What Is a Midlife Crisis?

What Age Does a Midlife Crisis Happen?

The typical midlife crisis age ranges from 40 to 65, though I believe it can extend from 35 to 75 in our era of increased longevity. There are three distinct phases:

Early Midlife (35-50): This is when midlife crisis symptoms typically hit hardest. You experience the challenging physical and emotional transitions—a bit like adult puberty. You realize you're no longer young but not yet old.

Core Midlife (50-60): You've settled into this new era and start seeing the upside. The chrysalis is doing its work.

Later Midlife (60-75): You're young enough to live vitally but old enough to know what matters.

Of course, midlife is less of an age than it is a feeling, a bridge between early adulthood with all of it promise and stress, and, later adulthood when the prospect of being elderly is in the not-too-distant future.

What Causes a Midlife Crisis? The Science Behind It

Economist Jonathan Rauch spent years studying why so many people hit an emotional wall in their 40s. What he found, detailed in his book The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50 (St. Martin's Press, 2018), was startling: life satisfaction follows a predictable U-curve across cultures. In a 2014 Atlantic article, "The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis," he explains that we start our adult lives pretty excited, then happiness tanks through our 30s and early 40s—bottoming out around 45 to 50—before swinging back up through our 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond

This isn't just feel-good nonsense. The research has been replicated in dozens of countries—from wealthy nations to developing ones—making it one of the most solid findings in happiness research.

Dr. Laura Carstensen at Stanford has been studying this for decades. She runs the Stanford Center on Longevity and found something surprising: people in their 70s are often happier than those in their 50s or 30s. Her theory—called socioemotional selectivity theory (fancy name, simple idea)—explains that as our time horizons shift, we naturally stop chasing achievements and start prioritizing what actually matters. We’re less focused on the future or past and more focused on the present and we’re more happy as a result.

So yeah, you're not imagining it. This dip is real, it's universal, and—thank God—it's temporary.

The Psychology of Midlife: 

Generativity vs. Stagnation 

So the data says happiness dips in midlife. But why? What's actually going on under the hood

Psychologist Erik Erikson had a theory. He mapped out eight stages we go through as humans, each one defined by a conflict we have to work through. And in midlife—roughly 40 to 65—we hit what he called the battle between generativity and stagnation.

Generativity is a fancy word for a simple urge: the need to create something, nurture someone, mentor the next generation, leave your fingerprints on the world in some way that matters. Stagnation is its evil twin—that creeping feeling that you're just going through the motions, spinning your wheels, not really contributing to anything beyond your own survival.

Sound familiar? It did to me.

When I was deep in my midlife unraveling, I thought something was broken in me. Turns out, something was trying to be born. That restless, dissatisfied feeling? It wasn't a malfunction. It was generativity banging on the door, asking some uncomfortable questions: What are you doing that actually matters? Who are you helping besides yourself? When you're gone, what will be left?

Here's the kicker: Erikson believed the "cure" for a midlife crisis isn't chasing your youth or buying that damn sports car. It's the opposite. It's shifting your focus from "What can I get?" to "What can I give?" From personal ambition to contribution. From accumulating to offering.

I wrote about this in my book Wisdom at Work—that adulthood, according to Erikson, means facing the crisis of generativity versus the despair of believing you have nothing left to offer. The despair part I knew intimately. The generativity part took me a while to figure out.

This is actually why we started MEA. We kept meeting people in midlife who felt stuck, irrelevant, like their best years were behind them. But when we helped them shift from "What's wrong with me?" to "What wisdom do I have to share?"—everything changed. That's generativity in action. And honestly, it's the closest thing to a cure I've found.

So if you're feeling that midlife itch, maybe it's not a crisis. Maybe it's a calling. The question is: will you stagnate in what was, or generate what's next?

Why Does a Midlife Crisis Happen Now?

A midlife crisis feels less like a crisis and more like a circus because everything hits at once:

The collision of reality with younger expectations. You realize you're probably not going to be President, climb Everest, or get 25,000 Instagram followers. Your kids aren't going to an Ivy League school. You didn't marry your perfect soulmate. You have fewer zeros in your savings account than you'd hoped.

But here's the thing: These were often fantasies of your younger self, scripts handed to you by parents, peers, and society. A midlife crisis is when you finally get permission to write your own script—one that feels authentic to you.

The weight of accumulation. By midlife, you've piled on so much—responsibilities, obligations, identities, stuff—that you're barely holding it together. You're "slightly wounded and tightly wound," as I described myself at 47.

