Men's Health Week 2016 - Beating Stress

Men’s Health Week 2016 is 13th – 19th June and the theme this year is beating stress.  We all have varying levels of stress in our daily lives and so therefore stress is normal – isn’t it?  When we experience stress adrenaline rushes through the body which increases the heart rate and boosts mental and physical awareness.  The trouble is though that those stress hormones are harmful when we don’t need them and over time can lead to problems such as:

• Damage to the immune system and heart
• Increasing your chances of serious health problems
• Reduce your life expectancy
• Damage your sex life

High levels of stress can also lead to mental health issues and the odds are 3 to 1 that you know someone who has a mental health problem.  That equates to 1 in 4 of us facing the challenge of dealing with a mental health problem each year.  Think about that for a moment – the chances are that one of your mates is dealing with these issues right now!

Ok moment over.  Let’s get real and ask all our mates which one is suffering from mental health problems and who wants to get it out in the open and talk about it?  Maybe over coffee and cake?  Anybody?  No?  Hmm probably should have seen that one coming! 

But, seriously guys, if you think one of your relatives, colleagues or mates is bottling something up you can make a difference by trying these:

• Offer to talk but don’t make a big deal out of it (may over a pie and a pint?)
• Ask “how’s it going?”
• Keep in touch by texting or emailing more often
• Do stuff together
• Swap stories and remember if difficult stuff comes up you don’t need to be able to offer solutions for your mate’s problems – you just have to listen
• Be there; ask if there is anything you can do

Professional help can often be invaluable in giving men a tool box of strategies that you can use as and when you need to, to help you deal with stress and mental health problems.  Whilst group therapy can be very useful, many men prefer the privacy of individual therapy and CBT and Mindfulness are both useful forms of therapy for dealing with stress.

CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) focuses on how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and behaviour, teaching you coping skills for dealing with your problems.  CBT helps you change how you think (cognitive) and what you do (behaviour) by breaking problems down into smaller chunks to make it easier to see how they are connected and how they are affecting you.

Mindfulness is a down-to-earth method of enabling you to reduce self-criticism and increase self-compassion; thereby regaining control of your life.  Studies have shown that Mindfulness is beneficial in boosting your ability to withstand life’s knocks and setbacks.  In fact it is so effective it is one of the preferred treatments recommended by NICE.

So hopefully, if you have read this far, you are now fully aware that stress and mental health problems happen far more frequently than perhaps you previously thought and that there are ways of dealing with it successfully……and, just maybe, talking about it will help. 

Old fashioned ideas of what it means to “be a man” can make it difficult to talk openly and honestly so remember: TALKING ABOUT STRESS IS NOT A SIGN OF WEAKNESS – IT TAKES BALLS!!

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