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4. Cancer
50% more men than women die of cancer. This year over 700,000 men will be
diagnosed with cancer and nearly 300,000 will die of it. Over the course of a
lifetime, half of all men will get cancer at least once.
5. Homicide
Your chances of being a victim of homicide are 1 in 30 if you are a black male
compared to 1 in 179 if you are a white male (That’s almost 600% higher risk for
black males vs. white males). Your chance of being a killed is 1 in 132 if you are
a black female compared to 1 in 195 if you are a white female. Whether you are
black or white, you are more likely to be killed if you are male than if you are
female.
Most people know that men commit suicide more often than women. But
most are not aware of how much more likely men are apt to kill themselves than
are women or how our risk differs with age. “The suicide rate is 4 times higher
among males than females overall,” says Will Courtenay, author of Dying to be
Men: Psychosocial, Environmental, and Biohavioral Directions in Promoting the
Health of Men and Boys. “Suicide rates for males range from 2 times higher
among children aged 10 to 14, to 18 times higher among adults aged 85 or
older.”
Estimated Annual Suicide Rate per 100,000 by Age and Gender
It might seem a stretch of the imagination to suggest that the discovery and
exhaustion of fossil fuels could be contributing to all these problems, including
the increase in male suicide, but Heinberg and others have continued to make a
compelling argument. In the 300 years since we first discovered the huge energy
potential contained in fossil fuels, industrial society has become totally dependent
on them for its survival and we have been consuming them at ever increasing
rates.
“Industrial civilization is based on the consumption of energy resources that
are inherently limited in quality,” Heinberg reminds us, “and that are about to
become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger
dramatic economic and geopolitical events, in the end, it may be impossible for
even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it during the
twentieth century.”
As I write this (March 6, 2011), the price of oil is $103/barrel and a headline in
Bloomberg News reads: Oil prices may rise as fighting in Libya and tensions in
other parts of the Middle East disrupt crude shipments from the region.
Regardless of short-term trends, we absolutely know the following:
When the economy is affected, so too are jobs, and men are particularly
vulnerable to job loss. An editorial in the March, 2011 issue of the British Journal
of Psychiatry, indicates that depression rates in men are likely to increase due to
the socioeconomic changes going on in the world. The study’s lead author
Boadie Dunlop, M.D., from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta writes,
"Compared to women, many men attach a great importance to their roles as
providers and protectors of their families. Failure to fulfill the role of breadwinner
is associated with greater depression and marital conflict."
The Ultimate “Power Tool” for Guys Who Want Their Lives to Work
What would you give to have a tool that can fix most of the things that really
need fixing, is easy to use, can be taken wherever you go, never needs to be
plugged in, and costs nearly nothing? Think of it as a super-charged Swiss Army
knife with everything you need to address any emergency and heal any wound.
The four elements of your Swiss Army knife for the body, mind, and spirit (I
call it the Energy Psychology Power Tool) are:
1. Meridian Tapping
2. Earth Connecting
3. Heart Coherence
4. Attachment Love
I won’t describe Meridian Tapping since most are familiar with it, but will
describe the 3 other elements.
In some ways all the major problems we face today--from global warming to
peak oil, from obesity to depression, from economic collapse to the increase of
divorce—could be helped if we were able to re-establish our connection to the
Earth. Social psychologist, Sam Keen put it simply: “The radical vision of the
future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our
destruction is simple:
So, how do we get in touch with the Earth? Well, for millions of years our
ancestors moved across the landscape. The women walked to gather food. The
men walked to find animals for food. In addition to walking, our male ancestors
also jogged, ran, and sprinted to get close enough to wild animals to kill them
and bring back meat for the tribe.
Have you heard of Earthing? When I first heard about it I knew I needed to
try it. “Earthing ranks right up there with the discovery of penicillin,” says health
guru and visionary Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD. So what is Earthing? In their
book Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?, authors Clinton
Ober, Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D., and Martin Zucker say, “Earthing involves
coupling your body to the Earth’s eternal and gentle surface energies. It means
walking barefoot outside and/or sitting, working or sleeping inside while
connected to a conductive device that delivers the natural healing energy of the
Earth into your body.”
