Small Stressors Can Also Negatively Harm Men's Health

A new study concludes that older men leading highly stressed lives are more likely to die earlier than their peers.

Led by the Oregon State University, the researchers focused at two types of stress i.e. everyday hassels like job stress, commuting or arguments with family and friends and life events like job loss or death of a spouse. After evaluating these factors, the researchers at OSU found that older men with high levels of stress either from chronic everyday hassles or series of significant life events, are more likely to die earlier than the average of their peers.

"We're looking at long-term patterns of stress - if your stress level is chronically high, it could impact your mortality, or if you have a series of stressful life events, that could affect your mortality," said Carolyn Aldwin, director of the Center for Healthy Aging Research in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at OSU.

It was observed that both types of stress harmed the health, but each type of stress had an independent effect on mortality. Those men who experience several stressful events in life do not have high levels of stress from these everyday hassles. 

"It's not the number of hassles that does you in, it's the perception of them being a big deal that causes problems," Aldwin said. "Taking things in stride may protect you."

This was based on the evaluation of the data from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study. They evaluated the stressful life events and everyday hassles for 1,293 men between 1989-2005 and followed them until 2010. Nearly 43 percent of the study subjects had died by the end of the study.

It was observed that among one-third of the men who had less stressful life events had died, while almost half of the men with moderate-high numbers of stressful events died by the end of the study. The lowest mortality rate was noticed in those who had few everyday hassles i.e. 28.7 percent. Less than half of the men with mid-range number of hassles died by the end of the study and 64.3 percent of the men having high number of hassles had died.

Men can live longer only if they can control their attitudes regarding everyday hassles. The finding is documented in Experimental Gerontology.