Why Men Try to Handle Things Alone – And How its Bad for their Health
TLDR: Men are more likely to lack the specific kind of connection that protects them — trusted relationships and a group they belong to — and they're far less likely to seek help for it. Learn why we should support men in getting the help they need and how group therapy is one solution they might be a natural fit for.
Half of US adults reported feeling “loneliness” prior to the Covid-19 pandemic (Surgeon General, 2023), and although lock-down restrictions were eventually lifted, what’s left in the wake of the pandemic are societal changes and innovations that traded convenience for connection. Anecdotally, loneliness is one of the most prevalent symptoms I hear clients talk about in therapy sessions – even if they feel like they are surrounded by other people on a day-to-day basis. We all likely have a pretty good understanding of some of the contributing factors at play: daily screen time, a dependence on cars, the overuse of social media and dating apps, living in a society where planned interactions are more common than casual ones, lack of third spaces to meet new people, reduction in participation in community or religious groups, the need for multiple jobs to make ends meet, and so on and so forth. These factors impact everyone, but in my practice I’ve begun to notice a particular pattern of how much they are really impacting men.
In therapy, it is more common for a man to say to me, “I’ve never told anyone that before.” Men have a harder time opening up at the start of a therapy session, often not knowing how to bring up the topic they are struggling with. In therapy, I often need to bust out my “feelings wheel” to show men all the different words they can use to describe how they’re feeling (not thinking) because they have a hard time both identifying and communicating it. People want men to be stronger communicators around their emotions – which is a tall ask for the guys who don’t even know what they feel.
The data supports what I so often see in therapy. The Survey Center on American Life's 2021 American Perspectives Survey found one in seven men say they have no close friends (vs. ~10% of women). The American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) reported that women and men socialize differently; women more often engage friends and family, whereas men are more likely to socialize through group activities rather than one-to-one socializing (AIBM, 2025). It makes sense that men are feeling more social isolation in a society where so often social groups fall away, leaving very little for men to fall back on when they need the organic social or emotional support that usually comes from friendships born and cultivated in the group setting.
Why Men Handle It Alone: Don’t Ask for Help?
I’ll never forget the moment I learned this fact in graduate school: gender socialization begins long before a child takes their first breath. Once a fetus’ sex is learned, parents and society begin to speak to the unborn baby in a way that reflects gender norms, a process called anticipatory socialization. An example of this is when we call the baby boy’s in-utero movements “strong” or subconsciously begin to alter different tones of voice to fit preconceived gender norms. My point is, that its a fact that caregivers have expectations for boys (and girls, of course) and begin to behave in ways that shape their inner world and access to social and emotional skills long before they are even born. (https://collected.jcu.edu/soc-facpub/25/).
Masculinity has become a bit of a “dirty word” these days, but masculinity itself is made up of many admirable qualities: strength, stoicism, self-reliance, the role of the provider, courage, resilience, accountability, protection, assertiveness, leadership, integrity, honor. These are attributes most human beings would benefit from employing. It’s not inherently a bad thing that most boys grow up with ideals of masculinity thrust upon them. It is, however, an unbalanced experience of what it means to be human when boys are discouraged and shamed if they embody any non-masculine, or in other words, feminine qualities. Gender socialization is not just about colors and clothing choices. Boys are also often discouraged when they exhibit feminine qualities, such as empathy, receptivity, nurturing, collaboration, community, relationship-oriented, intuitive, communicative.
Girls are often told that “girls can do anything boys can do” and boys are often told “don’t cry like a girl.” When anything feminine becomes a chronic source of shame and guaranteed teasing throughout boyhood, boys don’t allow themselves to engage with the skills they are going to need to be the emotionally intelligent man everyone wants him to be in adulthood. We would never expect a 6th grader to understand the math skills required of calculus; and yet, we are disappointed when the men in our life don’t know how to open up or shut down when things are emotionally challenging. There was likely no model for how to do so safely.
Along the same lines, stoicism and self-reliance are idealized masculine traits. Thus, it should come as no surprise that men are consistently about half as likely as women to seek help for mental health concerns. This doesn’t represent one gender being mentally healthier than the other, but rather highlights a gap between need for support and help-seeking behavior (Addis & Mahalik, 2003; Möller-Leimkühler, 2002). Again, when we haven’t been modeled or shown that it’s okay to do something like ask for help, we might not have the tools or the thought to do it. And furthermore, if that very thing has become a source of shame (“asking for help feels weak”), it makes sense that there is fear associated with it.