Heart disease is still the major killer of men. According to the National Center
of Disease Control (CDC):
• Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States.
• Half of the men who die suddenly of coronary heart disease have no
previous symptoms.
• Between 70% and 89% of sudden cardiac events occur in men.
Millions of men are taking medications to treat or prevent heart disease. And
once again there is another choice to consider. According to David Servan-
Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., author of The Instinct to Heal: Curing Stress, Anxiety,
and Depression Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy, there is an intimate
connection between the heart and the emotion centers in the brain and by
learning methods that produce heart coherence, we can not only protect our
hearts, but the rest of the human body as well. He says, “A simple and effective
method available to all of us seems to create the very conditions essential for
harmony between the brain and the heart. Although this method has only
recently been described, several studies have already shown beneficial effects.”
A number of these studies Servan-Schreiber notes have been conducted at the
Institute of HeartMath based in Boulder Creek, California.
She goes to detail the kind of cultural norms both women and men have
grown up believing:
What do these four healing practices have in common? They all reduce
stress, the primary cause of all our diseases.
Alex Loyd, in his book, The Healing Code, recounts a scene from the original
City Slickers movie with Billy Crystal where Crystal is talking with Curly played by
Jack Palance, the rough and tumble old cowboy. Although he is a man of view
words, Crystal comes to recognize that Curly is quite wise. Curly tells him that
the secret of life was one thing. Crystal hangs on the next words as he asks
Curly to elaborate. But Curly tells him that he must find the “one thing” for
himself.
We’ve all had the experience of finding that one special thing that opens our
eyes to the world. I recognized the power of love when I met my wife and again
when our son was born. In the Healing Codes Loyd offers three, “one things”
that he believes will help us heal our ills and create well being and joy in our
lives. “We believe that as far as your life, your health, and your prosperity are
concerned, these three things make all the difference.”
The one thing on planet Earth that can heal just about any problem in our
lives is the immune and healing systems of the body. Most of us are not aware
of the millions of healing events that go on in our body every second. Our
immune system goes after invading organisms and our kidneys filter our blood.
Our body temperature is kept within a healthy range and every second we shed
millions of old cells while new ones are created. Our nervous system alerts us to
threats and keeps us connected to others. Everything is kept in balance and we
rarely have to think about it.
The one thing that can turn off the natural healing system of the body is
stress. Most of us know that stress can cause all kinds of physical, emotional,
and spiritual problems in our lives, but we don’t really understand how it works.
Biologist Bruce Lipton offers a simple vision of how stress can harm us. He says
that evolution has provided us with a lot of survival mechanisms that can roughly
be divided into two functional categories: growth and protection. The body is
build to put energy into one of these two functions at a time.
“Humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a
protective mode,” Lipton says. “If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a
good idea to expend energy on growth. In order to survive—that is, escape the
lion—you summon all your energy for your fight or flight response. Redistributing
energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in a curtailment
of growth.”
The cells literally close up, like a ship battening down the hatches in a time of
attack. Nothing is going in or out. You don’t see a tender ship coming up beside
a battleship to give it food or to unload the garbage during a battle. In the same
way our cells don’t receive nutrition, oxygen, minerals, etc. nor do they get rid of
waste products and toxins while under stress.
The stress response is built in for our protection. When something threats us
we go into fight-or-flight mode. That works wonderfully when the threat is short-
lived. We can afford to turn off our growth functions long enough to escape from
the lion. But, in our modern world we increasingly suffer from chronic stress and
that’s where we have problems. There is only so much energy to go around. If
we are putting it into protection, there isn’t enough for all the healthy growth
functions. “In fact,” says Lipton, “you can shut down growth processes so
completely that it becomes a truism that you can be ‘scared to death.’”
One Thing #3
The one thing on planet Earth that can turn One Thing #1 back on is healing
the issues of the heart. As we’ll see in future chapters these issues of the heart
are encoded in the cells of the body based on beliefs that offered survival value
when we were growing up, but now cause problems in our lives. Removing
these energy blocks allows the chronic stress responses that are no longer
needed to be turned off and for the growth processes of the body to once again
function normally.
