Something funny happened the other day. My cousin is preparing himself to become the ‘Iron Man’. I am assuming you know the ‘Iron Man’ concept where you are supposed to swim 3 km, run 42 km and cycle around 100 km. I am not quite sure about the order in which they do this and I might be wrong about the distances. But then, that evening I was out with him and we happened to meet his friend, another fitness freak. She asked him why he intends to do this ‘Iron Man’ thing, because it is so tough. He gave an instant reply, “Midlife crisis”. All 3 of us had a nice laugh when he said this because he is definitely not going through midlife crisis. Doesn’t look like it at least. He is having a great married life, he is doing what he loves career-wise and has a good plan of dealing with his emotional and physical stress. But as our conversation continued, both of them gave me an interesting piece of statistic. According to them (and they could be right or wrong because they are obviously operating from their model of the world and are entitled to have their own perceptions) around 70% of the people who taken it up on their mind to become ‘Iron Man’, are actually going through midlife crisis. An urge to prove themselves or do something different to stand out or go away from mundane life. These were the 3 points they gave me which I am assuming is their inference of someone going through midlife crisis. Yes, why not? People tend to do something like this if they are going through midlife crisis. But not all of them. Everyone has a different way of living in such stress.

Let me point out an observation. In almost all my Emotional Intelligence and NLP Certification trainings, I get this question about what exactly is ‘Midlife’ crisis. And not once have I been asked this by anyone below 35 years of age person. So, although I know (and probably you know too) that there is a correlation of midlife crisis with age, let me just throw more light on what it is exactly. I also know one fact that many people think midlife crisis is because of stagnancy and saturation in marriage, which hence results in people going elsewhere to find something they are not getting in their current relationship. Well, true up to certain extent, but that is just like describing the tail of an elephant as the complete definition of the elephant.

The term was coined by Elliot Jaques in 1965. Midlife crisis is described as a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person’s growing age, inevitable mortality, and possibly shortcomings of accomplishments in life. This may produce feelings of depression, remorse, and anxiety, or the desire to achieve youthfulness or make drastic changes to their current lifestyle. The fact that it is called ‘Midlife’ crisis, implies that people go through this roughly around the mid-point of what is considered to be a general life span. So, we are talking this could happen somewhere at 40 and could just extend itself to 65 years. But not everyone goes through midlife crisis and it may not be severe for everyone who experience it. Midlife crisis lasts for about 3-10 years in Men and 2-5 years in women. It can occur because of ageing or in combination with changes, problems and regrets over work or career, spousal relationships, maturation of children or lack of having children, ageing or death of parents or lack of death of parents, physical changes due to ageing. How does it feel if you are going through midlife crisis?

• You may feel sorry for yourself or repent for not achieving your goals
• An urge to be/feel youthful again
• A heightened urge or feel of sexuality
• Urge to change anything that has gone wrong, either in career, relationships, parenting etc.
• A fear of failing in anything new, especially in front of more successful colleagues

Midlife crisis may affect Men and Women in a different way as their ‘stressors’ differ. A man going through midlife crisis may want to indulge in an adventure activity which may be out of his capacity. He may want to buy an over expensive luxurious car or seek intimacy with younger woman. I don’t know if you are going to label all men as ‘Midlife Crisis Candidates (MCC)’ who are probably in their 40s or over and checking out girls in their 20s at a public place. A man’s midlife crisis is more likely to be caused by work issues or stagnancy in life in general. A woman’s midlife crisis is more likely to be caused by personal evaluations of their roles. ‘Shopping therapy’ is a concept you will hear a lot from them. Sometimes an impulsive response can be expected from midlife crisis women over any small incident. In either of the cases, there is need to deal with such difficult situations with empathy.

So how do you treat/present midlife crisis? Well, physical changes with age is one of the reasons of midlife crisis. By physical changes I mean weight gain, wrinkles, sagging skin, hair loss etc. Regular exercise and maintenance of a nutritious diet may help to sustain one’s physical and mental health during these years of transition. Significant changes made early in life may prevent one from having a mid-life crisis. An example supporting such a theory can be derived from the research conducted by Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne. People who changed jobs/careers before their midlife years had a greater sense of generativity when they reached mid-life. They also experienced a greater sense of motivation to deviate from stagnation and a desire to help the younger generation thrive. This is a psychological stage proposed by Erik Erikson that describes a normal stage adults go through during their mid-life years. Another way of dealing with midlife crisis is learning something new which can serve as a hobby and maybe an alternate career. For example, photography. Occupies your mind and you are happy with every creative click. If you are having problems in your marriage, then one sun-kissed photo of your spouse which you click might just thaw things at least for that evening. You can pursue this as a hobby or maybe start your own studio. Learning a musical instrument is another example. Travelling is another good way of calming down hormones. Solo-trips work like magic to deal with stress associated with midlife crisis. But then if you are a kind of a person who gets depressed when you are alone, then solo-trips are not recommended. By the way, drinking doesn’t help one inch in dealing with midlife crisis. Simply because alcohol is a mood enhancer. If you are happy and you drink, you become happier and obviously you become sadder if you are sad. I am assuming that midlife crisis is not making anyone happy. Too much of alcoholism leading to stressful negative emotions for long period of time may result in getting into depression. Read more about this here.

Importantly, people (especially those going through midlife crisis) need to learn to be able to stay alone. If you get the right company, that is great. But if you don’t, you should have some hacks of your own to deal with it. Read more about it over here.

More importantly, it is necessary for everyone to have goals in their life. In fact, I would say everyone must have in place their ‘Mission’ (Purpose), ‘Vision’ (Goals 3-5 years ahead) because these terms are not only related to organizations but humans as well. Connect with me if you want to see the entire tree, because we’ve only seen the wood in this blog.