Here's something cool: UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson and his team spent years studying how people handle emotions at different ages. What they found flies in the face of everything we assume about getting older. While your IQ stays pretty much the same through adulthood, your emotional intelligence actually gets better. People in their 60s are way better at regulating their emotions than twentysomethings. You've got better tools now than you did back then—you just might not realize it yet.

Time becomes finite. When you're young, time feels infinite. During a midlife crisis, you start doing the math. If you're 45 and might live to 85, you've got roughly 2,000 Saturdays left. This awareness can feel terrifying—or it can be incredibly liberating.

Identity crisis. Many of us wrap our identity around our roles: CEO, parent, achiever, provider. In a midlife crisis, those identities start to crack. Your kids leave. Your career plateaus. Your body reminds you it has limits. Who are you when you're not doing?

Common Triggers That Can Spark a Midlife Crisis

Not everyone's midlife crisis looks the same. Sometimes it's a slow simmer over years. Sometimes it's a specific life event that cracks everything wide open.
Two of the most common triggers I see at MEA? The empty nest and the squeeze of caregiving from both directions.

The Empty Nest: Who Am I Now That I'm Not Needed?

You spent two decades driving carpools, attending recitals, helping with homework, worrying about college applications. Then one day your kid loads up the car and drives away.
The house goes quiet. And you're left standing in the kitchen wondering: Now what?

Empty nest syndrome hits harder than most people expect. It's not just that you miss your kids. It's that you've lost a role. If "Mom" or "Dad" was your primary identity for 18 or 20 years, who the hell are you when that job ends?

I've seen this at MEA over and over. People show up saying they feel lost, purposeless, like they've been fired from the most important job they ever had. One woman told me, "I didn't realize how much of my self-worth was wrapped up in being needed."
But here's the thing nobody tells you: the empty nest doesn't have to stay empty. For a lot of people, it actually becomes a relief. Even a liberation.

Studies show that marital satisfaction often goes up after kids leave. Parents report having more time for themselves, their relationships, their interests that got shoved in a drawer for two decades. The nest isn't empty. It's just got some room in it finally.

The key is what I call repurposing. That nurturing energy you poured into your kids for all those years? It didn't evaporate when they left. It needs somewhere new to go. Maybe it's mentoring younger colleagues. Maybe it's that project you kept putting off. Maybe it's your friendships, your marriage, your own damn growth for once.

At Modern Elder Academy, we help empty nesters stop asking "Who am I without my kids?" and start asking a better question: "Who do I want to become now that I finally have the freedom to choose?"

My friend Diane Flynn put it perfectly: "For me, life after 50—and after kids have left the house—has been one of the most freeing, energizing times of my life. I have seemingly unlimited time to think, work, play, and enjoy what I'm doing."

The empty nest isn't an ending. It's an invitation.

The Sandwich Generation: Caregiving from Both Directions

If the empty nest is sudden silence, being part of the sandwich generation is constant noise coming from every direction.

You're helping your 20-something figure out their career while also managing your 80-something parent's doctor appointments. You're paying for a kid's wedding and a parent's assisted living in the same year. You're the go-to problem solver for everyone above and below you on the family tree.

Which means there's nobody left to solve your problems.

About one in seven middle-aged adults in the U.S. are financially supporting both a child and an aging parent at the same time. Add in the emotional labor—the worry, the logistics, the guilt of never doing quite enough for anyone—and you've got a recipe for midlife burnout.

This isn't a "crisis" in the dramatic, blow-up-your-life sense. It's more of a slow grinding down. You're so busy taking care of everyone else that you stop taking care of yourself. Your needs slide to the bottom of the list. One day you look up and realize you're exhausted, resentful, and wondering where you went.

I've been there. Watching my parents age while navigating my own midlife transitions was brutal. You feel stretched so thin you're practically see-through.

The sandwich generation pressure is real, and it deserves to be named out loud. It's not weakness to feel overwhelmed by this. It's not selfishness to want something for yourself. It's not a character flaw to need help.

What I've come to understand is that you can't pour from an empty cup. Taking time to invest in yourself isn't abandoning your responsibilities to everyone else. It's the only way you can sustain them over the long haul.

Sometimes the most generous thing you can do for the people who depend on you is to tend to your own wellbeing first. That's not selfish. That's wisdom. And it's something we take seriously at MEA.

