Various sources of information and self-development blogs are spreading the opinion that today world’s comfort conditions make men waker, softer, more fragile, less ambitious, passive.

The above sources call this process the core reason of the young male adults’ problem to find a love partner.

The relatively peaceful environment, that humanity created for itself, fires back on the male part of the human tribe, they say.

I suppose, it has some truth in it. But what bothers me is the extreme point these “teachings” tend toward to.

After criticizing the current state of affairs, adepts of the above opinion suggest the solution, which consists of the number of stereotypical actions which may turn a neurotic nerd into an alpha male.

Going down the list of traits every “true man” must possess, and omitting cliche advices such as a “an alpha male is a confident leader”, we are likely to get to the part about emotions. Or, to be more precise, the absence of emotions.

If you’re a girl, you may be surprised with how many illogical expectations are laid on the shoulders of a boy brought up in traditional society. Among them, the expectation of being an emotionless machine.

There’s a phrase that describes it best: “Boys don’t cry”.

Since a boy is born, he is taught to be tough, strong like a rock, extremely disciplined, and yes, not to cry.

Crying here is over-generalization of all human emotions actually.

Most guys, your kind servant including, when they grow up, unconsciously tend to follow those instructions. However, as it is impossible not to feel emotions for a human being, the emotions get suppressed.

The side-effect is that those suppressed emotions, when it’s impossible to keep them inside, burst out. Then, this uncontrollable process may not only harm surrounding people, relationships with them, but also destroy the person itself.

According to the russian biology Ph.D., Sergey Saveliev, every normal human being spends its life in conflict of her/his two essential parts: an animal part and a human part. This struggle continues till a person dies.

When we talk about such things as social awareness, social sacrifice and concept of consciousness overall, we talk about the human component of us.

On the other side, food, reproduction and dominance is the basic and in fact the only needs of the animal half of the human.

My thought is that emotions, especially negative, hardly controllable and destructive ones, such as irrational anger, fury, are also a part of our animal component. Nevertheless, they’re still an inseparable part of our nature.

Thus the proposition of just suppressing them without a subsequent solution to expressing them is merely ridiculous and, moreover, dangerous.

I believe that every emotion – whether negative or positive one – must find its way out of the body in one or another shape. Unfortunately, the “eco” ways of expressing them is not what you can learn in school. As a result we have lots of terrifying cases of human emotional outbreak.

Crying is one of the least harmful expressions of negative emotions we may have. Nobody gets physically or mentally hurt if you cry (until you do it intentionally in order to get what you want).

However, it is considered as one of the most shameful experiences a male person may publicly have. Instead, the irrational fury is awarded. If you punch someone in the face, the traditional society will be on your side than if you cry when you feel bad.

There’s a false belief that crying is a mark of a weak person, a person who gives up a fight. This postulate cannot be more wrong.

Crying is a natural reaction when you do not get what you want. Although it can be unproductive in unreasonable amounts, if you do not overdo it, it may be quite helpful. When you’re done crying you may feel refreshed and like taking new actions.

Crying has nothing to do with complaining. Complaining is a poisonous process stretched over time (sometimes it covers the whole life of a person). Crying is usually a rare, one-time action, which may be viewed as saying farewell to plans you failed to achieve and celebrating the decision to build the new ones.

I read several bios of public people who are considered to be an example of masculinity in the modern world: they are successful in their careers and financially independent. Among them, Hong Kong action movie actor Jackie Chan, and well-known now dead Steve Jobs.

Reading their stories of life I was especially focused on places where they expressed their emotions, including those which are not interpreted as masculine ones by society.

However, their examples show the opportunity to break social expectations and, nevertheless, be accepted by society.

All in all, the fact is we cannot ignore an animal inside us, otherwise constant suppression will only fire back when we less expect it in an awfully destructive way.

As human beings at this stage of evolution, the only right thing for us to do is to take into consideration both aspects of our human nature and learn to express the latter one in a civilized, no-harm way, even if in doing so we have to review some social/religious norms of our lives.

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People who suffer from derealization question whether or not the world around them is real, and because of this, often have a very hard time functioning in the world around them.

Depersonalization is equally harmful: it robs the person of their feelings of humanity and makes them feel disassociated from the world around them.

Understandably, people who suffer from depersonalization and derealization may have a difficult time with social interaction, and may feel isolated and alone.

The best way to combat depersonalization and derealization is to get professional help from a mental health specialist, since depersonalization and derealization are often symptoms of larger mental illnesses, like anxiety or depression.

Along with professional help, these are some methods that can help reduce the panic, stress, and depression that come from depersonalization and derealization.

