Is Anxiety The New Midlife Crisis?
5 minute read
I am in my mid (to late) 40s, but somewhere in my forward-thinking brain, I haven’t quite caught up to that fact, until I attempt something ridiculous like showing my 10-year-old daughter how to do a backflip on the trampoline because it’s not long since I was able to do that, apparently, (it was, in fact, 30 years ago) and ending up in a bush. Just for the record, bouncing on a trampoline is not something I’d recommend for any woman who has had children. Nothing is the same ‘down there’ and in my case, my level of control is not what it used to be. It has left me with the kind of anxiety that fuels traumatic thoughts of adult nappies tipped over the edge by the fact that I recently found my car keys in the fridge. “Your brain is too busy,” my sister encourages, supportively. Perhaps. But there is also this low-level anxiety that has been floating on the periphery for some time since I turned 40, a reminder of the invisible line of midlife that we, as women, must manoeuvre.
In our twenties, we like to think that all is possible and saggy knees or ‘loose’ memories are a distant problem until we’re staring down the tunnel of the rest of our lives and it no longer seems endless. It’s far more than just looking in the mirror and seeing wrinkles, although that may well be part of it too. It’s a sense of overwhelm about what you must still do and what you wish you could do and may never get to.
But midlife is also the perfect storm: a time when you can no longer breed, your kids are growing or grown up and will at some point flee the nest. It’s difficult to change career because at this age – in your head – who would invest in you? Lives are full of loss: loss of youth, loss of dreams, of sexuality, of loved ones.
I think Robbie Coltrane put it best when he said: “It’s the fear that you’re past your best.” It has all the ingredients for the perfect anxiety bake. Just pop it in the oven for a number of years and take it out when it’s a festering hot mess. But here’s the rub: it feels like a crisis of confidence and yet, I think most women my age are more confident than we’ve ever been before. Ask me to swap places with my 25-year-old self and I will happily sprint into my 50s. But tell me my anxiety is rooted in fear and that makes sense; fear for what is lost but also what is still to be lost. Fear for the unexpected or the scales tipping in the wrong direction, fear of the unknown and the pain you may have to face without the helpful guise of youthful flamboyance.
Few people would dispute that stress is a hallmark of our times or that anxiety has become a kind of cultural condition of modernity. We live in an age of anxiety. For some, it’s like a loudspeaker and for others, like me, it creeps, often unnoticed, until it interrupts my sleep. Anxiety thrives on conditions of uncertainty, and the world has been its perfect petri dish for the past two years. Fear and uncertainty have been the currency of communication and when no constructive action seems plausible, we resort to worry which, perversely, feels constructive somehow. It has always been around, it’s just that the triggers and causes are manifested more often nowadays due to the rise in social media and technology. We are ‘plugged in’ all the time and feeling every anxiety from natural disasters and wars across the world because it’s right there in our living room each evening or on our phones when we wake up in the morning.
According to recent studies, human happiness hits the lowest point around the age of 43, proving midlife crisis is very real but Shane Kelly, spokesperson for the IACP (Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy), believes a ‘crisis’ can occur at any age. “I like to call it a ‘life crisis’ since we’ve discovered more and more young people suffering from anxiety about their lives.” Shane believes social media plays a huge role in the growing number of people suffering from ‘life crisis’ as it erodes self-esteem. “We are exposed to success on a daily basis. We used to compare ourselves to the rich and famous but now, thanks to social media, it’s our peers and this is putting pressure on people to have the ‘perfect’ life. A lot of the time you’ll find people aren’t having a better time than you. It’s important to look at the crisis you’re having and ask yourself how real it is, identify the things that make you happy and look at taking small steps to get there.”
The good news is that happiness economists view the midlife crisis as a normal dip in life that generally doesn’t last, petering out when we realise that most of us are reacting to the boredom of routine, are pursuing the wrong dreams and that our lives are just fine as they are.
But it also helps to remember that anxiety isn’t some bizarre psychological anomaly, but a fundamental aspect of human functioning that affects us all, a natural response to the times we live in. The very fact that we may be experiencing it ‘loudly’ in midlife is simply a reaction to this phase of our lives and the story we tell ourselves, how our glory days have peaked or that we are now, finally, in control of our lives, have a sense of purpose and we know what we want and are quite happy to say it. In middle age, there’s great power in the soul surviving its adventures. In the words of the late great writer Joan Didion: “there’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or, you don’t go.”
Orla Neligan, April 2022
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