The Apostolate of Cheerfulness

Forgotten truths about anxiety and masculinity

Suicide is the biggest killer of men under age 50, and depression is the leading cause of disability. These facts are well known (or at least should be), but anxiety as the underlying factor in both is often neglected. It’s the most prevalent mental health disorder experienced by men, and it’s predictive of depression and associated suicide risk. True, men have lower reported rates of anxiety disorders compared to women, but the male-type anxiety phenotype more often goes undetected by generic diagnostic classifications.

Male vs. Female Anxiety

In fact, masculinity can mask anxiety. In women, anxiety manifests as social disruption, teariness and interpersonal distress. Partly, this is due to genetic disposition: testosterone, for example, decreases tearfulness. Women also have different trauma responses, increased physiological reactivity, greater anxiety sensitivity and higher levels of rumination.

But it’s also partly due to how traditionally prized masculine traits such as toughness, stoicism, self-reliance and emotional control strongly discourage these expressions of anxiety. Masculinity specifically suppresses the symptoms the DSM-5 criteria for anxiety are based on.

In men, by contrast, anxiety is more often characterised by physical symptoms. Indeed, evidence is emerging for a distinct male-anxiety phenotype characterised by body pains, panic attacks, headaches, chronic recurrence of symptoms and a feeling of being out of control.

Anxiety and Men’s Spirituality

I’m not saying that masculinity shouldn’t regard anxiety as its enemy. It should. And it always has done: St Frances de Sales, for example, famously warned that ‘anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.’ Scripture repeats hundreds of times that we’re to fear God only.

Men aren’t being failed by the traditional message that anxiety isn’t masculine. An anxious man’s fearful spirit infects those of everyone entrusted to his protection. When the leader lacks confidence, so does everyone following him. No, we’re being failed by a lack of training in the traditional methods of managing it.

Yes, I’m aware that there’s research linking low testosterone to anxiety. I’m also aware that people worry that testosterone levels have gone down every generation. But the tests have changed, and there's a lot of noise in that data. It’s also unclear that it’s definitively a problem. Testosterone has a very broad physiologically normal range, and variation within this range generally isn’t particularly meaningful or predictive of better/worse outcomes. Some top-ranked, world-level strength athletes, for example, are on the lower end of normal, and they’re extremely muscular, lean and mentally healthy.

Overall, I think people place FAR too much importance on testosterone levels. Sure, get your levels checked, and if they’re below normal then follow the medical advice, and maybe it’ll help.

But your problem is likely spiritual, and no doctor or psychologist can help you.

The Apostolate of Cheerfulness

‘Be of good cheer,’ said Christ. And despite being a man of sorrows, He said this substantially many times. You can be sorrowful, then, without being sad. Life involves suffering, and masculinity means accepting reality rather than living in fantasy. Indeed, as Aquinas said, excess sadness is a disease of the mind, but mild sadness is the mark of a well-conditioned mind, according to the present state of life (ST 1-2 59.3ad3).

But you can accept that life’s a bitch without becoming one yourself. Christ possessed a cheerful temper, and when little children came to Him they felt peace and joy. So did women, who fell at his feet. They all sensed serenity and amiability. And since Christ is the ultimate model of masculinity, there’s a lesson for us here. It’s about having a superfluity of strength in doing one’s duty.

“I have given you an example,” Christ told His Apostles at the Last Supper, and it concerns among other things perfect submission to the divine will and confidence in Providence. The masculine man, never living for himself alone but for the betterment of others and the glory of God, understands that cheerfulness creates a wholesome moral atmosphere around him. He exerts an invigorating influence upon his environment. He has strength to spare.

And this is so even in sickness, in pain, in sorrow, in poverty, in misunderstanding. Nor can one’s “natural disposition” be offered as an excuse for being morose or rude. By the grace of God, it can be overcome. Christianity commands us to do violence to our own nature, and even the pagans regarded a man’s victory of anxiety has a mark of masculinity. Montaigne said that ‘the most manifest sign of wisdom is contented cheerfulness,’ and doubtless the same goes for masculinity.

All Things Desire Peace

Modern notions of masculinity, however, are infected by the secular-liberal understanding of life as a relentless ‘struggle for supremacy,’ to use Nietzsche’s phrase. Stemming from a view of man derived from a purely materialist understanding of evolution, this survival-of-the-fittest mentality fosters restlessness.

This is true not only in biology and psychology but also in business. In its economic realisation as unrestrained capitalism, liberalism idealises competition. The market operates in terms of the survival of the fittest, and a man must always be on the grind. Peace, in the rare moments that it exists, is only a byproduct: if you want peace, so the saying goes, prepare for war.

By contrast, Augustine wrote that ‘all things desire peace,’ and Christian tradition has always dignified this. Not war but peace is the foundation of reality. Even pagan stories testify to this: in Gladiator, for example, Maximus excels at fighting, but really all he wants to do is go home and farm with his family. Contrary to Nietzsche and Hobbes, civilisation wasn’t born in blood. Eden was the expression of an original harmony of wills that befits our rational nature.

