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" A lot of jabber has been jawed over the years about women&amp;#039;s anxiety. Most recently gals are said to be stressed-out by the pressures of leaning in and having it all. In Betty Friedan&amp;#039;s time, we were having our nineteenth nervous breakdown and gulping down mother&amp;#039;s little helpers to fend off the claustrophobia of limited choices. Women are diagnosed with anxiety disorders twice as often as men and prescribed around twice as many medications for it. It has ever been thus: The stereotypical lady twisting her hankie and succumbing to the vapors goes back at least to the age of Hippocrates, when female anxiety was called hysteria, from the Greek word for womb. But stick a finger in the winds of the zeitgeist and you&amp;#039;ll feel an icy new gust of dread blowing. Suddenly, for every Nervous Nellie, there&amp;#039;s a Nervous Neil reaching out a trembling hand for support. It turns out that men are also anxious as hell\u2014and they&amp;#039;re not going to sublimate it anymore. Louis C.K. has become a sort of spiritual guru for the isolated man with his show Louie, a magnum opus of existential angst. (Ever noticed that for his theme song, C.K. changed the lyrics of &amp;quot;Brother Louie&amp;quot; from the original &amp;quot;Louie, Louie, you&amp;#039;re gonna cry&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Louie, Louie, you&amp;#039;re gonna die&amp;quot;?) Obama is on Paxil (&amp;quot;Second Term Strength&amp;quot;) in the imaginations of Saturday Night Live&amp;#039;s culture vultures. And if you look beyond the obsessive-compulsive tics and nervous chatter of Hannah and Shoshanna on Girls, you&amp;#039;ll notice that Ray and Adam are in an even colder sweat of panic. Hysteria is so first millennium; welcome to the age of high scrotiety! Related: New Dating Rules: The Subtleties of &amp;#039;Relationship Lite&amp;#039; Stepping out before this backdrop are two prominent men with new anxiety memoirs. Last month Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, debuted My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, a carefully reported, wryly funny, and admirably honest historical and personal investigation. And next month we&amp;#039;ll see ABC&amp;#039;s Nightline anchor Dan Harris&amp;#039; 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works, an account of how he wrestled his nonstop ruminating into submission with Buddhism and meditation. Related: How a Hollywood Guru Helped Me Stop Being So Damn Indecisive As any psychologist will tell you, it&amp;#039;s not new for men to experience anxiety. &amp;quot;Culturally, anxiety is seen as a female symptom,&amp;quot; says Manhattan psychotherapist Michael Vincent Miller, PhD, author of Intimate Terrorism. &amp;quot;But in my practice there are as many anxiety and panic disorders among men, without question.&amp;quot; Since anxiety is viewed as feminine, men afflicted with it bear a double stigma: Not only do they have a mental illness, it&amp;#039;s one that strikes at the very core of their sense of self. As Stossel laments at the point in his therapy in which he discovers the well of sadness fueling the phobias and gastrointestinal attacks that had imperiled his love life and career: &amp;quot;How unmanly can I be?&amp;quot; Miller points out that nervousness can be alluring in women. He admits that, in his younger days, he himself was &amp;quot;attracted to women who had a skittish quality, like a deer at the edge of a forest&amp;quot;\u2014but outside of Woody Allen, it&amp;#039;s hard to think of many men who&amp;#039;ve used quavering to get dates (and one criticism leveled at Allen&amp;#039;s films has always been that the schlemiels he portrays would never get the babes he casts opposite himself). &amp;quot;Men are supposed to be pillars, right?&amp;quot; Miller says. &amp;quot;Breadwinners, protectors, more grounded, stronger. If you&amp;#039;re a tackle on a football field, you&amp;#039;d better not look anxious.&amp;quot;  So typically, men have hidden their anxiety, and it&amp;#039;s manifested in problems such as alcohol abuse and antisocial behavior, both of which are statistically more prevalent in men. New York therapist Mark Epstein, MD, author of The Trauma of Everyday Life, says he sees men who blot out their anxiety with a six-pack every night, but that habit disrupts sleep and relationships, causing ever more anxiety, which leads to more drinking and boorishness. &amp;quot;So it feeds on itself. I think that&amp;#039;s a pretty typical pattern.