski.
According to him, men still cannot talk about their weaknesses. The relationship between them is still a cockfight. Lined with fear of ridicule.
– What happens to them, and it’s not because other men don’t feel the same, they just put on masks in front of each other. No one prepares them for the fact that their souls can hurt, says the sociologist.
Influence of the environment
Getting help is essential in all of this. Psychiatrist Irena Najbar encourages you to support others in making this decision. “In a close relationship, you can say directly: ‘I see that you are going through a difficult time, it is worth seeing a specialist.’ Then you can help them choose a doctor and offer to accompany them to the facility,” she suggests.
Marcin is convinced that if it weren’t for the conversations with his friends and the fact that he lives in a liberal bubble where mental health is talked about a lot, he would never have gone to a psychiatrist. And if it weren’t for my partner who patiently repeated that treatment, it wouldn’t be such a shame.
He comments: – I prefer not to imagine what would happen to me if I lived in the country, among people with conservative values. My fears or the environment would affect me if I mentioned them out loud. I was lucky in a way that many people are not.
