Men’s Health Week stress-busting tips

06/06/14 . News

Staying healthy can keep the stress away - here are the Men’s Health Week stress-busting tips.

Men’s Health Week starts next Monday. In Men's Health Week are looking at stress and work.

With all the pressures of modern life it's easy to get stressed. Absence from work for stress, anxiety or depression has increased 29% in three years.

Dr John Chisholm, chair of the Men’s Health Forum, says ‘Male identity is strongly tied up with work and how men earn a living. This means that health at work is doubly important for men. Perhaps men take their work too seriously and their health not seriously enough.’

‘Your best strategy is to prevent stress getting out of control by finding ways both to tackle the causes of stress and to improve your coping strategies.’

Five top tips for Men’s Health Week

Watch out for things that mask the anxiety but do not solve the problem, for example:
- smoking
- comfort eating
- excessive use of alcohol
- abusing illegal drugs
Share your worries with a reliable friend or partner — not the whole company! Genuine friends offer positive support and advice. Uninterested colleagues may be negative, unhelpful and prone to gossip.
Aim for a balanced, healthy lifestyle that includes:
- a nutritious diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables
- regular exercise that gets your heart pumping
- adequate sleep most nights of the week
- plenty of relaxation that restores and heals sensitive nerves
- lots of non-competitive leisure.
Learn coping strategies to see you through the difficult periods.
Tackle the causes of your stress. The most permanent solution — but often the hardest — is to eliminate whatever's causing the problem. If your neighbours' loud music winds you up when you're trying to relax in the evening, ask them to turn it down and, if they keep refusing, take them to court. If you can't cope with the amount of work your boss gives you, say "No" next time you're asked to produce another miracle in two days.

Find more information on work, health and stress and about Men's Health Week.

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.

Beat Stress