Are you a Mid Lifer?

Simplistically, we might conclude that a Mid Lifer is someone between the ages of say, mid thirties to late fifties. Mid Life, though, is a state of mind as much as a physical age. So you may be older (or younger) and still consider yourself to be a Mid Lifer.

Typically, many of your habits will be set – you know what you like to drink, the type of holidays that you enjoy, the clothes that you wear and your hobbies, for example. These won’t be set in stone and may change as you grow older but by and large, you know who you are and you know what you want.

Some Mid Lifers may have young families as they have delayed parenthood whilst enjoying their youth. Others may have a young family with a second partner. At the other end of the family spectrum, some Mid Lifers will have seen their children leave home and this may lead to life changing decisions – moving house, reviewing their career, taking early retirement for example.

Mid Lifers may be carers for their elderly parents or they may have experienced the trauma of their parents passing away.

Many Mid Lifers spent their youth swearing that there would never be a generation gap between them and their children – then finding themselves wondering why their offspring listen to ‘such mindless music’ and have such odd hairstyles.

Some Mid Lifers will feel that they’ve reached the top of the ‘bell curve’ and it’s all downhill from here. These are the people that often experience a ‘mid life crisis’ with all the negative aspects that this holds for them and their family and friends.

This will be the future for some Mid Lifers but it doesn’t have to be. As Henry Ford once famously said ‘Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you’re usually right’. So mid life may be a time of retrospection and review and your conclusion may be that your best days are behind you. More positively, you might conclude that the experience and learning that you’ve gained in your younger years provide you with the springboard to greater things in the second half of your life.

Life is always full of opportunities – the trick is in recognising them for what they are.

The Mid Life Opportunity highlights all of the positive aspects of Mid Life whilst also recognising that not everyone is in this happy place.

If you have issues with your career, finances, relationships or your health you will be able to find Advice and Guidance from experts in their field. Experts who can help you to see that your coping skills, experiences, maturity and accumulated wisdom can increase your confidence and show you the way through your current crisis to a brighter future.

Thanks for your interest in The Mid Life Opportunity and do please join the community and add your voice. There is a form to the right of this blog or at: The Mid Life Opportunity – www.MidLifeOp.com

The Mid Life blog: http://MidLifeOp.blogspot.com

Do you recognise yourself??? :)

Thank goodness there's a name for this disorder. Somehow I feel better, even though I have it!

Recently, I was diagnosed with A.A.A.D.D - Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.

This is how it happens:

I decide to water my garden.
As I turn on the hose I look over at my car and decide it needs washing.
As I start toward the garage the postman arrives and hands me some letters.
I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.
I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the rubbish bin under the table and notice that the bin is full.
So, I decide to put the letters back on the table and take out the rubbish first.
But then I notice that one of the letters is a final reminder to pay a bill.
I take my cheque book off the table and see that there is only one cheque left.
My new chequebook is in my desk in the office so I go to my desk where I find the can of Coke I'd been drinking.
I'm going to look for my chequebook, but first I need to push the Coke aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over.
The Coke is getting warm, so I decide to put it in the fridge to keep it cold.
As I walk towards the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers catches my eye - they need to be watered.
I put the Coke on the side and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning.
I decide that I had better put them back on my desk, but first I'm going to water the flowers.
I set the glasses back down on the side, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote. Someone left it on the kitchen table.
I realize that tonight when we go to watch TV, I'll be looking for the remote,
but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the lounge where it belongs, but first I'll water the flowers.
I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor.
So, I set the remote back on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill.

Then, I walk down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day:

the car isn't washed

the bills aren't paid

there is a warm can of Coke sitting in the kitchen

the flowers don't have enough water,

there is still only 1 cheque in my cheque book,

I can't find the TV remote,

I can't find my glasses,

and I don't remember what I did with the car keys.

Then, when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I'm really baffled because I know I was busy all day and I'm really tired.

