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Crisis in mid-life
is common, study says
(April 2008
Issue)
By Ami Albernaz
If the mid-life crisis needed more validation as a concept, it
might have come through recent findings that show happiness follows
a U-shaped pattern that bottoms out in mid-life. What's more, the
pattern seems to hold true in countries around the globe.
Examining data from more than two million people in 80 countries,
David Blanchflower, Ph.D., of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald,
Ph.D., from Warwick University in England said the curve applied
to men and women, wealthy and poor and married and single. In the
U.S., women seemed to reach their low point at 40, while men appeared
to bottom out at 50.
While the researchers avoided drawing conclusions about why this
is, some providers believe it comes from the idealizations of youth
rubbing up against the realization that time is finite.
"Some people are unhappy because there's a gap between where they
thought they'd be and where they are," says Neil Liebowitz, M.D.,
director of the Connecticut Anxiety and Depression Treatment Center
in Farmington, Conn. "Young people may be despairing, but they have
optimism for the future. They're working toward a goal."
Reaching midlife, he says, triggers an assessment of one's life
compared to earlier goals. Sometimes the assessment is unrealistic.
"I see people who come in and say, 'well, I thought I'd have a
million square feet by now, but I only have a few hundred thousand,"
Liebowitz says. But if you were to ask these people how they might
have imagined their lives when they were younger, what they now
have might have been good enough, he continues. "People are always
shifting their views. The reality is they're comparing themselves
with other people."
Sometimes, paths laid earlier in life no longer feel right, adds
Lynn Margolies, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in Newton
Centre, Mass.
"In some cases, people have changed, but find themselves trapped
in choices they've made, like their career, their marriage or their
lifestyle," she says. "They may have done all the right things,
the conventional things, and now question whether they really fit
into the lives they find themselves in."
Margolies, who sees mostly men in her practice, says these patients
are faced with an urgent need to "break out" and start anew or learn
to reevaluate their lives and priorities. "Sometimes the security
and comfort of family life, unlike excitement and passion, is invisible
when it is in place," she says. "There are cases in which something,
say a marriage, truly doesn't work anymore. But more often than
not, it's about helping people change from within, thereby enabling
them to find new possibility in the context of their existing lives
and recognize the value and function of what they already have."
Assessing the feasibility of one's future plans and mourning opportunities
that might be lost for good are not the most enticing exercises,
but they can help people become more creative and deliberate in
their approach to life, Margolies says: "If you're a student and
have less time to write your paper, you do it."
In any case, people can take heart in that happiness seems to follow
a U-curve, meaning it starts rising once again as one exits mid-life.
"By the time people get to their 60s and older, there's sort of
a resignation," Liebowitz says. "People generally say, 'I'm OK;
this is the way it's going to be.'"
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