Christians understand that, in our fallen world, the ‘life of man upon earth is a warfare’ (Job 7:1), but on the holy night when our Saviour was born, the angels sang: ‘On earth, peace.' On the eve of His Passion, Our Lord said to His disciples in His farewell address, ‘Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.’ And after the Resurrection, He greeted His followers repeatedly with the words: ‘Peace be to you.’

Why? Because He knew that peace is a great blessing, and it is difficult to overstate the importance of this.

Thus the Church prays for peace daily in the Canon of the Mass. ‘Dona nobis pacem’ is the third petition of the Agnus Dei: ‘Give us peace.’ And in the prayers before communion, the Church again asks for peace. 'Pax huic domui’ (‘Peace be to this house’) is what the priest says on entering a sick-room to administer the last sacraments.

‘Pax’ is also the motto of the Order of St. Benedict, in connection with the watchword: ‘Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus!’ (‘That in all things God may be glorified!’) And the angels, too pray for peace for men: ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis’ (‘Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of good will!’)

Peace and the Prince of this World

Peace is a rebuke to the world and its prince, the devil. He knows no peace, and all anxiety is a foreshadowing of hell as an eternity of mental and spiritual illness. ‘Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say, rejoice’ (Philippians 4:4) is also a command to reject the devil’s temptations to despair by which he seeks to weaken us: ‘A glad heart maketh a cheerful countenance, but by grief of mind the spirit is cast down’ (Proverbs 15:13).

As a lack of confidence in God, however, the real root of anxiety — its most demonic aspect — is not despair but pride. This is because pride is involved, directly or indirectly, in all other sins. It’s the vice that disposes a man to make himself more than he is. The proud man is always under pressure in his desire for something difficult, and St. Gregory (Moral. xxiii 4) lists four species of pride:

1. thinking that one's good is from oneself;

2. thinking that one's good is not from God but is owing to one’s own deserts;

3. claiming excellence not possessed;

4. despising others and wishing to seem the exclusive possessor of what one has.

The first two amount to an assumed self-sufficiency which omits or discounts God in considering what one is. If you work hard enough, pride whispers, you can get everything you want. It’s in your power to control your future. You’re the master of your destiny. You deserve and can guarantee for yourself health, wealth and honour.

To be mortally sinful, of course, this would all need to be a conscious and fully willed misprising of God. Most acts of pride, by contrast, are merely venial sins due to deficiency of awareness or a lack of full consent of the will.

It’s an unwillingness to be subject to God — including whatever Providence has in store for us. Anxiety is an aversion from an imagined future evil, and pride likes to think it, not God, knows what’s best for us. That’s why it’s traditionally ranked with actual hatred for God. Aversion from God, although it’s in all sins, is the essence of pride. Hence it’s the first sin, and St. Gregory (Moral. xxxi 17) calls pride the queen of vices— not just one of the capital sins but the mother of them all — because it conquers the heart of a man and delivers it to the capital sins.

A Masculine Mindset

If the spiritual life involves us always being at the crossroads between heaven and hell, with humility and pride locked in mortal combat to pull us in either direction, we can focus on some practical guidelines for combatting anxiety.

Like with most important things in life, what’s effective here is simple but hard. Sorry, there are no magic bullets. Even Christ won’t take your suffering from you. But He will help you bear it, and He will use it to sanctify you.

• Train yourself persistently to notice and appreciate what’s good in your daily life: the touch of your wife, the smile of your child, even the affection of a pet.

• Thank God for your blessings: friends, family, physical and mental health. Even your existence itself.

• Be grateful even for your trials and misfortunes. Without them, your battle against pride would be even harder than it already is.

• Let past troubles go, and don’t harbour resentment or the desire for revenge. The four wounds of original sin — ignorance, malice, weakness and concupiscence — mean you shouldn’t be too surprised by your own failings or those of others.

• Don’t dwell on imagined future troubles either: ‘sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’ (Matthew 6:34) God won’t permit you to face anything He can’t help you through.

• ‘Bear ye one another's burdens and so you shall fulfil the law of Christ' (Galatians 6:2). Signal strength to those around you.

• ‘There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.’ - Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

• Finally, St Philip Neri has a lot of wisdom about anxiety in his Maxims:

  • ‘To preserve our cheerfulness amid sicknesses and troubles, is a sign of a right and good spirit.’

  • ‘When a man falls into any bodily infirmity, he must lie and think, and say, “God has sent me this sickness, because He wishes something of me; I must therefore make up my mind to change my life and become better.’

  • ‘When a man has a tribulation sent him from God, and is impatient, we may say to him, “You are not worthy that God should visit you; you do not deserve so great a good.”’

  • ‘Poverty and tribulations are given us by God as trials of our fidelity and virtue, as well as to enrich us with more real and lasting riches in heaven.’

  • ‘We must have confidence in God, who is what He always has been, and we must not be disheartened because things turn out contrary to us.’

  • ‘A man should not ask tribulations of God, presuming on his being able to bear them: there should be the greatest possible caution in this matter, for he who bears what God sends him daily does not do a small thing.’