&amp;quot; And while women&amp;#039;s relative ease in discussing worries is a double-edged sword\u2014seeking support from friends can be helpful, but endless sharing can be just another way of dwelling on the negative\u2014men are so skilled at concealing what&amp;#039;s going on, they may think they&amp;#039;re the only man in the world pathologically wracked by angst. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t have a good narrative of men speaking to men about that kind of uncertainty,&amp;quot; says Douglas Mennin, PhD, a professor specializing in gender and anxiety at Hunter College. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s done more now than in the Greatest Generation,&amp;quot; but it&amp;#039;s still an area in which men are flying somewhat blind. Maybe He&amp;#039;s Not a Jerk, He&amp;#039;s Just Anxious Many of the men who blurbed Stossel&amp;#039;s book remarked on his &amp;quot;bravery&amp;quot; in revealing his anxiety, a sentiment that seems mildly ridiculous\u2014he&amp;#039;s not admitting to cannibalism, after all, but to a disorder more common than heart disease\u2014until you read about the depth of Stossel&amp;#039;s shame. In an interview, he said that the most life-changing aspect of the book has been the number of people who have told him they know exactly how he feels. He had no idea\u2014he felt that alone. The most gutting passages in the book come in impassively reported footnotes recounting his father&amp;#039;s reaction to his anxiety when he was a kid. After Stossel visited a therapist, his father would ask, &amp;quot;How was your wacko lesson?&amp;quot; And the author tells of how, when he was 14, he had a panic attack in the middle of the night. His father, enraged, hit him repeatedly and threw him against a wall, calling him a &amp;quot;pathetic little twerp&amp;quot;\u2014an account backed up by his father&amp;#039;s own journal entry about the incident. &amp;quot;In that moment, I felt more lonely than ever before or since,&amp;quot; Stossel writes. Stossel lays much of the blame for his anxiety on his maternal bloodline: His mother&amp;#039;s family has a history of nervous disorders, and she shares his phobia of vomiting, or emetophobia. But he also writes that his father was an alcoholic. When I ask if it&amp;#039;s possible his father suffered from anxiety himself, given his drinking and wild overreactions to his son&amp;#039;s condition, Stossel allows that while it&amp;#039;s of course possible, he read his father as a &amp;quot;totally cavalier&amp;quot; man unruffled by &amp;quot;turbulence.&amp;quot; Stossel&amp;#039;s childhood therapist had informed him that his father couldn&amp;#039;t tolerate anxiety in himself or in his son. Yet isn&amp;#039;t that just another way of saying that his father was anxious, and, furthermore, anxious about anxiety? It&amp;#039;s so much easier to consider men assholes. Call him abusive, call him belittling, call him callous\u2014just don&amp;#039;t call him anxious. For women, reading Stossel can be the dating version of Us Weekly&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Stars\u2014They&amp;#039;re Just Like Us!&amp;quot; You find yourself recalling the cads you&amp;#039;ve known and thinking, Maybe he wasn&amp;#039;t a jerk; he was just anxious. Stossel writes about running away from the girl who gave him his first kiss and never calling her again, the first of a series of romantic fouls. In Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, writer Daniel Smith&amp;#039;s New York Times best-selling book, recently released in paperback, he tells about how, on a romantic trip to Italy with the love of his life, he ended up telling her &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I\u2026love you anymore&amp;quot; after having subjected her to months of &amp;quot;sullen, neglectful, and blatantly discontented&amp;quot; behavior as his anxiety\u2014secretly\u2014spiraled out of control. &amp;quot;In love an anxious person becomes a persecutor as well as a masochist,&amp;quot; he writes. &amp;quot;He doesn&amp;#039;t intend to hurt anyone, least of all his beloved. He isn&amp;#039;t a sadist. But he is toxic, and merely by yielding to his affection he draws an innocent into the zone of pollution\u2026. In love, anxiety takes victims.&amp;quot; Mike Birbiglia is another comedian-writer-director who, like Louis C.K., is often hailed as the &amp;quot;Woody Allen of His Generation.