Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution masses of women have entered the workforce while balancing domestic duties and as a result stress management tools geared towards them have flooded the market. Clearly there is a continued concern over the stressful lives many women are leading today and the deleterious health effects that can ensue. While a lot of focus has been placed on this super-woman syndrome recent studies are turning the tide and sounding the alarm that men not only suffer from stress but the resulting health effects including mortality may actually be far worse than those affecting women.

Chronic stress is particularly taxing to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regardless of sex and can negatively impact various physiological systems as low levels of cortisol circulate triggering a complex network of integrated hormones to respond. Among the many long-term effects of chronic cortisol release are a depressed immune system cardiovascular stress insufficient digestion mood and memory problems weight gain insomnia and most sobering of all a decreased lifespan. This latter effect has been the greater focus of research aimed at understanding the outcomes of chronic stress on men in particular. 

In a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology (2008) 12128 participants from the Copenhagen City Heart Study were evaluated for a sex-specific relationship between chronic stress and mortality. It was discovered that this link was far stronger within the male population compared to their female counterparts. In fact there was no association between high stress and all-cause mortality in women but among men high stress was associated with a hazard ratio of 1.32. Digging a little deeper into this study high stress was found to increase the risk of death due to respiratory diseases and was associated with an almost sixfold higher risk of suicide in men but not among women.

This study also concluded that high stress is linked to mortality the most in younger to middle-aged healthy men. While this age group of men may naturally experience a greater number of stressful life events as they work toward the height of their careers and juggle family relationships a more recent study turns our attention to the older male population who generally speaking experience fewer stressful life events. However this study also revealed that moderate to high stress in older men with fewer stressful life events was significantly linked to higher mortality. This suggests that not only are the number of stressful events in a man's life linked to his chances of death but other variables in a man's physiology may account for an even greater link between stress and mortality compared to women. Whether from differences in health family responsibilities work-related goals coping abilities or otherwise stress clearly affects men as well as women. 

To throw yet another log into the fire a recent study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (2014) showed that men are more susceptible to increased mortality rates when exposed to stressful social relations with partners children other family friends and neighbors. This was especially true if they were not participants in the workforce. The mortality risk was increased by 50-100 percent when frequent worries and demands were placed on the men from members of their family. Therefore the shear number of stressful life events is not the sole cause for increased mortality in men compared to women exposed to the same level of stress but apparently stress related to quality of close relationships can equally affect men's mortality.

Clearly we have missed a vulnerable population of men who are living equally stressful lives compared to women but with riskier health outcomes. Therefore stress management cortisol reduction and hormone balance are critical for all adults in this modern fast-paced society that lends itself to devastatingly stressful lifestyles.