Midlife crisis: what it is really about, and what helps

Is a midlife crisis a real thing?

Something is genuinely happening in the middle of adult life, and turning 40 is not what causes it. The phrase is popular rather than clinical, and no diagnostic manual contains it. What I see is a reckoning that has been waiting for the moment when it gets harder to believe there is unlimited time left to put things right.

This is common. About a quarter of American adults say they have had a midlife crisis, women as readily as men, and most of them put it down to a serious life event rather than to ageing¹. The dip itself is not imagined either: across a very large number of countries wellbeing follows a U through adult life, at its lowest around 50, though the age varies a good deal between countries². So the feeling is well evidenced and the folk explanation is not. Age is not doing this to you. The arrangement you have been living inside has become visible.

What is happening in the middle of a life?

The arithmetic changes: you stop counting forwards from the start and begin counting backwards from the end. This is my clinical judgement, and hardly anybody notices the switch happening.

What you feel first is rarely grand. A flatness on a Sunday afternoon. Irritation with a partner who has not done anything differently. An appetite for something new that is wildly out of proportion to the thing itself, so that a bicycle or a city is asked to carry more than an object can hold. Underneath all 3 is something plainer: the decisions you made provisionally have turned out to be the arrangement, and nobody ever asked you to confirm them.

The body registers this before you have made the argument. Sleep that breaks at four. Concentration that will not gather. A week at work that costs more than the same week did 5 years ago. In rich countries sleeping problems, difficulty concentrating and intense job strain all peak in the middle years rather than at either end of life³.

The thinking arrives last, and it arrives as a verdict. I have wasted it. It is too late to change. If I do not go now I never will. Those sentences carry great authority and very little evidence, and they are where the damage starts, because a verdict asks to be acted on. A good life produces this question about as reliably as a disappointing one, since the question is about time rather than about failure.

Why does a midlife crisis land on the relationship?

The relationship is the part of the arrangement that answers back. A job does not notice that you have gone quiet, and a mortgage does not ask what is wrong.

• Availability. A partner is the first thing you look at when the feeling has nowhere else to go.
• Backwards reasoning. Something is wrong, this person is in front of me, therefore this person is what is wrong.
• One question that is 3. Am I unhappy, am I unhappy in this life, and am I unhappy with you?
• When it is the relationship. Sometimes it is, and the question still deserves to be asked slowly. Read more about growing apart in a relationship.

What happens between 2 people then runs faster than either of them intends. You go quiet in order to think. Your partner reads the quiet as a verdict already reached and asks what is going on. You say nothing, because saying it half formed feels worse. They begin preparing for the worst and protecting themselves, which hands you the distance you were half asking for and the loneliness you were not. The load here is not even. Whoever is doing the reckoning holds most of the information, and that puts most of the responsibility for speaking on them.

How do I tell a crisis from a reckoning?

A reckoning adds, waits and survives being said out loud. A crisis subtracts, hurries and hides. The difference has nothing to do with how dramatic it looks from outside, and what follows is a way of thinking rather than a verdict.

Direction is the first thing I look at. A reckoning adds something: a conversation, a piece of work, a change you can describe to another adult without embarrassment. A crisis takes things away, and it aims at whatever is nearest. Speed is the second: a reckoning waits a month and loses nothing, while hurry holds a feeling at arm’s length and solves no part of the problem. Secrecy is the third and the most telling. A plan that only survives while nobody knows about it is worth examining before it is acted on, and that is not the same as giving it up.

Does living abroad change a midlife crisis?

In the people I see, a life abroad postpones the question and then adds a second one to it.

The early years in a new country are full of rebuilding, and rebuilding does much of the work a change of direction would do: a language, a career restarted, friendships made from nothing. Then the rebuilding finishes, and the question arrives later than it would have at home. It arrives with company too: ageing parents, or a child about to start school, turn going home into a real decision with a date attached. The 2 questions knot together and neither gets answered: am I in the wrong life, or only in the wrong country?

For mixed-culture couples there is a further complication, which is that the 2 of you are rarely at the same point in it, and one of you is living in the other one’s country. That asymmetry is worth saying plainly rather than treating as temperament. Read more about culture shock.

How do you get through a midlife crisis?

You slow the decision down, and you separate the change you want from the escape you are considering. Middle age is a reasonable time to change something, and plenty of people who change nothing have simply stopped saying they wanted to.

• Write 2 lists. On one, everything you want less of. On the other, everything you want more of.
• Read the gap. In my experience the first list comes out long and exact and the second short and vague. That gap is the work, and it is a suggestion for noticing rather than a measure.
• Test the plan on paper. A change is something you describe, cost and start on a Tuesday. An escape has to be sudden, or it loses its nerve.
• Take the 3 questions one at a time. Leaving a person answers only the third, and it leaves the first 2 standing where they were.
• Talk to somebody outside it. Your partner, children, colleagues and parents all gain or lose by what you decide, and their advice carries that.
• Give it longer than it wants. The decisions my clients come back to are the ones that were made at speed.

Read more about whether to leave your partner or stay and try.

These steps are not enough when the hurry is stronger than you are, so that you have acted before you have finished the sentence; when everyone you could talk to has a stake in your answer; or when what has surfaced is older than this marriage and older than this job. That is where individual work with a therapist is the next step, and where the damage has already reached the relationship, couples work alongside it. Part of this stays unresolved, because what middle age asks is partly a question about mortality, and that one does not get solved. It gets lived with, better or worse, and it makes a difference which.

Questions people ask

Is a midlife crisis something to bring to therapy?

Yes, and it is one of the better uses of it, because the question deserves more thought than the people around you are in a position to give it. Everyone close to you gains or loses by your answer, and I do not.

Should I come on my own or with my partner?

Come on your own if the question is mainly about your life, and come together if the greater part of the damage is now happening between the 2 of you. Some couples start with a session together and carry on individually, and that order works as well in reverse.

Will a therapist push me to stay or to leave?

No, my work is to slow the decision down enough that you make it rather than the hurry making it for you. If I had a preferred answer I would be no use to you here.

How long does this kind of work take?

For a question this size I would expect months rather than weeks, and I would rather agree a first block of sessions and review it with you than name a finishing point. In my experience the people who come through it well give it time instead of a deadline.

What if I am not sure anything is wrong enough to book?

Being unsure is a reasonable thing to bring, and there is a free 30 minute call if a full session feels like more than you want to commit to. You lose nothing by describing it out loud once to somebody with no stake in your answer.

If the middle of life has shaken your sense of direction, I can help you work out what is really asking for change in midlife crisis therapy.

Sources

1. Wethington, Expecting stress: Americans and the midlife crisis, Motivation and Emotion, 2000
2. Blanchflower, Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries, Journal of Population Economics, 2021
3. Giuntella, McManus, Mujcic, Oswald, Powdthavee and Tohamy, The midlife crisis, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 30442, 2022

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.