&amp;quot; When Birbiglia&amp;#039;s film Sleepwalk With Me came out last year, many feminist-oriented critics were apoplectic about his autobiographical tale of ignoring, cheating on, and ultimately abandoning his fianc\u00E9e. But seen through a psychological lens, it&amp;#039;s a story of a man hiding a nearly deadly sleep disorder and the anxiety that stokes it. It&amp;#039;s obvious how his fianc\u00E9e&amp;#039;s mere existence\u2014beautiful, smart, kind, shimmering with the promise of a future Birbiglia&amp;#039;s character thinks he can neither financially nor emotionally support\u2014only exacerbates his panic. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t tell you how strong of emotional reactions the movie gets in both directions,&amp;quot; Birbiglia says. &amp;quot;Sometimes I get this kind of come-to-Jesus understanding of past relationships.&amp;quot; But younger people, he says, who are more likely to be in the thick of an unsettled relationship, are less sympathetic. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re like, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re a jerk! That is not okay!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; After the film&amp;#039;s premiere, Birbiglia&amp;#039;s ex-fianc\u00E9e came up to him. Rather than expressing fury at the graphic depiction of how he&amp;#039;d screwed her over, &amp;quot;She was so moved by it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;She said, &amp;#039;If I&amp;#039;d known all that, I would&amp;#039;ve felt so much differently about it at the time.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Birbiglia&amp;#039;s critics aren&amp;#039;t wrong\u2014he was an ass. Being anxious isn&amp;#039;t a Twinkie Defense against malfeasance. But acknowledging it removes some of the darkness\u2014or at least makes the behavior darkly funny. A college girlfriend of mine whose husband refuses to admit to his own anxiety disorder describes how he developed an id\u00E9e fixe about their dog being a possible vector of parasites and pathogens. He monitored the animal&amp;#039;s bowel movements obsessively and made rules about activities like, for example, their son using glitter in art projects (the dog could eat it, have gastrointestinal distress, poop in the house, and then, of course, the whole family would die of the virulent germs contained therein). Ha, ha, unless you&amp;#039;re the one living under the unacknowledged anxiety-reduction regime. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;ll insist that it&amp;#039;s all rational, practical,&amp;quot; my friend says, and then cite her laxness as evidence that she doesn&amp;#039;t care about him. &amp;quot;In the grip of anxiety, he becomes impossibly rigid and vigilant,&amp;quot; she says. From that vantage point, it becomes easier to see Birbiglia et al. as the good guys. The Dizziness of Freedom After eons of veiling anxiety behind whiskey and despotism (petty and otherwise), why are men becoming more forthright? It could be that the tension has simply gotten too intense\u2014fattened up, downsized, no longer considered &amp;quot;marriageable,&amp;quot; men are at the end of their rope. Over the past decade, Stossel&amp;#039;s own Atlantic has done a great deal to dial up gender-based anxiety, publishing some of the most talked-about pieces on relations between the sexes. It&amp;#039;s had Caitlin \u2028Flanagan opining that the increase in shared domestic responsibility is the cause of sexless marriages (because girls don&amp;#039;t make passes at boys who wash the glasses). Hanna Rosin&amp;#039;s book The End of Men, about how the boys are being crushed by the girls in the new economy, started as an Atlantic article of the same name. There&amp;#039;s Kate Bolick&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;All the Single Ladies,&amp;quot; about why women are choosing to stay single rather than marry the shiftless losers many men have become. And, most recently, happily divorced Sandra Tsing Loh wrote the title-speaks-for-itself story &amp;quot;The Weaker Sex: How The New Gender Economics Has More and More Professional-Class Women Looking at Their Mates and Thinking: How Long Until I Vote You Off the Island?