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In the UK, one man in five dies before he reaches 65. Together we can change that. Donate, sign up for news or order some of our man manuals from the online shop.
Sign up for Men's Health Week
Beating loneliness? We can do it.
For this year's mental health awareness week (9-15 May 2022), the theme is loneliness.
Loneliness has been compared to smoking in terms of its negative impact on health so is an excellent choice of theme. It may seem counter-intuitive but beating loneliness begins with ourselves.
Feeling lonely can lower self-esteem and make us feel disconnected from the world. The longer we are lonely, the more these feelings compound. That makes it very hard to reach out to others even when, on some level, we know we should.
It may be easier - rather than beating ourselves up for not being more social - to start by doing things that improve well-being more generally - things that make us feel better within ourselves. That's where our CAN DO challenge comes in.
The CAN DO Challenge
The CAN DO Challenge invites you to:
- Connect - connect with other people (eg. call an old friend or family member)
- (Be) Active - move your body (eg. go for a run/walk/swim/dance/etc)
- Notice - take notice of the environment around you (eg. turn off your phone for an hour and look around)
- Discover - learn something new (eg. read a book you haven't read before)
- Offer (or give) - do something for someone else (eg. volunteer for a local community group)
These are sometimes called five ways to wellbeing. Try them. Leave Connect till later if you like. If you start with the others, you'll find you naturally start to feel more connected to the rest of the world and - with time - those feelings of connection can turn into real connection with real people.
Share your ideas
The Forum will be encouraging people to take up the CAN DO Challenge in Men's Health Week next month - so if you have any great ideas for any of the five ways, let us know.
- Discover more about the CAN DO challenge.
- Check out our Man MOT for the Mind manual - a DIY boost to your mental health based on the CAN DO challenge.
#mentalhealthawarenessweek
Jim Pollard,
Editor
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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