Work is my Catch 22

Wow, that was a long break between posts. If you've read this month's main feature on malehealth - The main cause of men's ill health in the developed world - you'll probably figure out why.

I think work is at best overrated and at worst a killer. My next project is a book on men's health. It's going to be a shortish book as it will be aimed at men who aren't, if truth be told, particularly interested in their health but know it makes sense to take a bit of notice. That's most of us, really. In a short book you need to think about what you're going to focus on before you start writing and that's what got me thinking about work.

The book will mention our genetic inheritance but as no reader will be able to do much about that I won't be banging on about it. I'll be looking at the the things we can change - the lifestyle aspects of health. But in a short book, which ones should you cover? So I started thinking about the things we spend most time on. Logically, by making these aspects our lives more healthy, perhaps we can effect the biggest changes in our overall health.

So what are the things we spend most of our time doing? Well, work's one, sleeping's another and perhaps eating and drinking is a third. If we can develop a healthy approach to the things we spend most time doing, the rest might follow. The basic principle, at least, seems to work. Certainly, if you can get a healthy attitude to work, a good night's sleep and a half decent diet, you'd be well on the way to doing what needs to be done to minimise your chances of joining the 120,000 men who die prematurely every year. What do you think?

What I need to do now is to collect all this thinking together with the latest data and research and turn it into the sort of book worth reading. Trouble is that is going to involve a lot of hard work. And that's not healthy. It's my Catch 22.