I realize this is a serious problem, and I'll try to get some help for it,
but first I'll check my e-mail....

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The Mid Life Opportunity (www.MidLifeOp.com) is a community for Mid Lifers. Advice and Guidance will soon be available from The Mid Life Coaching Panel. It’s free to join so what are you waiting for? Join here FREE!

Please take 1 minute to complete the 2010 Mid Life Survey: Click here

5 secrets of the mid life mind

5 Secrets of the Middle-Aged Mind, by Barbara Strauch

The author of a provocative new book reveals the latest research on the grown-up brain.

Over the past few years, neuroscientists have upended much of what we thought we knew about our middle-aged brains. Using scanners and studying the results of new, more sophisticated long-term studies that have followed real people as they age, researchers themselves have been amazed by what they’ve found. Here are just a few of the surprising things they’ve recently uncovered:

1. We are smarter than ever in middle age. In most areas, including reasoning, we improve as we age, and peak cognitive performance actually occurs in our 40s through 60s – and not in our 20s, as many had thought. It’s true that some glitches develop: Remembering names gets harder, and brain-processing speed slows down. But for most of what we do in middle age, it turns out that those skills might not matter that much. In areas as diverse as inductive reasoning and vocabulary, our brains continue to develop. What’s more, as we age we get better at getting the "gist” of arguments, making judgments of character, or even finances. And each generation is now smarter than its parents were in middle age.

2. We grow happier with age. We’ve all been conditioned to dread middle age, a time of midlife crises and empty nests. But there is no evidence for such widespread angst. Instead, research shows that we actually become happier during this period. In part, this is because our brains start acting differently by reacting less to the negative, a trait that may have developed because the grown-ups who were more optimistic could take better care of their young. And the idea that we get more depressed or troubled in midlife is a myth. New long-term studies that have followed real people in their lives for years find that men and women have a greater sense of well-being in middle age. Those who are in crisis, the studies show, have tended to have crises throughout their lives, not just in middle age.

We've all been conditioned to dread middle age. But ... we actually become happier during this period.

3. The brain does not lose millions of brain cells. For years, researchers thought our brains lost up to 30 percent of their neurons as we got older. That idea led science to largely ignore the brain as it aged. Why waste time researching something that was going to decay on a set schedule? Now, new studies show that while we can lose brain connections if they are unused, we keep most of our brain cells for as long as we live. This means that the quest to find real ways to maintain our brain cells is now being taken up in earnest.

4. The brain is like the heart: It needs blood. Nutrients, as well as certain growth chemicals produced by muscles when they exercise, are now known to cross the blood-brain barrier into the brain, which needs healthy blood flow as much as our heart. This, too, overturns longtime scientific dogma that for many years said the brain was protected, but also was so insulated that it could not be improved. There are many things we can do to keep our brains in gear. Indeed, exercise has now been shown to be one of the best things you can do. Not only does exercise pump blood through our brain’s blood vessels, but it also prompts the creation of new brain cells, even at older ages. Scientists at Columbia University and elsewhere have watched these new cells be born in the brains of animals and humans who have exercised.

5. Crossword puzzles are not enough. In fact, if we want to keep our brains sharp, we need to move beyond just recalling information we know (the main activity with crossword puzzles) and instead push them to experience new ideas to create and nourish new brain connections. This can mean anything that gets us out of our "comfort zones,” including making new friends, learning to play the cello — or even confronting ideas and people who disagree with us. One longtime researcher at Columbia University says that if we want our grown-up brains to stretch, we have to present them with a "disorienting dilemma” — in particular ideas or concepts that challenge our view of the world. As one researcher put it, we need to "shake up the cognitive egg" and push ourselves to consider other viewpoints.

The point is that we need not passively accept decline. If our brains are healthy, we can keep them functioning well, even into old age. But to do that, we need to continue to make them work — hard.

Barbara Strauch is deputy science editor at The New York Times. Her new book is The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle Aged Mind. Visit Barbara’s website by clicking here.