&amp;quot; Never mind that some of these articles emphasized provocation over balanced reporting, the idea is out there: Girls rule, boys drool. And men are freaked out enough to actually give voice to their agita. Even younger men who are rolling with the societal changes may find them destabilizing. Birbiglia vividly tells me how his panic bloomed when, touring as a young comic, he was exposed to the myriad ways people lived. Listening to him reminds me of a passage from Sylvia Plath&amp;#039;s The Bell Jar, a touchstone for many feminists; in it, she imagines herself sitting in a fig tree amidst the tantalizing fruits that represent all her options\u2014marriage, career, lovers, travel\u2014but since she can choose only one, and can&amp;#039;t decide which, she just sits at the crotch of the tree, anxious and starving. &amp;quot;[Men] don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s normal anymore,&amp;quot; Birbiglia says. &amp;quot;There was a sense for a long time, &amp;#039;This is what people do.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Men went to college, got married, had kids, their wives raised them, they retired, they died. &amp;quot;These days, like, you could do a million things! You could have a career and a family, or three careers and no family! Or you could have five careers and three families! How could you not go crazy thinking about all the possibilities?&amp;quot; And when men do make a choice, they still may feel on uncertain footing. (Kierkegaard called the anxiety caused by progressive political times &amp;quot;the dizziness of freedom,&amp;quot; Stossel notes.) Dan Smith\u2014now married to the woman he dumped in Italy, and a father\u2014says every married man he knows is &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; with the assumption that they&amp;#039;ll share child care and take on traditionally feminine roles. &amp;quot;Men wanted that; it makes sense to them,&amp;quot; he says. What has been harder to reconcile is the continued pressure they feel to &amp;quot;be the traditional masculine breadwinner; the strong, silent, practical type. Men don&amp;#039;t know where they stand.&amp;quot; Taking it a step further, even when men do adhere to older norms and achieve traditional roles of power and dominance\u2014for example, editor of a major magazine (Stossel) or coanchor of ABC&amp;#039;s Nightline (Harris)\u2014as everybody knows, it&amp;#039;s lonely at the top. And scary. You have so much further to fall. In another of Stossel&amp;#039;s footnotes, he remarks on studies that have found that the happiest- seeming monkeys are the ones near the top of the social hierarchy but not on the very top. The highest-ranking male, he says, is &amp;quot;always having to worry about the palace coup that threatens to topple&amp;quot; him. Harris&amp;#039; drive to reach the pinnacle of broadcasting and stay there was so overwhelming that he once had a panic attack while actually on air. &amp;quot;TV news is such a hypercompetitive business, it put my preexisting penchant for worry on steroids. Not only are we competing against other networks, but we&amp;#039;re competing amongst each other. There&amp;#039;s a finite amount of airtime, and everybody&amp;#039;s trying to get the best assignments, the best job, and the best position within the corporation,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I believed that the only way to really succeed was to have this internal cattle prod, this internal anchorman with an air horn constantly commenting on everything.&amp;quot; Smith, who used to work for The Atlantic and has known Stossel since they both were in their early twenties, says that it feels less risky for him to publish his memoir than it does for Stossel. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just a putz in his underwear writing in his living room,&amp;quot; Smith says, whereas Stossel has an image to uphold as a thought leader. Also, as a Jewish writer, Smith has always identified with Philip Roth and Woody Allen, Jewish men who managed to infuse their inferiority complexes with a measure of virility. Stossel&amp;#039;s father was Jewish but hid that information from his son until he was in college, raising him Episcopalian. He grew up identifying with his mother&amp;#039;s heritage as a Boston Brahmin Mayflower descendent, a segment of the population that\u2014stereotypically\u2014doesn&amp;#039;t brook weakness of any sort. &amp;quot;They just drink and then have breakdowns in their midforties,&amp;quot; Smith quips. There&amp;#039;s Nothing Incensey About That Stossel, in fact, talks a lot about drinking to keep his anxiety in check: shots of vodka or Scotch before speaking in public-, to survive airplane bumpiness, with a chaser of Dramamine and Xanax when his vomiting phobia rears its queasy-green head. He opted against including anything even vaguely self-helpish in the book. &amp;quot;I did originally boil down 15 lessons,&amp;quot; about how to minimize anxiety. &amp;quot;It was a mixture of things like avoid caffeine, exercise regularly, sleep, underreact, cultivate optimism, but it seemed too pat,&amp;quot; he says, so he cut it. &amp;quot;It just didn&amp;#039;t fit in.