We've Been Asking the Wrong Question About Midlife

There is a question that sits quietly beneath much of the conversation about midlife, although we rarely ask it directly. Instead, we ask dozens of other questions that circle around it. Why am I so exhausted? Why has my confidence disappeared? Why do I no longer recognise myself? Why can't I tolerate things that never used to bother me? Why does the life I spent years building suddenly feel as though it belongs to someone else?

Most of the answers we are given are valuable, but they tend to point us in the same direction. We are told about fluctuating hormones, changing brain chemistry, disrupted sleep, rising cortisol and the many physiological changes that accompany perimenopause and menopause. These explanations matter because they help women understand experiences that have too often been dismissed or misunderstood. No woman should be left believing that what she is experiencing is imaginary or insignificant when there is now such a substantial body of research demonstrating the profound biological changes that occur during this stage of life.

Yet the more I have explored midlife, both through psychology and through listening to women's experiences, the more I have found myself wondering whether biology alone explains what so many women describe. Hormones undoubtedly influence how we think, feel and function, but they do not fully explain why so many women begin questioning the very lives they have spent decades creating. They do not explain why success suddenly feels different, why long-held ambitions lose their appeal, why creativity begins to stir after years of silence or why so many women describe an almost instinctive longing to live more honestly, more slowly or more authentically. These experiences appear so consistently that it seems increasingly difficult to dismiss them as coincidence.

I have come to believe that the greatest misunderstanding about midlife is that we continue to treat it primarily as a collection of symptoms rather than recognising it as a stage of psychological development. We have become exceptionally good at asking how women can manage the changes of midlife, yet we spend remarkably little time asking what those changes might actually be for. The assumption often seems to be that the goal is to help women return to the person they were before everything began to change. It is an understandable objective, but I am no longer convinced it is the right one.

Throughout the first half of life we are engaged in a necessary process of adaptation. We learn how to belong within our families, succeed within education, establish careers, build relationships and raise children. We discover which parts of ourselves are welcomed, rewarded or needed, and we gradually organise our identity around those experiences. Some women become the achiever because achievement brought safety or recognition. Others become the caregiver because caring for everyone else became central to their sense of worth. Some become endlessly capable, endlessly accommodating or endlessly responsible because those qualities allowed them to navigate the lives they were living. None of these adaptations are inherently unhealthy. They are often intelligent responses to the circumstances in which we found ourselves, and many of them allow us to build meaningful lives.

The difficulty is that adaptations are not the same thing as identity, even though they can feel inseparable after forty or fifty years. An adaptation is something the psyche develops because it serves a purpose. It helps us belong, succeed, avoid conflict, gain approval or protect ourselves from emotional pain. The longer we rely upon these strategies, however, the more likely we are to mistake them for who we really are. Eventually we stop noticing that we are performing a role because the role has become so familiar that it feels entirely natural.

Perhaps this is why midlife feels so disorientating for so many women. The identities that carried us through the first half of life begin to lose their certainty, not because they were false, but because they have completed much of the work they were created to do. They helped us establish ourselves in the world, build families, develop careers and navigate the responsibilities of adulthood. What they cannot always do is carry us into the second half of life unchanged. The questions that begin to emerge during midlife are therefore not necessarily signs that something has gone wrong. They may instead be signs that something within us has begun to outgrow the identities we have inhabited for decades.

This completely changes the way I think about many of the experiences women describe. The desire to spend more time in nature no longer feels like a random lifestyle preference. The return of creativity no longer appears to be an unexpected hobby. The growing discomfort with people pleasing, over-functioning or constantly placing ourselves last no longer seems like selfishness or dissatisfaction. When viewed through the lens of psychological development, these experiences begin to look less like isolated events and more like expressions of the same underlying movement. Something that has remained quietly in the background for many years is beginning to ask for our attention.

In The Alchemy of Midlife, I introduced the Phoenix Cycle as a way of understanding the psychological journey many women experience during midlife. The final stage of that framework is The Return, and in many ways it has become the part of the cycle that fascinates me most. We spend so much time talking about the fire, the ashes and everything that appears to be falling away that we rarely stop to consider what happens afterwards. Yet psychologically, this is where the real work begins. Once the identities that have shaped the first half of life begin to loosen, we are presented with an opportunity that few conversations about midlife ever acknowledge: the opportunity to begin living from a place that is less defined by adaptation and more rooted in authenticity.

Perhaps this is why I believe we have been asking the wrong question about midlife. Instead of asking, "How do I get back to who I was?", perhaps the more meaningful question is, "Who am I becoming now that I no longer need to be who I was?" That is a very different question, and I suspect it leads us towards a very different understanding of what this stage of life is truly about. Rather than viewing midlife as the beginning of decline, perhaps we might begin to recognise it as one of the most significant periods of psychological development we will ever experience; a time when life gently invites us to stop living entirely through adaptation and begin living with greater authenticity, intention and freedom than we believed possible.