Emotions themselves are gender neutral; however, there are common emotional themes when we talk about men’s issues. We socialize boys to suppress their sadness, hide their tears, and shove down any feelings that aren’t “tough.” As a result, distress often shows up sideways in men as irritability, anger, withdrawal, drinking, and "surface functioning" (Addis, 2008; Brownhill et al., 2005). A lifetime of transforming your sadness into another more acceptable emotion like anger can lead to a lack of understanding emotions not just in oneself, but in everyone.
Why handling things alone is bad for your health?
All human beings are wired for connection. Period. It doesn’t matter if you’re introverted, shy, or told your whole life that you don’t need anyone else. People need people, and there is actually evidence to back this up! The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies on happiness, tracked participants for over 80 years and found that the quality of our close relationships is the strongest predictor of long-term health and well-being. The study showed that learning to build and maintain warm, supportive connections is just as important to our physical and mental health as diet or exercise (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023).
Just as strong relationships protect our health, their absence carries real risk. Here are the facts:
The 2023 Surgeon General warned that social isolation and loneliness are independent risk factors for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and premature death from all causes.Ahrq
Research found that the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day (Murthy, 2023).USU Extension
Isolation raises heart-disease risk by roughly 29% and premature-mortality risk by 29% (HHS / Holt-Lunstad meta-analysis).U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Chronic isolation elevates cortisol and inflammation and worsens sleep and health behaviors (American Heart Association scientific statement, 2022).
And these data points don’t even highlight the impact loneliness and isolation have on mental health. Research consistently links social isolation and loneliness to significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles, with one meta-analysis finding that people who are frequently lonely are more than twice as likely to develop depression (Mann et al., 2022; Gabarrell-Pascuet et al., 2023).
We simply are not wired to carry everything on our own. Decades of research show that social support acts as a buffer against stress, mitigating its impact and lowering the risk of depression and anxiety. Facing life’s challenges alone without any form of support can lead to the mental suffering that occurs within these diagnoses (Cohen & Wills, 1985; American Psychological Association, 2024) and so the value of stoicism and self-reliance is very much counterproductive and antithetical to the idea that handling things alone is a stronger, more effective strategy for anything in life.
Why group therapy supports men?
When I worked in community mental health, the Men’s Process Group I ran each week was by far the most special atmosphere I had ever experienced. Group is kind of like Vegas: what happens in Vegas group, stays in Vegas group. The group provides a safe container for men to talk about “real life shit” with no false pretenses. It’s different from individual therapy in that the therapy itself is not the component that heals the individual, but rather the group of people who share similar experiences and can relate, advise, support, challenge, laugh, or even cry with each other.
I’ve always argued that I believe group therapy is a more effective modality than individual therapy, and as a woman identifying therapist, I think that’s even more the case for men and men that I’ve worked with. Group therapy fosters a sense of belonging and cohesion while offering a safe space to get real honest feedback that helps men work towards some of the outcomes they actually want to achieve. It’s a space where the truth comes out, and even if it’s a harsh truth, you’re in an alliance with the people who gave it to you, and they want to help you face it. Individual therapy can give you a completely confidential space and tools to use outside of the room on your own, whereas group therapy gives you the tools in the moment and says “okay time to practice this right now.” Individual therapy can’t offer the elements of a brotherhood in the same way that process groups for men often can and do. And better yet, as I previously mentioned at the beginning of this blogpost, groups offer the exact social structure that men tend to prefer when it comes to socializing and forming deeper connections.
What a Men’s Process Group actually is?
If you’re curious about what a process group is, take a look at blogposts I’ve previously written on the subject for a deeper dive. To give a brief summary, a process group is a small therapy group who meet regularly to get honest, direct feedback on how they come across and how they handle things. In the 90 minute therapy sessions, the group members use what happens between them in the room to sharpen the way they show up in their relationships, their work, and at home. The way I run process groups is the same regardless of gender or commonality of the members; but the themes that arise in a men’s process group are uniquely different from that of my women’s only group.
Notes:
Men are more likely to lack the specific kind of connection that protects them — trusted relationships and a group they belong to — and they're far less likely to seek help for it.
References
American Psychological Association. (2024, October 22). Manage stress: Strengthen your support network.https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/manage-social-support
Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310–357.https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.98.2.310
U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023); Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), PLoS Medicine; American Heart Association (Cené et al., 2022).
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.