6. Assess your current medications.

If you’re currently taking medications for anxiety, depression, or any other illness, talk to your doctor about feeling dissociative: it could possibly be a side effect of your medication.

Common medications that can induce depersonalization or derealization include antihistamines, anti-anxiety medications, carbamazepine, fluoxetine, fluphenazine, indomethacin, nitrazepam, and sodium pentothal.

5. Monitor your recreational drug use and diet.

According to the US National Library of Medicine, long-term use of hallucinogens like LSD and marijuana can either cause, increase, or lessen feelings of dissociation in people with depersonalization and derealization disorders depending on their neural chemistry.

If you’re in a state that allows medical marijuana, consider talking to your doctor about possible depersonalization treatment; but in any other case, stay as far away as possible from unregulated marijuana or LSD from street vendors. While LSD and other hallucinogens may have promise in helping treat depersonalization, their lack of regulation can mean it may worsen your symptoms.

Regulating less intense chemicals like caffeine and alcohol are important as well. Because caffeine and alcohol both interfere with natural brain processes, eliminating or reducing their presence in your diet can help mental health and reduce the number of reactions with your medication.

4. Get some sleep (no, seriously).

We all know the woozy feeling from not having enough sleep. And while one or two all-nighters are fine, consistently having a bad sleep schedule can contribute to feelings of depersonalization or disassociation, not to mention a host of other negative effects on a person’s health.

The number of hours needed per night is different for everyone: according to the UCLA Psychiatry and Behavioral Services Center for Sleep Research, the best way to figure out how much sleep you need is to go cold turkey on everything.

Quit caffeine, quit sleeping pills, quit anything that wakes you up or puts you to sleep, and let your body naturally fall into a sleep pattern rhythm. It may take a couple weeks, but you’ll find your body may need much more or way less sleep than you’ve been providing it.

It’s important to fix that in order to effectively manage any mental illness, especially depersonalization and disassociation disorders.

3. Instead of obsessively concentrating on trivial things, practice purposeful, mindful meditation.

One of the hardest and most challenging aspects of depersonalization and derealization is the feeling of obsession, or not being able to “let things go”.

This obsessive quality can not only be personally distressing, but is also often one of the most significant symptoms that make forming social relationships with other people extremely difficult for people who struggle with it.

Obsession can be overwhelming, and can be tough to treat “on the spot”. However, practicing daily mindful meditation can help prevent obsessive episodes from occurring.

Mindful meditation can take many forms, and it’s important to find which type works best for you.

Essentially, a mindful meditative session will include focusing your entire being, mind and body, on the present moment: the pillow you’re sitting on, the smell you’re smelling, the thoughts you’re thinking.

You don’t pass judgment on the thoughts or feelings, you simply let them exist.

You accept the world as it is, for just 10 or 20 minutes, and feel calm and rooted in reality.

Guides for mindful meditations can be found virtually everywhere, and remember: the best ones are free. Mindful meditation has been successfully practiced for centuries, so don’t let some scam artist in L.A. convince you he has a “secret formula”.

Do, however, research different guides for mindful meditations, as everyone’s needs are different.

2. Find and foster communities, both likeminded and otherwise.

One of the toughest parts about living with depersonalization and derealization is the feeling of social isolation.

When first learning how to manage your symptoms, you may feel uncomfortable talking to people in public, and that’s okay: everyone recovers at different rates, and taking things slowly isn’t bad.

Luckily, lots of online communities exist for people suffering from depersonalization and derealization, from subreddit communities to 4chan forums and Facebook groups. Sometimes forming connections online can be easier than forming connections in real life, and it’s not a bad place to start.

Of course, it’s extremely important that your social interactions don’t begin and end online. Moving outside of your comfort zone, meeting people without your same mental illness, is very important.

Apps like Meetup are great places to start: if you’re interested in books, they have book clubs, or if you love football, there are lots of Meetup groups that meet for games. If you crave a more romantic or sexual connection, apps like Tinder or websites like Match.com can be good places to start to meet other people.

Because the worlds of online communities and the “outside world” are being more and more connected by apps like those mentioned, it’s becoming easier to transition to a social life outside of your laptop.

1. Be kind to yourself.

It’s very easy to let your inner monologue turn hateful: you’re not good enough, you’re bad with people, you have no friends, you’re a loser, etc.

If you follow nothing else in this list, follow this advice: do not let that internal script continue to play. Self-hatred will do nothing but make your condition worse. Instead, practice mindful thinking: when something like “I’m so stupid” crosses your mind, immediately say to yourself, “I may have some things to learn, but I am a smart, important person”.

Counter every negative thought you have with a good one and see how much self-love can help.

As always, take everything here with a grain of salt — that grain of salt, of course, being your mental health provider.

