The quiet habit costing British men their health
There’s a specific kind of denial a lot of men are fluent in. It’s the same one you use on a strange noise in the car engine: turn the radio up, keep driving, hope it sorts itself out before the MOT.
New research backs this up in a way that’s hard to laugh off. A 2026 survey by Benenden Health found that 69% of UK men have ignored a symptom or health concern they were genuinely worried about – more than a quarter of them on multiple occasions. Separately, research commissioned by Medichecks (fronted by Chris Kamara) found that 92% of men will tell a mate to see a doctor about a symptom, but nearly half will sit on the exact same symptom themselves. Two thirds blame old-fashioned ideas about what it means to “cope.”
If you run a business, there’s a good chance you recognise this in yourself before you recognise it in anyone else.
The Quiet Habit – It isn’t laziness – it’s arithmetic
Ask most SME owners why they haven’t had something checked and you won’t hear “I don’t care.” You’ll hear a version of: “I haven’t had time,” “It’s probably nothing,” “I’ll deal with it after this job’s finished.”
It’s a logical-sounding trade-off. Except the maths doesn’t actually work in your favour. The Benenden research found 40% of men who delayed treatment did so hoping the problem would simply disappear, and 28% assumed it wasn’t serious enough to bother anyone with.
Meanwhile, NHS data shows men take up NHS Health Checks at 45.3%, compared to 54.7% of women – meaning fewer men get an early flag on heart disease, stroke risk, diabetes or kidney problems before those become expensive, business-interrupting emergencies.
And it’s not just physical health. Suicide remains the single leading cause of death for men under 50 in the UK, with men in their late 40s and early 50s, prime business-owner years, at the highest risk of any group. Layer that against Mental Health UK’s finding that 80% of small business owners experience symptoms of poor mental health at least a few times a year, and 44% have never sought support, and a pattern starts to look less like bad luck and more like a system working exactly as badly as you’d expect.
The bit nobody puts on a whiteboard: you’re the single point of failure
Every SME owner has, at some point, mapped out what happens if a key member of staff is off sick for a month. Fewer have mapped out what happens if it’s them.
If you’re a sole trader, a limited company director, or the person whose name is on the lease, the business’s risk register has a hole in it — and that hole is you. No sick pay scheme covers a founder’s income the way it covers an employee’s. No amount of “the team can manage without me for a bit” survives six weeks of chemo, a cardiac event, or a breakdown that finally forces the issue after being ignored for a year.
This isn’t scaremongering. It’s the same logic you’d apply to any other business risk: you don’t wait for the warehouse to flood before buying insurance. You don’t wait for the van to break down on the motorway before booking a service. Somehow, health gets treated differently, as something to be dealt with only once it’s unavoidable.
Why “I’ll get round to it” so often becomes “I never did”
Ask men what actually stops them getting checked, and it isn’t usually fear of the diagnosis, although that plays a part. It’s friction. Trying to get through to a GP surgery at 8am while simultaneously running a business. Being told the earliest appointment is three weeks away. Taking half a day off work for a ten-minute conversation, when half a day off work means a missed job and an unhappy client.
This is precisely the gap private medical insurance is built to close. Same-day or next-day GP access via app or phone. Specialist referrals in days rather than months. No guessing game about whether a symptom is “worth” the hassle of chasing an appointment, you just ask, quickly, and get an answer.
What a “wake-up call” usually looks like
Interestingly, the Benenden research also found that 66% of men have had a genuine health wake-up call, most commonly their own health scare (35%), or watching someone close to them go through one (32%). The uncomfortable truth is that most men’s turning point comes after something has already gone wrong, not before.
The entire point of early intervention is to move that wake-up call earlier, ideally to a five-minute conversation with a GP, rather than a hospital bed.
What to actually do with this
If you’ve been sitting on something, a symptom, a low mood that’s stuck around too long, a “we should probably get that looked at” you’ve said to yourself more than once, the ask here isn’t complicated. Book it. This week, not “when things calm down.”
And if the barrier is genuinely about access – appointments, waiting times, finding the hour in a week that has none spare, that’s a solvable problem, not a reason to wait another six months
At Insure My Health, we’re a Bournemouth-based brokerage built specifically around making that access simple: fast GP consultations, quicker specialist referrals, and cover that treats your health the way you’d expect any other essential part of your business to be protected. We manage plans for individuals, families, couples, and business owners across the UK, and we’re always happy to have a straightforward, no-pressure conversation about what cover would actually look like for you.
Have a look at insuremyhealth.uk, or drop us a message. The conversation costs nothing. The alternative sometimes does.
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