The Female Midlife Crisis

Drinking too much? Feeling worthless? Obsessively shopping? You could be having a FEMALE midlife crisis

This is the headline in a recent article in The Daily Mail written by Lorna Martin. Lorna describes the affect that a midlife crisis has had on two of her friends:

 “A friend was recently made redundant from her high-flying job as a magazine editor. 

Now 39, this is the first time since she left school at 17 that she has not had a job. Unsurprisingly, it has hit her hard. Once confident and outgoing, she now struggles to get out of bed in the morning. 

She used to live to work. It gave her a nice lifestyle, a good social circle, a sense of belonging to something and the means with which to buy an ever-changing wardrobe of designer clothes. Now, she feels she has nothing to live for. 

Another friend, 44, who prioritised family over career, has, at least on the outside, a very enviable life. But with both of her children now away at university, she doesn't quite know what to do with herself. 

She is always asking: 'Is this it?' The last time I met her, she half-jokingly said she'd like to have an affair just to inject a bit of excitement into her life. 

Neither of my friends would appreciate being told this, but I think they're both having a bit of a midlife crisis. A midlife crisis is not just a male thing, and it is only a cliché until you have one.”

 So what does a female midlife crisis look like? Is it an addiction to Botox and plastic surgery in a futile attempt to turn back time and cling on to one's youth? 

Or is it, like Eva Longoria's character in Desperate Housewives, an affair with a teenager? Is it packing everything in and doing a Shirley Valentine? 

For many, it may not be quite as dramatic. Less acute symptoms may be boredom, a feeling of worthlessness, loneliness and lack of meaning, depression and anxiety. Or drinking too much, repeatedly changing jobs or partners, or obsessively shopping but never quite finding the satisfaction you are looking for. 

It could be triggered by divorce, diagnosis of a serious illness, redundancy, an empty nest, the loss of a parent. Or it can just occur, seemingly out of the blue. 

The important question is: Why?

In the midlife crisis, we realise that our basic childhood and adolescent dreams of immortality and specialness have all been a bit of a fantasy. 

And this, essentially, is what a midlife crisis forces us to confront - the harsh realities of adult life. 

No matter how much we compete with each other and no matter how hard we try, the truth is we're all just the same.

It's usually at midlife that we realise life's not quite so simple. We realise the pretty painful fact that bad things happen to good people and vice-versa. 

Although this sounds grim to some, it can be incredibly liberating. It can force us to stop drifting through life. It can make us stop and think carefully about the choices we make, their impact on others and what we want to do with the rest of our journey. 

Once they've begun to recover from the initial crisis, women tend to handle the whole thing as a challenge, even an opportunity. 

 It may not feel like it at the time, but a midlife crisis can be an unexpected gift.

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The Mid Life Crisis Survival Kit

During Mid Life many people feel a growing dissatisfaction with their life. This leads to the inevitable questions about the meaning of our present place in the world and is usually accompanied by a sudden encounter with the concept of our own mortality. This can lead to a frightening conclusion - Is this it!? Is this ME for the rest of my life!?

Highly painful periods of personal re-evaluation can leave us running aground in shallow waters of despair unless we have a map and compass. The Mid Life Crisis Survival Kit provides both. Its world map helps the reader to understand his/her place in it and the coaching tools provide an opportunity to plot a route home - wherever that might be now. 

By the end of the book, the world will be a smaller and less frightening place as you find not just a path to understanding yourself better in Mid Life, but also the courage to express yourself authentically and with purpose.

Customer Review:
The Mid Life Crisis Survival Kit does exactly what it says on the tin. It helps you negotiate the choppy waters of mid-life, which so unexpectedly turn out to be filled with rapids and piranhas… By focusing on the future rather than dwelling on the past, it enables you to work out what you want for the rest of your life and how to get it. It doesn’t make the crisis go away, but it does encourage you to take responsibility for your own life and put structures in place that will make it easier to achieve your goals. Both inspirational and practical, it will repay careful study. It is clearly written from the heart.


Click on the link: The Mid Life Crisis Survival Kit to purchase your copy of this excellent reference book.

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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?

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.