Touch base with reality. Remember that your emotions are not necessarily grounded in reality. Emotions themselves are real, but they may be based on an incorrect interpretation of things. Get some objective input into your situation. Be kind. Be kind to yourself and others. See If You Qualify.
Works Cited Capetta, A. Last updated: November 12, Share article. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. Share on pinterest. Prev Post. Next Post. Contact us today. The Company. Upshaw Shop Meet the Team Menu. Our Locations. Get In Touch. Refer A Patient. Get Free Consultation. Facebook-f Instagram Twitter Youtube. Terms of Use. 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. Where was my best seller? My literary masterpiece? Barack Obama was younger than I, and look where he was! In my 50s, like my friend K. The goals that are chronically activated in old age are ones about meaning and savoring and living for the moment.
In my own case, however, what seems most relevant is a change frequently described both in popular lore and in the research literature: for some reason, I became more accepting of my limitations. He used a German longitudinal survey, with data from to , that, unusually, asked people about both their current life satisfaction and their expected satisfaction five years hence. That allowed him to compare expectations with subsequent reality for the same individuals over time.
So youth is a period of perpetual disappointment, and older adulthood is a period of pleasant surprise. In other words, middle-aged people tend to feel both disappointed and pessimistic, a recipe for misery. Eventually, however, expectations stop declining. They settle at a lower level than in youth, and reality begins exceeding them. Surprises turn predominantly positive, and life satisfaction swings upward. Okay, but why does this abandonment and reorientation seem to happen so reliably in midlife?
Firm explanations are some years away. Still, clues have emerged from the realm of brain science, and they hint at an answer that is both heartening and ancient. Dilip V. Jeste is a distinguished psychiatrist with an unusual pedigree. Jeste, who is 70 and thin enough to look frail until you notice his nimble gait, is no mystic. These are difficult questions to answer with research. If people believe that midlife is a significant time of change and reprioritization, then it is, even if there is no particularly good reason for it.
There is some recent evidence that happiness definitely dips in midlife. If who we are and what we do and how others see us suddenly seems altered, or incomplete, or even dissatisfying, the basic building blocks of meaning can be threatened.
Research does not always find that meaning declines as we age. A quite large study in California found that meaning in life peaked at around age 60 in their participants. My own research suggests that meaning in life does not necessarily peak like this, but it is tricky to say the least attempting to pin down trajectories of a complex human experience like meaning in life based on surveys that are only taken at one point in time.
Additional studies would help us better understand whether and why meaning in life peaks, for whom, and if it is mainly the purpose element that seems most challenging for us in midlife and beyond. Purpose gets the most attention of the three elements of meaning because it is the piece that actively expresses and enacts all the rest. Great purposes grow from the sense we make of the world and help us make the contributions that assure us our lives matter.
What does it take to live a happier life? Learn research-tested strategies that you can put into practice today. Hosted by award-winning psychologist Dacher Keltner. In the largest meta-analysis to date, Martin Pinquart reviewed 70 studies on purpose in life across the lifespan. This study concluded that there is a small drop in purpose that can be observed as people grow into old age.
Many mid-life crises showcase spectacular splurges such as a new car. While this might temporarily placate, it's not the answer. It's time to stretch and learn!
Learn that skill you always wanted to pursue and see how it nourishes and recharges. If you find yourself debating which next step to take to improve your personal and professional life more than you are exploring them, it is time to change your behavior. Do your research. Talk to friends, family members, a trusted mentor and industry professionals about your ideas. They can guide you forward with their advice because the more you learn, the more inclined you will be to act. Take this opportunity to slow down, reassess your wishes, and course correct.
Cultivating mindfulness can help you get in touch with your real desires, and books like Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi will be a good place to start. You feel like there is no purpose to your life, or there is a bigger purpose than what your day-to-day life currently offers. The pursuit of finding a purpose can be downward spiraling in itself. Start volunteering and focusing on making a difference to other people outside your regular sphere of influence.
Start making a difference to new people and shift the focus of you. A telltale sign you're experiencing a mid-life crisis is that your plans just don't work anymore. Everything you've established for yourself, your job, your normal routine, now feels stagnant, even stifling. When this happens, be kind to yourself. Give yourself permission to change tracks and start getting curious about what will serve you best at this stage of life.
Making out-of-character life changes could be a sign of mid-life crisis. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
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