As you may have noticed, many signs of a supposed midlife crisis — sadness, irritability, less interest in life, thoughts of death — resemble key symptoms of depression.
Keep in mind that mental health symptoms can certainly show up for the first time as you approach middle age. Therapy can help, no matter your age or stage of life. In fact, many therapists specialize in offering support for life transitions and the mental health symptoms that show up alongside these changes. A therapist can offer more insight on what might be going on and help you explore new ways of finding fulfillment.
After all, the sun has to set in order to rise again — and rise it will, on the dawn of the rest of your life. Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health.
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We'll go over common traits, how they compare to type…. Psychologists and psychiatrists have a lot in common, but they also have some key differences. Nothing is. Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Mental Health. Midlife Crisis or Midlife Myth? What are some supposed signs? Are there different stages? So, some people in their mids may think life is only going to get worse, which may spark a midlife crisis.
Some people may experience depression during midlife and refer to their depressive state as their midlife crisis. Women between the ages of 40 and 59 in the United States have the highest rates of depression Suicide rates are highest during middle age—among white men in particular. People between the ages of 45 and 54 are more likely to kill themselves than any other age group. If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at for support and assistance from a trained counselor.
If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database. Does a midlife crisis cause depression? Does depression cause a midlife crisis? Or, is the depression people experience during midlife simply referred to as a midlife crisis?
Similarly, does a midlife crisis increase the risk of suicide? Some people may mistake health issues for a midlife crisis as well. A shift in behavior or a change in personality could be a sign of dementia.
People with early-onset dementia may have trouble planning, organizing, or thinking ahead. Consequently, they may be stressed or grow confused easily. Tartaglia explains that the changes brought about by dementia often lead to separation or divorce before a proper diagnosis is ever made. A study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development found an upside to the midlife crisis—curiosity.
Researchers found that people who were experiencing a crisis—whether it was a quarter-life or a midlife crisis—experienced enhanced curiosity about themselves and the wider world around them. The distress and uncertainty participants experienced brought about openness to new ideas, which could bring insight and creative solutions. That curiosity could lead to new breakthroughs or new opportunities, which might be the silver lining in the midst of a crisis.
Perhaps you become more spiritual or maybe you decide to begin volunteering so you feel as though your life has more meaning.
But it could also take a toll on your well-being. If you experience distressing symptoms that impair your functioning, seek professional help. If you suspect a friend or family member may be experiencing a midlife crisis , there are several things you can do to be supportive:.
Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life. Inter Jour of Behavioral Dev. Young onset dementia. Alzheimer Society of Canada. Published September 11, National Center for Health Statistics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published February 13, Blanchflower D, Oswald A. Is well-being u-shaped over the life cycle? Lachman ME. And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.
I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned. I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s or, even better, in my late 30s is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom.
Today he is at the University of Southern California and is celebrated as the founder of a new branch of economics, focused on human well-being.
At the time, though, looking at something as subjective as happiness seemed eccentric to mainstream economists. His findings, Easterlin says, were for many years regarded as a curiosity, more a subject for cocktail conversation than for serious research.
A generation later, in the s, happiness economics resurfaced. This time a cluster of labor economists, among them David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, got interested in the relationship between work and happiness. That led them to international surveys of life satisfaction and the discovery, quite unexpected, of a recurrent pattern in countries around the world. The pattern came to be known as the happiness U-curve. She told me she was startled to find that objective life circumstances did not determine subjective life satisfaction; in Peru, as in other countries, many people who had moved out of poverty felt worse off than those who had stayed poor.
Hunting around, she discovered the sparse literature on the economics of happiness, plunged into survey data, and found the same U-shaped pattern, first in Latin America and then in the rest of the world. The U-curve emerges in answers to survey questions that measure satisfaction with life as a whole, not mood from moment to moment. The exact shape of the curve, and the age when it bottoms out, vary by country, survey question, survey population, and method of statistical analysis.
The U-curve is not ubiquitous; indeed, one would be suspicious if a single pattern turned up across an immensely variegated landscape of surveys and countries and generations and analyses. Still, the pattern turns up much too often to ignore. They found a relationship between age and happiness in 80 countries, and in all but nine of those, satisfaction bottomed out between the ages of 39 and 57 the average nadir was at about age The curve tends to evince itself more in wealthier countries, where people live longer and enjoy better health in old age.
Sometimes it turns up directly in raw survey data—that is, people just express less overall satisfaction in middle age. Some scholars—including Easterlin, the grand old man of the field—take a dim view of making such adjustments. In other words, if all else is equal, it may be more difficult to feel satisfied with your life in middle age than at other times.
Blanchflower and Oswald have found that, statistically speaking, going from age 20 to age 45 entails a loss of happiness equivalent to one-third the effect of involuntary unemployment.
Not everyone is prepared to go so far. Many psychologists have their doubts, partly because the U-curve is a statistical regularity that emerges from large data sets, and psychologists prefer to study actual people, whether individually or in experimental groups, and ideally across their whole lives.
In recent work, however, U-curve researchers have begun to find evidence that is harder to dismiss as mere statistical correlation. Oswald, Terence Cheng, and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the U-curve in four longitudinal data sets from three countries: an important kind of evidence, because it traces the lived experiences of individuals over time, rather than comparing people of various ages in a statistical snapshot. Zookeepers, researchers, and other animal caretakers filled out a questionnaire rating the well-being of their primate charges more than captive chimps and orangutans in Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States.
I think where the evidence points is this: being satisfied is perfectly possible in midlife, but for a great many of us it is harder. That is how the U-curve felt to me, and how it feels to some of the people I unscientifically surveyed for this article. He said he now experiences difficulty feeling contentment, leading to some of the same self-doubt that I felt: a creeping suspicion that he is fated to be whiny.
He also wondered whether his dissatisfaction has been a cause of some of his problems, not just an effect. Something sufficient for my wife to leave. If I did a deep psychological dive, I might say that nothing will ever make me content. I see life as a challenge to overcome rather than an adventure to be enjoyed. Maybe that will change in my 50s. My friend K. In the past few years, things have turned upward, markedly so.
I measure my worth now by how I can help others and contribute to the community. It was always striving and looking ahead, as opposed to being in the now and feeling grateful for the now. I think I feel a great gratitude.
When I am in a situation when I can moan a little bit or feel bad about some of the difficult things that have happened, the balance sheet is hugely on the side of all the great things that have happened. And I think that gratitude has helped me be both more satisfied and more giving. The same has been true for me.
Though I still have my share of gloomy days, I find it far easier than I did in my 40s to appreciate what I have, even without writing down lists of good things, as I had to resort to doing a decade ago. It certainly helps that my pet cause, gay marriage, has met with success, and that I myself achieved legal marriage at age But something has changed inside, too, because in my 40s, I had plenty of success and none of it seemed adequate, which was why I felt so churlish.
For me, after a period when gratitude seemed to have abandoned me, its return feels like a gift. Carstensen described to me this pattern in her own life.
I feel it now. Of course, the most interesting question, and unfortunately also the hardest question, is: Why is happiness so often U-shaped? Why the common dissatisfaction in middle age? And why the upswing afterward? Part of the answer likely involves what researchers call selection bias: unhappier people tend to die sooner, removing themselves from the sample. Also, of course, middle age is often a stressful time, burdened with simultaneous demands from jobs, kids, and aging parents.
I can attest that I experienced the U-curve without dying off in the process; so do other people, as we know from happiness research that follows individuals over time. And recall that the U-curve often emerges after adjusting for other variables in life children, income, job, marriage , so it is not purely situational.
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