'Don't lose your sense of humour, you'll need it': How to get through a mid-life crisis

Middle age is not what it used to be.

We are now in the era of the 100-year life and that stretching of the life course means that each stage of adult life now starts later and lasts longer. Most of you don’t consider yourself fully adult until your late 20s.

Young adulthood, the usual time to get married, settle down, and start a family, now starts in your early 30s and extends well into your late 40s. So you will be happy to know that you now don’t enter middle age until you are you about 50, and it then extends right into your late 60s, or even early 70s. In the US, nearly half of those aged 65-69, and one third of those in their early 70s, consider themselves to be middle aged.

How young you feel is not a trivial thing. It’s a better predictor of how long and how healthily you will live than your chronological age. Middle-aged people typically report feeling 10 years younger than they are, and feeling that way is associated with better health and wellbeing. Any physical changes are more than balanced out by significant increases in your cognitive and emotional functioning. At 50, barring ill health, you can look forward to at least 30 more years of active engagement in life.

Please log in or register with Independent.ie for free access to this article.

Log In

New to Independent.ie? Create an account

Turning point

Becoming middle aged is one of the turning points in life. During middle age, you will take a big step forward in your psychological development as you search for a sharper sense of what defines you, or re-find the core of your self.

Most people expect to change at mid life, and most do, and this sense of personal change and development is the key element in how to manage your happiness and wellbeing not just now, but at later stages.

The big dip

But the first sign of impending middle age is not reassuring. You experience the Big Dip – a general sense of stress and strain, more worries, a loss of confidence, feeling that it’s going to be hard to deal with any difficulties you have, more problems sleeping, maybe a spike in depression. Happiness and wellbeing begin to drop to their lowest level in the whole life course, outside of advanced old age. The dip comes on slowly, starting, on average, sometime in your 40s, and you don’t recover your old sense of wellbeing until sometime around your early 50s.

What triggers the Big Dip? There is a sense of an ending. You’ve just run the marathon of young adulthood. The totally absorbing enterprise of setting up a home, caring for young children, and getting established in your career is coming to an end. By now, you’re tired, the runner’s high giving way to a certain flatness. And as you advance into your mid 40s, the physical messages that you are ageing become more frequent and harder to ignore. Your hair is greying or getting thinner. You notice a few pounds going on, a new slackness in your neck, a loose fold of skin. When did that happen, you wonder?

Most of you take these changes in your stride – unless your identity has always been strongly tied to being physically attractive. You still look pretty good and your physical and sexual performance is up to par. Contrary to stereotype, concern about appearance and ageing is lowest in women, and there’s a new freedom from the body-image tyranny of earlier years.

But these intimations of mortality trigger a more significant change – your sense of time flips. Up to now, you’ve measured time as ‘time since birth’. But at mid life, it changes to ‘time left’. You become aware of death in a very personal way – like reaching the top of a hill and seeing for the first time, in the far distance, the end of the road ahead. And then, the big questions of middle age start. Is this it? What have I actually achieved? Is this the life I want? Now what?

Time to reassess

The spectre of middle age is stagnation – feeling stuck, dried out, unable to move forward in relationships that have lost vitality and purpose, or trapped in a bleak cycle of work, or repeating patterns that you can’t escape. There is an overwhelming sense of lost opportunities, of squandered efforts. But this feeling of stagnation can also act as a spur to find a better fit between the person you now are and the way you live your life.

This new sense of urgency and the fear of stagnation trigger a period of stocktaking that ranges over three Rs – reassessing the past, reviewing the life you have built, and revisiting the unlived parts of yourself. You reassess how much of what you hoped for in life has materialised or evaporated. By now, the boundless optimism and self-belief that launched you into the adult world has taken some knocks against the wall of reality. You have to let go of some illusions about yourself, and about what’s possible.

You review your closest relationships, your work, what interests and drives you, and ask yourself how good a fit there is between what you have and what you now need. Your work may be secure or high-earning, but crushing your spirit.

Your marriage may be ticking over, but the intimacy and enjoyment you once shared with each other is hollowed out and most couples have to find new ways to renew and deepen that intimacy.

Some take the exit route, some break out and start an affair. In most countries, mid 40s is the time when separations, divorces and affairs happen most frequently.

You also revisit the unlived part of yourself. In your 20s and early 30s you had to make choices in love and work, to invest in some sides of your personality and suppress others. At mid life, this unlived part of yourself begins to surface into your consciousness. The psychological task of middle age is to explore that unlived part of yourself and find a new way of integrating it in your life; to recapture a sense of wholeness and authenticity. Finding a new, energising set of answers to these questions is a key part of your happiness and wellbeing.

Middle age

Finally, this period of stocktaking comes to an end and you enter middle age sometime around 50. Most of you feel in your prime – and there’s is a lot of psychological evidence to back up that claim. You have a more assured mastery of the world you operate in, and you are functioning at a high level of competence. Your cognitive executive functioning improves significantly. You possess a rich store of experience. There are striking improvements in your judgment. You know when to consult other people and when you have to make decisions yourself. You make better use of time.

Your new sense of mastery is matched by a new seniority in the different domains in your life – in your extended family, in work, in areas of interest like sport or politics. It’s the middle aged who hold most of the institutional and political power and make the major decisions that shape how people live and work.

But the downside to this new status and authority is the responsibility overload that goes with it. You have an acute sense of crossover stress – simultaneous and competing demands from different parts of your life that are harder to juggle. These pressures trigger a feeling of angst, a sense that you can’t escape the demands of those around you, and it takes a while to find ways to adjust to this.

But, finally, it sinks in. This is the new normal for a long time to come.

Confidence

The emotional gains are particularly sharp if you are a woman. In middle age, women score higher than men on most measures of wellbeing. You feel that you are coming into your own. A new sense of confident power is one of the most marked psychological changes in women in middle age.

You have a more favourable body image than younger women do, and you rate your sexual attractiveness and overall physical condition pretty highly. What influences your body image now is not your actual age, but your subjective age – how young or old you feel and judge your body to be, and how concerned you are by ageing.

Negotiating the menopause is trying – hot flushes, broken sleep, unexpected bouts of tears, strange aches and pains, loss of libido and more trouble achieving orgasm are no fun.

But for most women, menopause is nothing like the crisis it was once thought to be, delivering a dismal menu of anxiety, depression, and lack of purpose. The loss of fertility is not an assault on your core sense of self, although you may mourn it for a while, especially if you did not or could not have a longed-for baby. But it’s also the beginning of a new independence and sexual freedom.

Resilience

Whatever your circumstances, negotiating the challenges of ageing requires resilience, and that means working on four things.

First, be open to new experiences so you can keep growing and developing; trying something new and interesting in your relationships and your work.

Second, have a strong sense of purpose about your life, about what you want to do and achieve.

Third, learn to manage uncertainty – what is threatening also holds within it a new possibility.

Fourth, don’t lose your sense of humour – you’ll need it.

If there is a ‘secret’ to successful ageing, that’s pretty much it.

Dr Maureen Gaffney is a clinical psychologist and writer. Her new book Your One Wild And Precious Life will be published by Penguin next year.

Source: Read Full Article