Why High Stress is Killing Men

Emmet Thompson was 51 when he suddenly found himself struggling for breath, his blood pressure dropping dangerously low, according to Nancy Churnin reporting in The Dallas Morning News.

Before he knew it, he was in an ambulance, racing to the hospital with encephalitic shock. And no one was more surprised than Thompson when they finally discovered the cause.

"They ruled out everything except stress," he says of the emergency room doctors. Are you a man who is living with high levels of stress? Are you a woman who worries that stress may be killing the man you love?

About 40 percent of American men and women are concerned about their stress levels, and about 34 percent describe themselves as "routinely overwhelmed by stress," according to a May survey by Mental Health America, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va., that is dedicated to helping people live mentally healthy lives. And as stress levels rise with foreclosures, job losses, soaring oil and food prices and concern about wars and terrorism, men are particularly at risk, experts say.

There’s a tendency for men to think that being affected by stress is somehow unmanly. Real men let stress run off their backs like water off a duck. But the numbers don’t lie. Men are dealing with heightened stresses from birth until death.

Think of the current job market. Men lost 686,000 jobs in the U.S. from November through April, while women gained 280,000, according to Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Biologically, too, men experience symptoms of coronary artery disease 15 to 20 years before women, and twice as many of them die of the disease as women, according to Marianne J. Legato, author of the recently published "Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan."

Male vulnerability begins in the womb. The male fetus is at greater risk of death or damage from almost all the obstetric catastrophes that can happen before birth, according to a recent study in the medical journal Lancet. By the time a boy is born, he is, on average, developmentally some weeks behind a girl of the same age. According to a study reported in the journal Behavioral Brain Science, "a newborn girl is the physiological equivalent of a 4- to 6-week-old boy."

So we see that right from the moment that the sperm penetrates the egg, males begin to experience problems in greater numbers than females. Some of us don’t make it. We die off early. Others survive to make it into the world but are at greater risk than our female counterparts.

Part of the problem is the difficulty men have in admitting problems, because they think of stress as a moral issue rather than a physical condition. And when you don't deal with escalating pressures on the body, the problem can fester until it explodes, Dr. Legato says.

"If you don't discuss a problem, you don't find solutions, and you begin to feel you're the only one in the world who has this problem, which increases your sense of hopelessness," Legato says.

"Hopelessness is the greatest threat to health because it depresses the immune system, raises blood pressure, raises blood sugar and puts your cardiovascular health at risk. That's one of the reasons men are less robust than women. Coronary disease begins to appear in men when they're 35, and they commit suicide and die in violent deaths substantially more often than women do."

Or as she puts it in the book: " 'Suck it up' is what we tell them from the time they are little boys and experience their first hurts and disappointments. Most of them never ask for quarter -- and give none -- as they struggle to advance their careers, provide for their families and earn enough money to survive. Asking for counsel is unmanly, while ignoring pain and even the most patent symptoms of illness is routine in the male patients I treat. Whining, as they see it, is for women. Not for real men."

The cost of ignoring stress is high; it can lead to sirens blaring, as it did for Thompson.

Thompson was one of the lucky ones. Because he was otherwise physically fit, he bounced back quickly. He acknowledged for the first time that he may have taken on too much when he returned to school in his 40s to complete a bachelor's, a master's and, at the time of his attack, a doctoral degree in strategic leadership, all while managing a business and staying attentive to his wife and young children.

"I thought I could handle more stress than I really could. It gave me pause," he says.

But he also managed to achieve his goals after becoming sensitive to the signs of stress and taking a break when he felt pressure building.

How are you dealing with the increased stresses of modern life? What things bother you most these days? Talking about them here can not only relieve some of the stress you feel, but it can be life-saving.

If you want to write to me personally you can do so through my website at www.MenAlive.com

Come visit me at www.MenAlive.com and receive a free subscription to my e-newsletter.