Am I Having a Midlife Crisis?

Are you finding yourself making significant changes to your life to enhance your sense of wellbeing? Are you acting spontaneously and out of character? Are people commenting or joking about these changes as a mid-life crisis? Do you see it differently?

What is a mid-life crisis?

Wikipedia defines a midlife crisis as “a transition of identity and self-confidence that can occur in middle-aged individuals…” and although I like their emphasis on transition, I prefer the term midlife epiphany to crisis myself, and I don’t believe we only have these at the mid-point of our lives either. 

My own understanding of a midlife crisis is that you reach a point in your life that you believe is the halfway mark and you suddenly re-evaluate your entire being and the life you’ve been living and make significant changes that are evident to others. This comes from a place of discontent, that the life we were living does not feel satisfying therefore we feel the need for big changes. How is this a crisis? This is a wonderful opportunity to stop wasting time and start making the most of your life. I would argue that this is closer to an epiphany. 

Wikipedia describes an epiphany as “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realization.”

I would also argue that the ‘midlife’ aspect to this suggests we’ve never considered our lives and made changes before. We make significant changes in our lives as we go along, marriage, divorce, retirement, changing career, joining a fitness regime, etc and we evaluate ourselves at each of these junctures. We consider who we are and what we are capable of, we consider our options and either create change or resign ourselves to fate and we become a different version of ourselves.

Life transitions

Although it is normal to evaluate your life when you get to a point you believe you’ve lived half of it, there’s a significance around age throughout our lives that can make us re-evaluate as we go along. There’s a particular emphasis on those ‘big’ birthdays that help us take stock of what we’ve achieved and who we’ve become in the last decade.

I remember turning 20 and having a sense of being an adult, needing to leave my teenage years behind, having to be sensible and seriously considering where I wanted my life to take me despite having already entered motherhood.

Having increased my family through my 20s, turning 30 was the life-point for seriously considering my career goals.

Coming up to 40, I made a decision to say yes to everything. I felt I’d held back on so much and recognised the need to challenge myself and my fears and anxieties if I were to experience life at its fullest. This was a significant turning point for me and I began taking every opportunity that I could get, leading to new friendships and new fulfilling career paths. 

I’ve not even limited my epiphanies to my own aging process but have found myself looking at my life journey as my children reach significant ages as well. Their aging forces me to acknowledge that time is passing quickly, that these people that resemble me are growing and making changes to their own lives, that my time for nurturing my children is coming to an end and I need to replace that part of my life with something else.

How we can benefit

Our life epiphanies are soul nourishing. We consider the things we haven’t yet done. We evaluate and re-evaluate our contentedness in our lives. We make changes for the better and we leave behind the things that aren’t serving us well. We do this every New Year’s Eve too! How many resolutions have you made over the years? To lose a few pounds, to drink less, to spend less, to take up a new hobby, to give up smoking… these are all evaluations of how you are living your life and what you can do to improve it. Whether you stuck to them or not, they were mini-epiphanies, things we weren’t happy with that needed to be worked on. How wonderful that we take the time to evaluate our lives at the end of each year and make promises to ourselves to be better the next year? Happier? And what a shame it might take a more significant occasion to commit to it fully.

I wonder if we all need to be more conscious of ourselves and our lives and evaluate more seriously more often? How wonderful might it be to, at the end of each day, or each week, or month, consider how our lives are being lived, how content we are, what changes we would like to make, what we are grateful for, what we are avoiding, what we are aiming towards? How valuable would it be to keep monitoring and creating change for the better with much more frequency? Mid-life ‘crises’ would become a thing of the past. 

If you’ve found yourself at a particular juncture in your life that is causing you to re-evaluate, then enjoy it, focus on it, consider what your brain and your body is telling you. Which areas of your life would you like to spend some time thinking about? Which areas are you particularly discontented with? What makes you feel great and what makes you feel tired? How might you create the change you need to make to become more fully content?

Consider these elements of your life:

• Career / work

• Relationships / friendships

• Self-care

• Physical health

• Mental health

• Finances

• Ambitions

• Fun

Where might you put your priorities for change?

Put some detailed thought into it:

• Visualise what your life might look like with the changes you want to make

• Write a To Do list

• Draw it out / be creative

• Talk to others about it – hearing it out loud can make it feel more real

• Find some support – professional or from people you are close to (or both)

• Have some fun considering your options

Sometimes significant life changes can be utterly enthralling and easy to implement, and sometimes they can be overwhelming and scary and we can avoid them until we do come to crisis point and have to make the change we need. Find a way to take your risks and overcome your challenges and become the happier, carefree person you’re looking to become, it’ll be worth it.

You can find goal setting resources in our resource section here.

And if you do feel you would like to talk through your life transitions, it would be our pleasure to listen and support you through them. You can contact us here.