There are bad habits and there are bad habits. There’s the chronic tendency to leave cupboard doors open and an inexplicable inability to carry one’s dirty socks from floor to hamper. There’s the toilet seat thing that drives women nuts. There’s eating crackers in bed and hogging the remote. And then, of course, there are the bad habits that kill you.
MEN HAVE a particularly hard time when it comes to overcoming patterns of behavior that have a negative impact on their health. Certain behavioral traits and tendencies — impulsivity, stubbornness, macho stoicism, to name a few — harden whatever slothful tendencies may plague us.
Over the past 20 years, women have been catching up to us in the bad-health department, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever surpass us.
“Women have more sensitivity to their health,” says Dr. Daniel Stettner, director of psychology at William Beaumont Hospital in Birmingham, Mich., and an expert on habits. “They go on more diets than men. They’re typically responsible for the health of their family members. They’re enmeshed in the health-care system, go to doctors far more often than men. Many men don’t see a doctor for years — until they become seriously ill. They don’t have a physician regularly telling them they’re overweight, their blood pressure is too high or they’re diabetic.”
IMPULSE EATING
In Stettner’s view, bad health habits are influenced by the culture, stress and an individual’s particular style of dealing with the latter. Men tend to suffer more stress at work than women do, for instance. Many have also been socialized to have their food decisions dictated by their mothers or wives: They make passive food choices. “As a result, men drift toward impulse eating when they’re overworked,” he says. “They don’t stop for lunch, [they] eat fast food on the run or whatever’s available.”
Men’s health blunders
- Avoiding the doctor
- Impulse eating
- Too much alcohol
- Poor stress control
- Not exercising
Men’s typical response — which is to say, their lack of a healthful response — to mood shifts can also be problematic. Women report more depression than men do, although they may not necessarily suffer from the disease more. Men, for a variety of social and biological reasons, simply don’t pay as close attention to their interior lives as women do.
Yet they do medicate their moods with comfort food, alcohol or other drugs. “The fact that women report more depression means they’re doing something about it,” says Stettner. “Men neither report nor treat their depression.”
Taken together, this constellation of bad habits presents a particularly difficult challenge to health-care practitioners and their male patients. Both men and women may suffer from poor diet and lack of regular exercise, but at least women are hounded by their doctors to shape up.
TAKING STOCK
What’s a fellow to do? Stettner advises men who want to embark on a healthful path to simply take stock of where they are. “They need to ask themselves, ‘How am I feeling right now? Is there too much stress in my life? Do I feel as healthy as I used to?’ Then they need to make personal evaluations and take simple, small steps to change.”
For men in particular, he says, it’s important to get at underlying problems that may manifest themselves in unhealthy activities. For instance, if you feel like you’re eating or drinking too much, it’s not necessarily a good idea to go on a strict diet or give up drinking altogether. “That will simply create a disequilibrium in your life. It’s more productive to try to understand what triggers the desire to drink or binge on unhealthful food.”
Men who want to begin exercising should do so slowly, for as little as five or 10 minutes a day, so they don’t get discouraged by trying too much too fast. Gail Marion Meyer, a fitness trainer at the Chelsea Piers Fitness Center in New York City, suggests that newcomers join a group program with a specific goal — finishing a mini-triathlon, for instance. “If you have ‘teammates,’” she says, “they’ll help keep you motivated. Dropping out would be too embarrassing.”
The first priority for men who want to pursue a healthier lifestyle, though, is to see a doctor. Virtually all other positive self-care habits begin here. Whether it’s being alerted to high blood pressure or dangerous cholesterol levels or a borderline PSA count, a doctor’s visit will help a man address his worst habit of all: thinking he’s invulnerable.