The fatigued 40s - how understanding the happiness curve can help you

If you’re an exhausted 40-something, almost everything you think you know about aging and happiness is wrong, and what you don’t know is hurting you.

Most people under 40 think that by the time they hit their forties, they’ll have everything sorted - their career will be peaking, they may be in a long-term relationship and possibly raising a family, they’ll be able to afford some nice things and really enjoy life.

Unfortunately, for most of us, the reality is very different. Your forties are when there are more people dependent on you than at any other time in your life, before or after. You’re being squeezed from all directions - most likely demands at work, from a partner, young family and aging parents.

Plus, as we begin to notice the start of a decline in our physical abilities, we start to look ahead and begin thinking, "Is this it?"

This is where I could insert all the stereotypes about a ‘midlife crisis’. But I won’t, because it’s extremely unlikely you’re having a crisis. You’re just experiencing a perfectly normal transition that happens around the mid-forties.

There is overwhelming evidence (over 600 studies, covering 146 countries) that your forties are the slump at the bottom of the happiness curve. When you control for almost every imaginable variable - income, gender, marriage, socio-economic group, country, health, etc - happiness, or life satisfaction, follows a shallow U-shaped curve according to age, bottoming out at around 47-48 years of age in most western cultures.

Around 20 years ago, Andrew Oswald and David Blanchflower first noticed this in large sets of economic data and popularised the idea. Not everyone follows this pattern, but there’s a strong tendency towards it around the world.

What’s even more intriguing is that it’s been observed in chimps and orangutans too.

They hit rock bottom in their midlife at an age that would be equivalent to 45-50 for humans. This suggests the pattern is something evolutionary; and not just the result of too many emails, a big mortgage and not being able to keep up with younger friends on a run or in a fitness class.  

Three things to take from this so far:

1. It’s not guaranteed to happen - some people sail right through middle age without experiencing the dip
2. If you are feeling more dissatisfied around your forties, it’s perfectly normal and highly unlikely to be a crisis
3. Things will almost certainly get better with age - and the happiness you experience in your fifties, sixties and beyond is likely to be as fulfilling as how you felt in early adulthood - if not, more so

However, the dip is significant. Jonathan Rauch, who literally wrote the book on The Happiness Curve, describes the decline in happiness from 25 to 45 as the equivalent of roughly half how we feel during a divorce or unemployment.

In our thirties, when things got tough, we had the energy, determination and optimism to push through - thinking that ‘the good life’ was for the taking in the next decade. 

But in our forties, those same pressures in life can feel harder. As a former triathlete, I think of it as like swimming against a current, cycling into the wind or running up a hill. You can still meet life’s challenges, but it takes more effort and is getting exhausting. 

From middle age we have a lot to look forward to! But society has conditioned us to think that getting old is just going to be decay, disease and then death. It turns out it’s likely to be the most satisfying period of our lives.

So why does happiness dip in midlife?

Our brains change during this period. We are one of the few species on Earth where females outlive their reproductive years - what’s known as the grandmother effect. Having elders around with wisdom, nurturing time and life experience improves the outlook for young tribe members, so nature keeps us around. 

Nature rewires our brains as we get older so we are more oriented towards ‘our tribe’, teaching and serving others, and giving something back.

The problem is, if you don’t know this is what’s going on in your brain during your forties, the shift away from finding competition and achievement-related goals so motivating is totally disconcerting. 

At exactly the point where you’re striving to have it all, it suddenly feels so hollow. Then you start to feel embarrassed and ashamed that you’re disappointed with your life because, outwardly, it looks like you’ve made it. You haven’t yet come to realise that your values are changing to prioritise feeling more family and community-oriented.  

What can we do?

People in their forties often feel isolated and can withdraw, not feeling able to express these feelings to anyone because they’re supposed to be at the top of their game at this point. As Jonathan Rauch says of the midlife slump, “Like teething and adolescence, it is a healthy if sometimes painful transition, and it serves a purpose by equipping you for a new stage of life.”

It’s not a crisis, you’re almost certainly not depressed, so you don’t need medication or therapy. There’s nothing wrong with you that needs fixing. As Rauch identified, one of the ways you can break the feedback cycle that sustains these feelings of disappointment is with coaching.

Having a safe, confidential space to talk through what you’re grappling with at this point, without judgment, can be really helpful. A coach can help you surface what really matters to you from this point, and how you can realign your life with your shifting values. 

One of the things really lacking in our society is recognition that this is a perfectly normal and completely healthy transition. We don’t tend to make fun of adolescents; we accept that they are coming to terms with who they are becoming in the adult world, and try to help them through the changes they are experiencing. 

The opposite is true of fortysomethings who dare to share anything about their struggles: they become the butt of jokes about a midlife crisis, sports cars, Harleys and affairs. Or they’re told to pull themselves together and stop feeling sorry for themselves.

What if more companies provided the following support for people in midlife: 

• Make coaching a standard benefit, available to all midlife employees
• Offer more flexible working and job-sharing, creating more off-ramps for midlifers to transition to portfolio careers; instead of slogging it out until a hard stop at retirement 
• Let people access some of their pension (or take some form of paid sabbatical) so they could take a midlife gap year or return to education
• Create full-time mentoring or employee development roles for midlifers to pass on their social and cultural capital to younger employees
• Teach entrepreneurship and support midlife employees in starting new companies that their employer can take a stake in  

Yes, there’s a cost attached to these things. But offset against less burnout, less attrition, greater productivity, better collaboration, increased engagement and more employer advocacy I’d wager more progressive companies would gain overall.

Despite having probably experienced the U-shaped happiness curve themselves, I think people leaders are overlooking a massive challenge in the middle of their organisations. Middle aged employees will be leaving, burning out, quiet quitting, turning to substance abuse to self-medicate, or worse, all because we are failing to recognise the midlife slump is a very real phenomenon and people in it need support.

What do you think? Do you see yourself on the happiness curve?