What is Mid-Life Crisis?
What is mid life? What is a mid-life crisis? Is there an age range that is called mid life?
The concept of midlife is changing every decade. Some decades back, 50 and above would be mid life. The last couple of decades, midlife was above 40. As of now, we call 30s as early mid life and late 30 as the beginning of mid-life.
Mid life is that uncomfortable time when you may start questioning your life choices, regarding your career; life partner; family and friends; and perhaps everything.
It’s a time when you don’t feel secure about the present, may feel regret when you think of the past and feel apprehensive when you think of the future.
Midlife crisis may be about significant emotional impact due to varied events or situations that happen. When some of these happen concurrently, a crisis may get precipitated. This could be hitting a road block in your career, a job loss or change, financial crisis, death of a parent or a loved one, divorce, children becoming fairly independent, sudden illness, near death experience etc.
Mid life crisis can be a period of self-doubt and self esteem issues may come up. Different parts of your life may get affected.
Work life : This could be a time when you may feel overwhelmed, feel a loss of purpose or identity. After achieving a good growth in your career during early years, now your career growth at your profession may stagnate and if you are someone who gets a lot of validation from your work, you can feel unimportant, feel that your work doesn’t make any difference or that you are not being recognized or rewarded for your work. A Job change or a job loss may also make you question your sense of worth.
You may feel regret at lost opportunities or unfulfilled potential, question the decisions made earlier in life and the validity of those decisions.
Personal life : You may feel anger towards your life partner and may resent many things that you liked earlier. You may feel that the relationship has kept you from achieving your potential in other areas.
Your sex life may hit a low and you could possibly feel attracted to someone outside and crave for an intense intimate relationship.
For home makers, this is the time when children become more independent. This could make you kind of feel redundant questioning the value of yourself and an overall feeling of lack of direction.
Body Image : Mid life could bring about doubts about yourself. It could make you feel a sense of loss of youth and beauty and strength. Wrinkles may creep in, your waist line may increase, greys appear or increase, physical exertions could leave you panting for breathe.
You may end up questioning your own value and worth on account of this. This also may lead you to avoid doing things that interests you or that you used to have fun doing.
Mid-life need not become a crisis. But if it does, seek support for yourself. Talking to a counsellor / therapist, who is supportive and accepting can help deal with your situation in a more effective manner.
Read more on how to deal with Midlife Crisis in our next post , Dealing with Mid-life Crisis.
If you would like to meet with a professional counsellor call us at +91 96321 46316 or write to us at counselor@innerdawn.in
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