Who gets anxiety more, men or women?
Anxiety in men
Women apparently suffer more from anxiety disorders. This fact may really reveal that women tend to seek medical help for anxiety more often than men. Men may self-treat anxiety symptoms with alcohol and/or drugs rather than see a doctor.
Women appear to suffer most often from major depression, possibly because men refuse to report symptoms they may consider weak or unmasculine and tend to silently cope with anxiety themselves. Manic depression is divided equally among the sexes.
Interestingly, more of the men (but not women) with social skills deficits were the first-born child or only child in their families. We might speculate whether older siblings are important as social role models for males. Among people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, too, first-born males predominate.
In conclusion, social phobics have fears that are more limited to particular situations and more discrete in onset than the anxiety men of those with social skills deficits, which is more like a trait of shyness in extreme form. The two groups overlap; they fear some similar situations and include more subjects who are men and have higher social class and education than do other phobics.
Public speaking anxiety (sometimes called “stage fright”) is probably the most common social anxiety and affects even professional actors or musicians. Unlike other phobic disorders, which are most common among women, social phobia is almost as common in men as in women. A public speaker or performer fears that he or she might be embarrassed or even humiliated if a train of thought is lost, lines are forgotten, or a note is missed. Other common social phobias are of blushing (high-neck blouses or turtleneck sweaters are often worn in attempts to hide such reddening, also called anxiety rash by anxiety men), eating or drinking with others (where embarrassment would result if anxiety caused a visible tremor or resulted in spilling soup or other liquid), writing (an excellent salesman didn’t work for seven years because of fear that his hand might shake while signing a contract in front of a customer and that such shaking would be interpreted by the customer as a sign of dishonesty – irrational anxiety behavior), and difficulty urinating or defecating in public bathrooms (more common in males standing before urinals, but both sexes may be troubled with embarrassment arising either from an inability to eliminate or from the sounds of elimination).