How to Deal with the Midlife Crisis
This week, Savvy Psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen channels her best Talking Heads and asks, on behalf of every middle-aged adult, “How did I get here?” Plus, why time seems to fly as we get older.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How to Deal with the Midlife Crisis
The midlife crisis, while not an actual diagnosis, is enough of a cultural phenomenon to instantly conjure images of balding guys in impulsively purchased red sports cars, or women of a certain age getting nipped and tucked.
And while not everyone has a wine-soaked midlife crisis accessorized with an Ashley Madison account, there is certainly developmental evidence that middle adulthood, defined as approximately ages 40-65, can be a difficult stage.
What is it about midlife that’s so challenging? Last week in our episode about the quarter-life crisis, we talked about Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development. And guess what—there’s a challenge for middle adulthood as well. It’s the seventh of the eight life stages and it’s called Generativity versus Stagnation. As the name implies, the challenge is to be productive—to give back through a career, be active in our community, raise good kids to send forth into the world, or otherwise care for those around us. Anything that benefits others falls into the Generativity bucket.
Stagnation, on the other hand, is being self-absorbed, taking more than you give, or choosing not to contribute (therefore, health problems that keep you from giving don’t count against you). Stagnation, predictably, leads to feeling disconnected or alienated, which can set the stage for crisis.
But you don’t have to have been navel-gazing for a couple of decades to have a crisis. It’s also around this age that kids start to leave the nest, which may leave middle-adulthood types feeling irrelevant or unnecessary, particularly if they stayed home to raise their children. Likewise, you may be giving back actively, but still have regrets, like not completing school or pursuing a dream.
Or, a midlife crisis may not be related to feelings of regret or irrelevance at all. It might be sparked by loss—it’s at this age that losing a parent becomes more common, which sets us up to feel like we’re next in line on the generational escalator to eternity. This new salience of mortality often makes us feel like we have to kick things up a notch, or at least to pay more attention to our one and precious life, which seems to be flying by at breakneck speed.
This phenomenon—time speeding up as we age—isn’t new. The founder of American psychology himself, William James, wondered about the increasing speed of life all the way back in 1890. In his classic book, Principles of Psychology, he wrote that our perception of time is affected by two things: first, what we do with the time, and second, whether we’re in the thick of things or looking back through the rearview window. To quote, he says,
In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short. A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day.
OK, in short, when you’re bored, time seems to crawl by. But look back on that same time and it feels short precisely because not much happened.
On the other hand, when you’re busy or engaged in something, time flies by. But look back and whatever you did at the beginning of the day, week, or month seems eons ago.
The phenomenon explains why on Friday I have no idea where the week went, but when I go to write our yearly holiday card, I can’t believe how much actually got packed into a year. The things that happened in January feel like a million years ago.
Here’s another possibility: Paul Janet, the French philosopher and James’s contemporary, noted that time seems to speed up because the proportion of a given unit of time to one’s lifespan gets smaller and smaller. To illustrate, let’s take one year: If you’re five, a year is 20% of your entire life. But by the time you’re 50, a year is just 2% of your life. So from childhood on, as the proportion shortens, time seems to speed up.
Put the two theories together and next time you hear, “Are we there yet?” from the backseat, you’ll know why. To a little kid, time (and especially boring time) really does seem to go by more slowly.
So what does all this have to do with a midlife crisis? As time seems to go by faster and faster and the future seems shorter, we start to evaluate what we’ve generated thus far. If we don’t like what we see, we may be struck by a need to reassess. Which brings us to our three tips:
As time seems to go by faster and faster and the future seems shorter, we start to evaluate what we’ve generated thus far.
Tip #1: Add more firsts. Or take a moment to do nothing. If you’re thirty or older, think back to high school or college. How long do those four years seem? Probably a lot longer than four years seems these days. Why? If we go with William James’s theory, a lot of memorable events got packed into those four years—lots of firsts, lots of novelty.
So take advantage of the effect by adding more novelty to your life. Change things up. But change-ups don’t have to be drastic like divorce or expensive like an around-the-world cruise. It can be simple: switch up your schedule, take a new route home, use this weekend to explore your community. When each day or week follows a certain sameness, the time seems short, so change things up and when you look back, the time will seem longer.
By contrast, if you want to feel like time is passing more slowly as it happens, take a break. Do nothing. Close your eyes for one minute. Sit on your couch but don’t look at a screen—just sit. At most, look at the flowers in your windowbox. And poof! Magically, time slows down.
Tip #2: Reconsider what it means to be happy. Or, in the words of Pharrell, clap along if you know what happiness is to you. All of us set goals within a context of time, so as we age, our goals change. As the future gets shorter, our goals may naturally shift from competition to connection. Spending time with family and friends, seeing the world, or pursuing small pleasures—the things that create fulfillment rather than, say, victory or excitement, start to take center stage.
Indeed, a 2013 study out of Stanford surveyed 136 people ages 18-93 about feeling good. Younger participants valued what the researchers called “high-arousal positive affect,” like feeling excited or proud, as well as “low-arousal positive affect,” like feeling calm, peaceful, and relaxed. However, older participants increasingly preferred low-arousal positive affect. And what’s more, they achieved it more often than the youngsters, indicating that as we age, happily, the gap narrows between how we want to feel and how we actually feel.
Tip #3: Know the best is yet to come. There’s a phenomenon called the Happiness Curve, where happiness over the lifespan is, roughly, a U. Our happiness is generally high in childhood, but declines over the first couple of decades of adulthood, and hits bottom, on average, in the mid-40s. But after that, happiness starts to increase with age. And many people report being happiest in life in old age. A 2011 study also out of Stanford followed nearly 200 people ages 18-94 for 10 years and found that people reported not only better emotional well-being over time, but also greater emotional stability. More happiness and less drama–those are definitely two things worth aging for.
You can check out Paul Janet’s 1897 theory in a 2016 way: an interactive graphic by German artist Maximilian Kiener makes this point beautifully. It takes a lot of scrolling, but that’s the point.
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About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.