Only a trained professional can give you the complete resources you need to be mentally healthy, and there’s absolutely no shame in accessing one.

Have a great week, and remember to love yourself!

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People affected by Depersonalization and Derealization will describe their symptoms as a detachment from reality and that they are living a dream (as if they’re outside their body, observing of themselves). That is what depersonalization feels like.

Derealization on the other hand, is a detachment from the environment: feeling that everything around them isn’t real. Another variation of this is the feeling that they don’t exist and when they are in a public area, nobody notices them.

You might of heard the phrase ‘reality testing’ being used when researching about DPD and how ‘reality testing’ remains in tact for individuals with DPD. What this means is, unlike other disorders such as psychosis, the person is aware that what they experience is only a feeling and that the world isn’t actually an illusion. People with DPD may think they are going insane, but this has been described as almost the opposite of insanity: being hyperaware of one’s surroundings. I’ll talk more about this later on, when we explore the cause of DPD, but now the big question:

Do you Have Depersonalization Disorder (DPD)?

Now, here’s where it starts getting a bit tricky. One can experience Depersonalization and Derealization symptoms, but not be diagnosed with Depersonalization Disorder (DPD). In these circumstances, they are just symptoms rather than the person having the disorder itself. The symptoms of Depersonalization and Derealization are actually quite common in panic attacks, phobias (including social anxiety), PTSD, and acute stress. Furthermore, alcohol and drugs are known to cause this problem as well. So simply having these symptoms doesn’t mean you are affected by DPD.

So, first of all, in order for a diagnosis of DPD to be possible, you must ensure that the feeling of Depersonalization doesn’t only occur due to the above reasons, for instance, if it only occurs during a panic attack, then it is a symptom of anxiety rather than DPD itself. Secondly, the symptoms must be persistent and must be severe enough to impair one’s daily life functioning in order to become a disorder. If you still think you have DPD, then don’t worry, because there are steps you can take immediately to eliminate your Depersonalization Disorder for good, and worrying is the opposite of what you must do. Before we get to how to cure Depersonalization Disorder, it’s important to know what causes it.

Depersonalization Disorder Causes and the Depersonalization Cure

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Most of the time, DPD is caused by chronic childhood trauma or abuse and a lack of social support in one’s life. The main thing to note here is the word ‘chronic’ since having one or two traumatic events occur isn’t likely to bring about DPD: it’s the recurring trauma that causes the altering of the brain. Most likely it’s due to family issues especially with one’s parents.

Due to the experience of some chronic trauma, people might start to become hypervigilant of social situations as a protective mechanism. Depersonalization is just a way of coping with the event, especially when there is a lack of social support. This is one of the most common Depersonalization Disorder causes: Evidence has shown that prolonged stress/anxiety/depression have been known to cause changes in the amygdala, the area responsible for causing  this hypervigilance.

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My advice for those with DPD is to firstly accept what has happened in the past and acknowledge that this is what caused your DPD. Next, start relaxing everyday: do meditation or any activities you find fun. It can be difficult for people with DPD to relax, so seeking help from a therapist might be the best option, especially since they’ll be able to help with other disorders preventing you from relaxing such as anxiety disorders/phobias.

Another cause of DPD is mistaking a symptom as a disorder, as mentioned previously. Sometimes, an experience of depersonalization can be quite normal and will go away on its own, however, when one starts to worry about it and think they are mentally ill, it can start to be a recurring thing, especially since they bring on unnecessary anxiety. In other words they experience a cycle where:

1. They experience a casual depersonalization symptom that will go away on its own.
2. They fear they are mentally crazy and this causes a great deal of anxiety
3. This anxiety causes the symptoms to reappear at a heightened degree of severity
4. The cycle repeats and it gets worse over time.

So the common theme is DPD is caused and made worse by stress or anxiety. In order to dissolve DPD for good, it is crucial to eliminate these stressors. Treatment of DPD involves alleviating anxiety disorders and depression to enable relaxation. It may seem that DPD has progressed so severely that it can’t be cured, but once you are able to relax, your feelings of depersonalization and derealization will gradually dissipate over time. Remember chronic depression, stress and anxiety will cause negative changes in the brain, so start relaxing more in your life and remove all the unnecessary/irrational causes of stress.

Read more from Sociable Introvert: How to cure depersonalization disorder

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Last week, a customer came up to my makeup counter and demanded we honor her coupon that promised a free mini mascara. After I explained the coupon was expired and offered her a mini lip gloss instead, she threw the lipgloss back at me (a really poor choice of ammunition, considering it’s barely the size of my pinky finger) and told me it was a “gross pink”, and, besides, we are “a crappy ghetto store anyway”.

