John Henryism

John Henryism is a behavioral disposition characterized by high-effort active coping with chronic psychological and social stressors. The concept was named by epidemiologist Sherman James in the 1980s after the folk-hero John Henry. James's research showed that working-class Black men who scored high on a John Henryism scale had higher blood pressure than those who scored lower, despite reporting the same external stressors.

The pattern matters because high-effort coping is often the behavior celebrated and expected of Black workers ("work twice as hard"), yet the cardiovascular toll over decades is real. See our longer explainer on John Henryism and blood pressure.