Mortality Salience: When Time Starts Feeling Short

Mortality Salience: When Time Starts Feeling Short

When you're young, death is something that happens to other people. Then one day it isn't.
Psychologists call this shift mortality salience. It's when the reality of your own death moves from background noise to foreground static. Maybe it's a health scare. Maybe it's burying a parent, or worse, a friend your own age.

For me, it was losing five friends to suicide in my 40s, followed by my own near-death experience at 47. Trust me, nothing makes mortality feel more real than dying on stage after giving a speech and somehow coming back.

This awareness does strange things to people. Researchers who study Terror Management Theory have found that when we become acutely conscious of death, we often react in irrational ways. We grasp for symbols of youth and vitality. We make impulsive decisions. We blow things up.

Sound familiar? That red sports car, the affair with someone half your age, the sudden urge to quit everything and move to Costa Rica—these aren't random acts of midlife stupidity. They're often unconscious attempts to outrun the Grim Reaper.

I get it. I really do. When you're staring down your own mortality, you want to feel alive. You want to feel young. You want death to go back to being something that happens to other people.
But running doesn't work. I tried.

What I've learned—and what Stanford's Laura Carstensen has spent decades researching—is that our relationship with mortality can actually make us happier, not more miserable. Her work shows that people who have a clear sense that their time is limited often experience more joy, not less. Why? Because scarcity is clarifying. When you stop pretending you have unlimited Saturdays, you quit wasting them on stuff that doesn't matter.

This is the difference between time scarcity and time affluence.

Time scarcity is that panicky, grasping feeling: I'm running out, I haven't done enough, it's all slipping away. Time affluence is something else. It's the recognition that you have enough time to live a meaningful life—if you're willing to get ruthless about editing out what doesn't serve you.
At MEA, we don't teach people to outrun death. We help them turn toward it. Mortality isn't a deadline. It's a motivator. When you stop fighting the reality that your time is finite, you can finally ask the question that matters: How do I want to spend the time I have left?

There's a line I keep coming back to: We have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.

How Long Does a Midlife Crisis Last?

Here's the honest answer: Bruce Feiler, who wrote Life Is in the Transitions (Penguin Press, 2020), interviewed hundreds of Americans about their major life changes. His finding? The average adult transition takes three to five years.

Yeah. Years. Not weeks or months.

I know that sounds daunting when you're in the thick of it. But understanding the stages helps you stop beating yourself up for not "getting over it" faster.

The Three Stages of a Midlife Crisis (Your Roadmap)

Midlife transitions - whether it be a divorce, changing careers - becoming an “empty nester,” or menopause -  follow a pattern. Understanding where you are in your midlife transition helps you be patient with yourself and realize that maybe it’s not a crisis:

The Three Stages of Midlife Transition (Adapted from Feiler, 2020)

Stage 1: The Ending (The Caterpillar)

This is when you start letting go of old identities, habits, and stories that no longer serve you. It feels like everything is falling apart during this phase of your midlife crisis. This stage requires rituals—ways to honor what was and acknowledge it's time to move on. For me, this was selling my company, ending a long-term relationship, and watching my success scripts crumble. But, I needed rituals - a thank you retreat to my leadership team, a dinner with long-time friends to support me at the end of my relationship - to help mark the occasion so that I was ready for my next chapter.

Stage 2: The Messy Middle (The Chrysalis)

You're betwixt and between. No longer who you were, not yet who you'll become. This liminal state is uncomfortable as hell, but it's where the real transformation happens in a midlife crisis. You're not stuck—you're dissolving so you can reform. This is often the longest and most difficult phase and it’s easy to get stuck here. This is when we need social support to both remind us we’re lovable and help to objectively give us guidance. And, this is the time we should look for our throughline based upon the belief “on the other side of this, I’m going to be wiser and a better person.”

Stage 3: The New Beginning (The Butterfly)

You emerge from your midlife crisis with a clearer sense of who you authentically are. You've shed the old skin. You've edited out what doesn't serve you. And you're ready to pollinate your wisdom to the world. But, butterflies don’t often immediately fly as their wings are wet when they emerge from the chrysalis. This is why a growth mindset - a desire to improve and learn - is essential during this period as creating your an online dating profile for the first time after a 30-year marriage requires a sense of humor along with a belief that we’re going to get better at this over time.

