By MidLyfe Editor: No other time of life is as plagued with misinformation as middle age – so says the American Psychological Association. Why the AMA – because no other organisation in the UK seems to have bothered to investigate. Type in the word ‘midlife’ into your search engine and at least 90 per cent of the first one hundred bits of content offered is about the inevitable ‘crisis’ you will experience. The myth of midlife is actually a scientific fact.

Written 20 years ago was this statement – “Midlife – the years between 30 and 70, with 40 to 60 at its core is the least charted territory in human development” -psychologist Orville Gilbert Brim, PhD, wrote. Brim also noted that almost all research focuses on childhood, adolescence or old age with midlife almost completely empty in terms of knowledge or research. Brim long argued that faulty knowledge and unvalidated statements have given people the wrong idea about what really happens in midlife, which has given the media a pass to push the false narrative that midlife is a place you should fear. And in that 20 years, the core of midlife has moved on now more like 45 to 65

Brim completed a decade-long research effort carried out by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development, he and his team of researchers uncovered data that challenge stereotypes about midlife crisis, menopausal distress and the empty-nest syndrome.

The APA wrote –  “psychologists from that study and others are continuing the effort to provide more information about a stage of life long-ignored by researchers focused on the more dramatic changes that occur earlier and later in life. They’re examining the stressors unique to midlife, identifying factors that help predict a healthy middle age and searching for signs of cognitive decline. What they’re finding is generally good news.” Don’t forget that this research is now 20 years old – and here we are with more misinformation about midlife than ever before.

 

Control is key

Psychologist David M. Almeida, PhD, an associate professor of family studies and human development at the University of Arizona at Tucson, was one of the researchers who worked with the MacArthur Foundation network 20 years ago.

What they found was that day-to-day stress doesn’t add up to a midlife crisis. In fact, said Almeida, these stressors may even have a positive effect.

 

“If you look at the research, evidence for a midlife crisis is just not there”

 

“The reason why midlife people have these stressors is that they actually have more control over their lives than earlier and later in life,” he explains. “When people describe these stressors, they often talk in terms of meeting the challenge.”

In other words – when you’ve arrived in midlife, you have more control over your life than you did when you were younger or that you will have when you’re much older.

“If you look at the research, evidence for a midlife crisis is just not there,” says Margaret H. Huyck, PhD, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Psychology in Chicago.

 

Unstuck

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, focuses on how job and relationship choices made earlier in life affect baby boomers’ psychological well-being at midlife. Her work draws on data from a study called “Psychosocial Development in Adulthood: A 34-Year Sequential Study,” which has tracked three generations of college students.

 

“Job changes made in midlife seemed to have a beneficial effect”

 

Whitbourne found that people who had switched jobs early in adulthood scored higher in a category she calls generativity – a sense of productivity in work and a desire to leave something of yourself behind for future generations – than those who settled down and stuck with an occupation for 20 years or more. In contrast, she found, divorce and other changes in personal relationships in early life had a detrimental effect on midlife mental health.

“Job changes in people’s 20s and 30s tended to be beneficial in midlife,” says Whitbourne, adding that even job changes made in midlife seemed to have a beneficial effect. “The assumption is these people didn’t feel stuck.”

 

Improving Scores

Psychologist Sherry L. Willis, PhD, professor of human development at the Pennsylvania State University, first got interested in the topic when she noticed that the middle-aged women in the long-term study were defying conventional wisdom by not “losing their minds” at menopause. The Seattle Longitudinal Study has been assessing members of a health maintenance organization every seven years since 1956.

“You can look at what we know about baby boomers’ cognitive functioning from a ‘cup half full’ or a ‘cup half empty’ approach,” she says.

 

“Verbal ability, numerical ability, reasoning and verbal memory all improve by midlife”

 

The good news is that people at midlife score higher on almost every measure of cognitive functioning than they did when they were 25, Willis found in a study published in a book she co-edited called “Life in the Middle” (Academic Press, 1999). Verbal ability, numerical ability, reasoning and verbal memory all improve by midlife, she found. The only ability that declines between 25 and midlife is perceptual speed – the ability to quickly and accurately perform such tasks as deciding whether two postcodes are identical.

For Willis, anxiety about so-called “senior moments” is misguided since verbal memory doesn’t decline any more than numeric or reasoning ability. When it comes to verbal memory, she says, the research just doesn’t show the dramatic decline that stereotypes of middle age suggest happen.

 

“Midlife is a media-driven mirage – fuelled with misinformation because fear sells”

 

“Much of the research has focused on old age because that’s where you see these dramatic changes,” says Willis. “Some researchers say middle age is really dull because nothing happens.” For Willis and other researchers, that’s good news.

What is interesting about the work of Willis, Whitbourne, Almeida and Brim is that they all say the same thing – that midlife is a media-driven mirage – fuelled with misinformation because fear sells.

The media misinformation is so plausible though, isn’t it? Youth draining away, career peaked and probably failing and a life that they now try to say will make you invisible. Invisible from who exactly? At midlife, you have more economic and political power than ever before. People respect you for your experience and not being either naive at the one end or senile at the other.

The average age of a UK CEO of a listed company is up from 50 to 53 in a decade (source). Over a quarter of all businesses in the UK are set up and owned by people aged over 54 – and of the successful businesses, they are still at the helm at 65. Only 9% of small business employer owners and co-owners are aged 35 and under. This is because they don’t have the experience, the ability or the money.

Let’s not forget that the average age of the new car buyer in the UK is 54 and the average age when people pay off mortgages is 55. This is the reason why men buy sports cars at this age – they can afford to buy one, not because they are suffering a ‘crisis’ of identity. And what’s not to look forward to when debts fall of a cliff and you can go and treat yourself? This is a time to build a marvellous midlife. 

In Scientific American, (yes, it has to be American because the UK still thinks midlife is a place we all go to die) published a paper in 2016 entitled – “Most People Get Happier as They Approach Midlife.” That report blows to pieces the myth that life is great in your 20s and old age with the bit in the middle being a ‘crisis’ (source).

So next time you see an article about the so-called ‘midlife-crisis’ perpetuated ad-nauseam by the media, don’t bother wasting your time reading it – it’s click-bait. The myth of midlife is just that – and in the end, it depends on what you believe because ageing with attitude is what it’s all about.