&amp;quot; The self-help category, like anxiety itself, is feminine territory. Publishers Weekly has reported that women comprise \u2028up to 85 percent of the genre&amp;#039;s buyers. And according to a 2004 national survey, 63 percent of people receiving mental-health treatment are female. Epstein mentions that he&amp;#039;s a big fan of Alcoholics Anonymous\u2014founded by and highly populated by men\u2014because it&amp;#039;s one of the few forms of self-help that men find palatable. &amp;quot;AA is a safe place where men don&amp;#039;t have to put up a false front,&amp;quot; he says. Not to mention that drinking itself is pretty macho. The other form of self-help drawing more anxious men is mindfulness meditation, Epstein says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been successful because it&amp;#039;s coming at them without saying directly that it&amp;#039;s a treatment for anxiety. It&amp;#039;s circumventing the psychotherapy language.&amp;quot; (And, bonus, circumventing the ugly substance abuse necessary for AA!) Which brings us back to Harris, who, despite his panic attacks and admittedly harmful rumination, tells me, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never been diagnosed with anxiety.&amp;quot; He called Epstein after his wife passed along one of the therapist&amp;#039;s books, but instead of booking an appointment, Harris asked him, &amp;quot;Will you be my friend?&amp;quot; These days, the two go out for dinner and drinks, and Harris extols meditation&amp;#039;s masculine edge. &amp;quot;The first time I meditated, I realized, This is tough. The samurai did this.&amp;quot; He goes on to use a string of boy-friendly metaphors to describe his practice: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the dumbbell curl of the mind.&amp;quot; Or, &amp;quot;The mind has a bonus level,&amp;quot; as one of his gamer buddies told him, &amp;quot;and when you access that level, you&amp;#039;ve got all these special tools.&amp;quot; Harris even interviewed a woman who taught meditation to the Marine Corps. &amp;quot;She believes it will help them not to overreact to asymmetric warfare, and she was saying, &amp;#039;There&amp;#039;s nothing incensey about that.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; So many Manhattan machers are meditating, Harris says, citing &amp;quot;a New York Times reporter, an editor at a big publishing house,&amp;quot; that &amp;quot;there is a move afoot to create sort of a &amp;#039;normal people&amp;#039;s meditation club.&amp;#039; It won&amp;#039;t be just guys, of course, but the guys are instigating it.&amp;quot; The Problem That Has No Name Fifty years ago, when Betty Friedan dubbed women&amp;#039;s mass anxiety about being left at home to hang out with the mop &amp;quot;the problem that has no name,&amp;quot; it was a harbinger of massive social changes\u2014ushering in decades of investigation into what women want. Smith suggests that as we&amp;#039;ve worked through the legacy of centuries of patriarchy, nobody&amp;#039;s much cared about what the other half wants: &amp;quot;If men are in an uncertain place, the response I&amp;#039;ve gotten mostly is &amp;#039;Fuck you.&amp;#039; Maybe not since second-wave feminism has there been such confusion. So it makes sense that you see these books by men, that you see a strong [male] response.&amp;quot; Stossel, whose research has afforded him a bird&amp;#039;s-eye view of how the perception of anxiety has developed over the ages, sees the possibility for a more relaxed and open discussion between the genders in the coming years. To quote Kier-kegaard again: &amp;quot;The greater the anxiety, the greater the man.&amp;quot; Could all this agony be caused by the growing pains of men becoming, well, greater men? &amp;quot;Maybe because of The End of Men and other economic trends, where women are stepping up and occupying more prominent breadwinning roles, men can then be free to be more emotional,&amp;quot; Stossel says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s probably a salutary thing if that&amp;#039;s the case.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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