How to Deal With a Midlife Crisis: What Got Me Through

I had a near-death experience at 47—literally died on stage after giving a speech. Talk about a wake-up call. But you don't need to die and come back to navigate your midlife crisis. Here's what helped me, and what I've seen help thousands of others going through a midlife crisis:

1. Find Your Midlife Atrium

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of the famous Margaret Mead) came up with this brilliant concept of a "midlife atrium." Instead of just tacking on a couple extra bedrooms in the backyard of life (being old longer), she argued we need to redesign the whole blueprint.

See, we're not just living longer—we're in midlife longer. Half the kids born in the western world today might live to 100. That doesn't mean 30 extra years of being old. It means 30 extra years of being in the middle, with time to reinvent, explore, and actually figure out what matters.

During your midlife crisis, this is your permission slip to create that space—an atrium filled with light and air right in the center of your life, not just stuck on the end.

2. Do the Great Midlife Edit

As philosopher William James wrote, "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." Start editing out what no longer serves you during your midlife crisis. Which commitments? Which stories about yourself? Which expectations?

There's delicious freedom in learning what to edit from your life—it frees up space for what's been overlooked, like sunset walks, great books, or people you love.

3. Rewrite Your Success Script

Most of us got handed a success script as kids—what achievement should look like, what matters, how to measure whether we're "winning." Your midlife crisis is the moment you realize that script was written by someone else—your parents, your peers, the culture you grew up in. Time to write your own damn script. I call the old way "successism"—this addiction to chasing more and more success even when it's making you miserable.

People with a growth mindset focus on learning and improving rather than just proving they're smart or successful. And here's the kicker: this becomes even more powerful during a midlife transition. When you stop trying to prove yourself and start trying to improve yourself, everything shifts. You become more resilient, more open to feedback, better at handling setbacks.

4. Build Your Transition Intelligence (TQ)

Look, you're not going to avoid change, especially if you're living longer. The caterpillar doesn't fight becoming a butterfly—it surrenders to the process.

Herminia Ibarra at London Business School is one of the world's experts on career transitions. In Working Identity (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), she makes this counterintuitive point: successful transitions require experimentation, not just sitting around thinking really hard about yourself. You can't think your way into a new identity—you have to act your way into it. Her research shows that identity changes often follow behavioral changes, not the other way around.

In other words, you don't figure out who you are and then change your life. You try new things, and then you figure out who you're becoming.

5. Embrace Being a Beginner Again

At 52, I joined Airbnb as mentor to CEO Brian Chesky, who was 21 years younger. I knew nothing about tech. I was no longer the visionary CEO—I was "the guide on the side." I had to right-size my ego during this midlife transition and learn a completely new habitat.

But that's when Brian and the founders told me something profound: "We hired you for your knowledge, but what we got was your wisdom." Your midlife crisis might be pushing you toward discovering wisdom you didn't know you had. And, given that I was new to tech, I had to be open to being the most curious person in the room as I certainly wasn’t the smartest.

6. Connect With Others Going Through This

Albert Schweitzer supposedly said, "In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being." You don't have to white-knuckle your way through a midlife crisis alone.

Here's something that blew my mind: The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following the same 724 people since 1938. That's 85+ years of tracking what actually makes people happy and healthy. Dr. Robert Waldinger runs it now, and he and Marc Schulz wrote up the findings in The Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

The big takeaway? The quality of your relationships at age 50 predicts how healthy you'll be at 80—more than your cholesterol, more than your exercise routine, more than anything else. People who were satisfied in their relationships at 50 were the healthiest at 80.

So during your midlife crisis, when you feel like pulling away and isolating, that's actually the worst thing you can do. Find your people—a therapist, a men's group, a workshop, friends who get it. Connection matters more than you think.

What's Waiting on the Other Side of a Midlife Crisis

Here's what nobody tells you: Your 50s can be extraordinary. Life after a midlife crisis can be the best chapter yet.

After my brutal 40s, my 50s became a revelation. I got in the best shape of my life. I studied weird topics that fascinated me—the psychology of emotions, why festivals matter, how hot springs form. I spent hours in my backyard hammock. And I finally had the emotional chops to handle whatever life threw at me.

Yale researcher Becca Levy has spent her career studying how our beliefs about aging shape our actual health. In Breaking the Age Code (William Morrow, 2022), she lays out decades of research showing that when you shift from negative to positive beliefs about aging, your health improves across the board: better balance, more openness to trying new things, sharper thinking, even better sex.

But here's the stat that stops everyone in their tracks: just by changing your mindset about aging, you can add seven and a half years to your life. That's more than if you quit smoking or start exercising at 50. Levy tracked thousands of people in the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement for over two decades and found that people with positive age beliefs lived longer, period.

