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After all, if you are approaching fifty, there may be a reason to buy the sports car of your dreams.
Scientists now claim that “midlife crisis” is real, after studying data on this well-known transitional period in thousands of people across all age groups.
It was found that work stress peaks around the age of 45, when people feel “overworked at work”.
With reaching the dreaded age, the rate of insomnia, headaches, anxiety and depression also increased.
Middle age
This led scientists to conclude that “something fundamental seems to be happening in the middle age of many people”.
Scientists call it a “worrying paradox” that these feelings appear at a time when people should theoretically be happier, because they are at their highest earning and have few health problems.
The study’s authors, economists from the UK, USA and Singapore, said this phenomenon can be partly attributed to people who feel they have failed to achieve key life goals.
They do not believe children are to blame, because both those who became parents and childless people aged 40 to 50 experience similar feelings in middle age.
The scientists collected data on thousands of people in countries such as the UK, USA and Australia.
They also studied several decades of health and wellbeing records
They found that for all risk factors there is a “humped” pattern, where people in their 40s and 50s more often reported psychological problems and unhappiness than younger and older people.
“Middle age is a period when people commit suicide, have sleep problems, suffer clinical depression, have difficulty concentrating, forget, feel oppressed at work, suffer debilitating headaches and develop an addiction to alcohol,” the authors say.
This occurs despite the fact that, statistically, these people should be enjoying the highest incomes of their lives and at the same time not having health problems caused by aging.
“It seems that something fundamental has gone wrong in the middle age of many people”
People in middle age are twice as likely to suffer from depression than those over 60 and under 25.
It was found that the risk of suicide peaks around the age of 50, although the authors noted that for women this may occur somewhat earlier.
At the same age the number of hospitalizations for sleep disorders also peaks and respondents report fewer hours of sleep, even those who do not have children.
Another study involving 18,000 adults found headaches that prevented patients from performing any activities, depression and anxiety disorders, which also peaked in middle age.
Psychological phenomenon
The authors cannot say exactly what causes or triggers the midlife crisis, and they emphasize that “there is still much we do not understand about this psychological phenomenon”.
Previous research showed that chimpanzees and orangutans suffer certain psychological problems in middle age, suggesting that there is some biological trigger for the midlife crisis in primates.
Other studies have reached more hopeful conclusions that “it’s a crisis, it will pass”.
A 2020 study found that after the midlife crisis happiness returns with increasing age and that people over seventy are as happy as they were at twenty.
The term “midlife crisis” comes from Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who in 1965 described it as a period when a person painfully confronts the certainty of death.
Source: giatros-in.gr
