New MedExpress Canada research ties burnout to erectile dysfunction, with most men reluctant to name the real cause
Work stress is spilling well past the workday for Canadian men, according to new research from MedExpress Canada. More than a third of respondents said workplace stress had a negative impact on their sex life in the past year, and men who are highly stressed at work are two-and-a-half times more likely to report erectile dysfunction (ED) than their less-stressed peers.
The survey, conducted July 13 to 16, 2026, polled just over 1,000 Canadian men aged 18 and older. Respondents were split into three cohorts: Gen Z (ages 18–29) at 31 per cent, millennials (ages 30–45) at 50 per cent, and ages 46–61 at 15 per cent, with the oldest respondent around 73.
Dr. Karim Vellani, Chief Medical Officer for MedExpress Canada, said the findings run against a familiar pattern in his clinical experience. “We found that 36% of all respondents say that work stress had a negative impact on their sex life in the past year,” he said. “And in fact, about 38% of Canadian men were avoiding sex because they felt too drained or stressed from work.”
Burnout as the hidden driver
Perhaps the most striking figure, Vellani said, is how framing changes willingness to seek care. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said they’d be more likely to pursue treatment if they saw ED as a stress and burnout issue rather than a purely sexual one – a distinction that could reshape how the effects of burnout on safety compliance get talked about in workplaces that have historically treated burnout as a productivity problem, not a health one.
“I would say the majority of men usually come to the clinic because they are having ED and they’re seeking treatment,” Vellani said, drawing on roughly 14 years as a family physician. “And sometimes they’re not able to make that causal link between their workplace... Often they tend to look at things like relationship discourse or age or cardiovascular risk factors, which are all rightfully so their own causes of ED. But I think sometimes they have problems connecting workplace health or workplace stress with ED problems.”
He attributed that gap largely to stigma. “I think men tend to have trouble talking about stress or mental health in general,” he said. “Whenever we get a chance to actually open up those conversations in a scalable way or in a much more accessible way, I think it makes it a lot easier for men to then talk about stress... and then talk about ED as a symptom of that stress.”
What employers can do
For health and safety leaders, Vellani pointed to a practical first step: giving workers a clear, low-friction route to raise the issue at all. “There’d be opportunities for workplace environments to be able to create safe spaces for these types of discussions, or at least through things like EAP [employee assistance program] programs, allow for an easier avenue for men who are seeking treatment or experiencing work burnout to actually pursue treatment,” he said. “Establishing the right type of forms, the right type of pathways for men to actually seek the right type of advice and guidance is probably the first step that most employers can look at.”
That framing lines up with where constant stress and financial insecurity threaten worker safety has already been pointing: stress originating outside a specific task can still show up as a workplace risk. Vellani said the conversation around men’s mental health has advanced over the past decade, but tends to stop at labels like depression or adjustment disorder without reaching the functional, day-to-day impact of stress – sexual health among them.
He also linked the issue to the broader pattern covered in breaking the stigma of male mental health, noting that silence cuts both ways: men who won’t discuss stress are often the same men who won’t discuss its downstream effects. “I think it’s beholden to providers like us at MedExpress... in terms of like creating those frictionless pathways for men to have an easy avenue to either talk about or identify these issues,” he said. “And then how do you uplift the rest of the healthcare system to be able to facilitate these conversations?”
Vellani said MedExpress Canada doesn’t currently offer a comparable women’s health program domestically, though he flagged hypoactive sexual desire disorder and postmenopausal changes as areas warranting similar research. “We know that just as men are not willing to have those conversations around ED, there’s a large prevalence of women who are having issues around hypoactive sexual disorder or postmenopausal changes,” he said. “And a lot of that can be secondary to – can augment workplace stress as well.”
His closing message to safety leaders was straightforward: normalize the conversation before symptoms escalate. “I think collectively we need to start to encourage the right types of spaces and opportunities and access points for men to have these types of conversations in a safe environment,” he said.