We actually experience less regret, frustration, and sadness as we age, not more. Our EQ rises while our IQ stays stable. We become more skilled at editing what matters. We stop sprinting on the treadmill toward some distant destination and learn to appreciate where we are.

The U-curve of happiness doesn't magically resolve because your problems disappear after a midlife crisis. It resolves because you learn to roll with the punches. You stop obsessing over "more, more, more" and start welcoming the joy in simple gifts—a smile from a stranger, a thoughtful gesture, a new book on your nightstand.

Two Ways to Look at What You're Going Through

When I was in the thick of my midlife unraveling, I went looking for answers. What I found was a lot of medical language about "crisis" and "disorder" and "treatment." It made me feel like I was sick. Like something was broken in me that needed to be fixed so I could get back to "normal."

But what if normal was the problem?

Here's how I've come to see the difference:

Look, I'm not anti-medicine. If you're dealing with serious depression or anxiety, please talk to a professional. Therapy helped me. Medication helps a lot of people. I'm not here to argue with that.

But pills couldn't answer the questions that were keeping me up at night:

What do I actually want from the rest of my life?

Who am I when I strip away all the roles and titles?

What's worth keeping and what do I need to let go of?

Those aren't medical questions. They're wisdom questions. And they don't get answered in a 15-minute appointment.

Don't just treat the symptoms. Understand the calling.

Jackson's research shows something fascinating: the midlife crisis became a self-fulfilling prophecy in Western culture. People expected to have one, so they did. Or at least they interpreted their natural life transitions through that lens.

But here's a better metaphor: chrysalis. When a caterpillar is fully grown, it fastens itself to a twig and forms a protective shell. Inside that chrysalis, something profound happens — metamorphosis. Yes, it's dark and gooey and a little lonely. But it's a transformation, not a catastrophe. And on the other side? Wings.

Your Midlife Crisis Mantra: From Success to Significance

As developmental psychologist Erik Erikson suggests, try this on after age 50: "I am what survives me."

Not "I am my job title." Not "I am my accomplishments." Not "I am my Instagram following." But "I am what survives me"—the seeds I've planted, the people I've helped, the wisdom I've shared, the impact I've had on future generations.

That shift from success to significance, from accumulation to contribution, from being well-known to being known well—that's the gift of navigating a midlife crisis consciously.

What to Do Right Now If You're Having a Midlife Crisis

If you're in the thick of a midlife crisis, here are three steps:

1. Name it. Stop pretending everything is fine. Say out loud: "I'm going through a lot of midlife transitions, and it's hard." The dangerous kind of suffering is the kind that allows you to pretend everything is okay. Naming your midlife crisis gives you some power over it.

2. Ask different questions. Instead of "What's wrong with me?" try "What am I being called to become?" Instead of "Why is this midlife crisis happening to me?" ask "What is this teaching me?"

3. Get curious. At Airbnb, they called me a "Modern Elder"—someone who's as curious as they are wise. Curiosity is your superpower during a midlife crisis. What have you always wanted to learn? What would you study if time and money weren't issues? What seeds of knowledge do you have that might thrive in new soil? Ten years from now, what will you regret if you don’t learn it or do it now?” Anticipated regret is a form of wisdom and that question catalyzed me to learn to surf and speak Spanish when I moved to Mexico at 56 even though I initially thought I was too old.

The Bridge to a Better Shore: Moving Beyond Midlife Crisis

Early midlife (called “middlescence” by many academics), like adolescence, is a bridge over troubled waters. My five friends who took their own lives didn't realize the bridge of a midlife crisis leads to a safe shore. But it does. I promise you it does.

You're not experiencing a crisis in the destructive sense. You're experiencing a chrysalis. And yes, it's dark and gooey and uncomfortable in there. But metamorphosis is happening. You're dissolving the old to make room for the new. You're becoming the person you were always meant to be.

David Bowie said it best before he passed away: "Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been."

A midlife crisis isn't the end. It's a calling. It's an invitation to shed what no longer serves you and step into your wisdom. It's permission to rewrite your story in your own words.

Welcome to your midlife crisis. It's not a disaster—it's a doorway.

You've already taken the first step by searching for "midlife crisis" and finding answers. Now let me give you the complete roadmap for transforming your midlife crisis into your renaissance. Because you deserve more than a crisis—you deserve a calling.

References & Further Reading

Scientific Studies & Academic Research

Books on Midlife Transitions

Books on Midlife Transitions

Books on Midlife Transitions