“According to the greatest minds of our time,” says Loyd, “every problem is an
energy problem.” As biologist Bruce Lipton and other scientists have shown,
these problems are held in the cellular memories of our bodies. But the good
news is that these cellular memories can be healed through various Energy
Psychology techniques.
Who’re You Calling Irritable! What Makes You Think I’m Depressed?
I treated a lot of these men and the women who loved them, but felt like I was
missing something essential about what was going on. I got my first clue when a
colleague sent me copy of an article by Dr. Gerald A. Lincoln, a researcher in
Edinburgh, Scotland. Dr. Lincoln had recently published the results of his studies
on animals in the journal Reproduction, Fertility, and Development. He titled the
paper, “The irritable male syndrome” and described what he observed in the
animals following the withdrawal of testosterone.
Dr. Gerald Lincoln, who coined the term “Irritable male syndrome,” found that
lowering levels of testosterone in his research animals caused them to become
more irritable, biting their cages as well as the researchers who were testing
them. Larrian Gillespie, M.D., an expert on male and female hormones says,
“Low testosterone is associated with symptoms of Irritable Male Syndrome.”
One of the most common causes of low serotonin levels is our eating and
drinking habits. For instance, research has shown that protein, if consumed in
excessive quantity, suppresses central nervous system serotonin levels. Many
men were taught to believe that eating lots of meat would make them manly. Not
only are there hormones injected in meat to make the animals fatter, but the
protein contained in the meat can be harmful as well.
Futurist Alvin Toffler was one of the first people to recognize the effect of
stress on society as a whole. “I coined the term ‘Future Shock,’ in 1965,” says
Toffler, “to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in
individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”
As Toffler describes soldiers who broke down under the pressures of combat,
you can recognize what happens to all of us under the constant stresses of a
rapidly changing world. “Mental deterioration often began with fatigue. This was
followed by confusion and nervous irritability. The man became hypersensitive to
the slightest stimuli around him. He became tense, anxious, and heatedly
irascible. His comrades never knew when he would flail out in anger, even
violence, in response to minor inconveniences.
For most of human history, the male role was clear. Our main job was to
“bring home the bacon.” We hunted for our food and shared what we killed with
family and tribe. Everyone had a role to play. Some were good at tracking
animals. Others were good making bows and arrows or spears. Some men
were strong and could shoot an arrow with enough strength to kill a buffalo.
Others were skilled at singing songs and doing dances that invoked the spirit of
the animal and made the hunt more effective.
But now many of us work at jobs that we hate, producing goods or services
that have no real value to the community. We’ve gotten farther and farther away
from the basics of bringing home food we’ve hunted or growing our own. The
money we receive is small compensation for doing work that is meaningless.
And the men with some kind of job, no matter how bad it is, are the lucky ones.
More and more men are losing their jobs and can’t easily find new ones.
Any one of the four causes mentioned above could have a major impact on a
man and contribute to IMS. But what makes it even more difficult is that they
interact with each other. When a man doesn’t feel he has meaningful work, for
instance, his stress levels go up and his testosterone levels go down. When men
are stressed they often drink too much, which lowers their testosterone as well as
their serotonin levels.
The good news is that by changing any one, we can impact all of them. Here
are a few things a man can do now. Have hormone levels checked. Find out if
your testosterone may be low. Eat healthy food with a balance of carbohydrates,
fats, and proteins. Exercise every day. Look for work that is meaningful and
don’t take it personally if our dysfunctional economy pushes you out of your job.
Grow something you can eat, even if it’s just a carrot or potato.
When my book Male Menopause was first published in 1997, most people
had never heard of “male menopause” or the more scientific term “andropause.”
But men, and the women who loved them, were impacted by the problems
without knowing the cause: Erectile dysfunction, loss of sexual desire, irritability,
weight gain, and low energy. Now, it is accepted that male menopause is real, it
affects all men as they reach the age of forty (it can actually start as early as 35
or as late as 65), and there is much we can do to prevent and treat the problems
associated with this major change of life.
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