What this lady experienced was a form of cognitive dissonance. According to the American Psychological Association, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort caused by a contradiction between the actual truth and what a person believes is true: in other words, it’s the awkwardness, the collar-loosening, and the throat-clearing silence (or the lip-gloss-chucking anger) we experience when we’re wrong.

There are a few different categories within the broad heading of “cognitive dissonance”, and what my customer experienced is called the “effort-justification paradigm”, which occurs when a person can’t get what they want, so they decide they never wanted the item anyway. Aesop’s fable of “The Fox and the Grapes” is the most famous example of this: the fox really wants some grapes, but when he can’t reach them, he decides the grapes are probably sour anyway.

There are three other main paradigms within the theory of cognitive dissonance: belief disconfirmation bias, induced-compliance paradigm, and free choice paradigm. Without going into overly-scientific detail, a basic description of these paradigms:

• The “belief disconfirmation paradigm” is probably the most familiar to us: it’s what happens when a person is confronted with proof their previous beliefs are wrong. This is most commonly seen during family gatherings with your racist uncle, who cannot handle statistical proof that minorities are not evil and will simply ignore the facts.
• A famous experiment by scientists Elliot Aronson and James Carlsmith in 1963 showed that in absence of an external motivator (a positive one like money, or a negative one like the threat of punishment), humans needed to internally justify actions they were required to perform that they wouldn’t normally do. This type of justification–knowing that something is actually X, but being required by your job to tell people it’s really Y–is called the “induced-compliance paradigm”.
• The “free choice paradigm” has to do with justifying our own choices. In another study by Elliot Aronson, he found that when forced to make a decision between taking home two products, participants always rated the product they chose higher than they did before the choice to take it home was presented. This phenomenon explains things like brand loyalty or always taking the same roads home, regardless of how good the brand actually is or if there’s a faster route.

Naturally, one of the most interesting parts of this theory is how people respond to situations that create cognitive dissonance. From what we’ve seen so far, cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. It makes us feel dumb and insults our ego. So how do we handle it?

There are essentially two ways: we run away, or we fix it.

Running away is probably the most common reaction, especially with a wealth of slanted sources at our fingertips. The “running away” phenomenon can be seen in those who choose to only listen to their preferred bias: conservatives who only watch FOX News or liberals who only watch MSNBC and throw slander at the other side without knowing what’s really over there. Sometimes we “run away” without even realizing it: when you search Google for “was the Iraq war a failure or a victory?”, you’ll receive different results based on your political party, the news sites you frequent the most, and your age, ethnicity, and gender. Google knows how uncomfortable cognitive dissonance can be, so they tailor your results to fit what you want to hear, and they’re certainly not the only websites who use cookies to track what they should show you to make you happiest. You can choose to deliberately run away, as well: you can drop your friends who don’t share your worldview, you can choose to go to a university that only caters to your political affiliation, and you can isolate yourself from anything that challenges the way you see things.

According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, this type of “running away” is natural. After all, our natural evolutionary goal is to pick the environment that hurts us the least. And while this, of course, includes things like a warm and sunny living space, easy access to food, and plenty of opportunity for socialization, we are also evolutionarily designed to seek the most mentally comfortable environments we can find. By running away, we surround ourselves with more and more “evidence” that we’re right, and keep ourselves away from people who would challenge that.

There is a slightly less cowardly (and, one could debate, more evolutionarily advantageous) option as well: research. Some people will naturally respond with a desire to know more about a certain topic, according to Festinger. If, for instance, your political debate with your uncle gets heated and he gets out his phone to do some Googling—out of anger or out of curiosity—that would be a great example of Festinger’s theory of a research response to cognitive dissonance.

The big one, of course, is the practice of actually changing your mind when you come across new information: “fixing” cognitive dissonance. If you hear something that gives you cognitive dissonance, that familiar hum of awkwardness and uncertainty, you can embrace it, because you know this is an opportunity to learn something new about the world. You can fact-check the arguments presented and use one of the best things humans have—logic, reasoning, and a capacity for understanding truth—to determine what theory best aligns with reality. You can use the plethora of information we have at our fingertips not to find what you want to hear, but to find accurate, unbiased fact.

So as you can probably tell, I personally favor one of these responses more than the others. But I’ll leave it up to you to decide: when you present someone with new knowledge that proves their worldview wrong, who do you respect the most? The one who runs away? The guy who immediately whips out his phone to find statistics from a biased source to “prove you wrong”? Or the guy who calmly works through the evidence presented and comes up with a (new or old) worldview that takes all facts into account?

I think you know the answer.

by  Samantha Sampson

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