¡GANAS!: A Men’s Health Intervention to Improve Sleep, Increase Social Connectedness and Reduce Stress Among Low-Income Men

About This Grant

Low-income men experience elevated chronic disease burden and chronic stress, yet few prevention programs are designed to strengthen stress coping, social connection, sleep, and wellbeing in this population. In our previous NIMHD-funded research with low-income men in the U.S. Northeast, stress emerged as a key link between unemployment, housing insecurity, limited social support, stress-related behavioral responses, and chronic disease risk. Sleep is a particularly important prevention target because chronic stress can disrupt sleep through physiological arousal and altered stress regulation, while poor sleep is associated with hypertension, cardiometabolic disease, mental health symptoms, and earlier mortality. Social connectedness is also strongly linked to quality of life and health, including psychological wellbeing, blood pressure, immune functioning, and mortality. Programs that strengthen coping, help-seeking, communication, social support, and health-promoting routines have strong potential to improve sleep and reduce chronic disease risk among low-income men, yet few scalable interventions have been tested with this population. The objective of this proposal is to test GANAS, a 10-week men’s health intervention designed to improve sleep, strengthen social connectedness, and reduce chronic stress among low-income men. Delivered through Facebook Groups and facilitated by trained peer mentors, GANAS brings together groups of men for weekly workshops, discussion, skill-building, and digital engagement focused on chronic stress, coping, sleep, relationships, help-seeking, social support, and health-protective routines. GANAS was developed through formative and pilot work with Latino men, and the revised trial will test whether its core mechanisms improve sleep, stress regulation, and social connection among low-income men more broadly. We will randomize 300 low-income men ages 25–64 in Philadelphia into a two-group waitlist-controlled trial. The primary outcomes are sleep duration, sleep quality, and sleep efficiency, assessed using Fitbit actigraphy and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Mechanistic outcomes include fingernail cortisol, blood pressure, perceived stress, coping, and social connectedness. Changes in social connectedness will be assessed using egocentric and sociocentric social network analysis. Follow-up data will be collected immediately post-intervention and 9 months after intervention completion to assess maintenance of effects. Findings will inform scalable prevention strategies to improve sleep, strengthen stress regulation, and enhance social connection among low-income men.