machado: middle age blues — and rage — is totally normal

the after-40 years can be tough as women navigate what the mayo clinic calls a “dramatic reproductive hormone plunge” — when ovulation ends and hormone production drops in a relatively short period of time. our bodies heat up and then a second later, leave us shivering, our metabolism slows, we have trouble sleeping, and our hair thins. plus, things get dry .

zenifer khaleel writes in friday that the reasons for midlife rage in women include “living inauthentically,” parenting difficulties, relationship problems, health problems and — finally, we are getting to the crux of it —not living the life they wanted, all with an extra chin hair or two thrown in. yup, there’s nothing more irritating than looking back and realizing you aren’t where you want to be, and knowing that the minutes we have left on earth are ticking away . loudly.

and certainly, while staring down 50 or 60 is enough to make anyone feel a little anxious — think of all the changes humans typically move through during this time, from kids leaving home to losing parents to retirement— therapist mandeep jassal tells friday that it’s not the only time in life women may feel overwhelmed, lost and angry. in fact, she says that similar feelings are also sometimes experienced by women in their 20s who face similarly big transitions, like employment and relationship changes.

maybe the rage never goes away. maybe it just simmers under the surface for a few decades only to emerge decades later, exploding to the surface with the realization of, as rose laferla puts it in the new york times , “mingy salaries, thwarted ambitions, waning sex lives and — gasp! — impending mortality.”

jonathon raucher writes in the atlantic about a study on life satisfaction done by economists david blanchflower and andrew oswald which found that happiness with life decreased with age for the first twenty years of adulthood and bottomed out somewhere in the 40s or early 50s — which may explain our propensity to experience a midlife crisis or feel rage during this time. the researchers also found an increase in the use of mood supporting drugs during this time — being middle-aged “nearly doubles” a person’s likelihood of using antidepressants, writes raucher. the good news is that, according to the data, this pattern of life satisfaction — known as a u-curve — then trends upwards as you grow old, so much so, that you may actually reach or exceed the level of happiness of youth when you are elderly.

it’s worth pointing out, however, that while women tend to get all the shade when it comes to the behavioural effect of hormones — somehow our less pleasant emotions get often dismissed with “must be that time of the month” — men also experience hormonal changes that can influence how they act and the decisions they make. on average, testosterone declines one per cent a year after age 40 , and while not all men experience the symptoms of low testosterone, when they do, it shows up in things like reduced sexual desire, breast discomfort, decreased energy, depressed mood and increased body fat.

for sure, women and men experience midlife crisis — experts say ‘midlife transition’ is a better way to put it — differently. men tend to want to prove something and look successful, according to dan jones , director of the counselling and psychological services center at appalachian state university, boone, north carolina. hence, the convertibles and the younger women. middle-aged women, however, often take this time to reevaluate their accomplishments and relationships, he says, maybe choosing to get back to goals that may have been abandoned during child-raising years. they may feel that they have “paid their dues,” and become more selfish. ah, there it is: frank’s big middle finger theory.

and then there’s the rage. most women are raised to be caregivers — many of us spend a good chunk of our lives looking after others. but as doreen yomoah told the podcast unchained, unbothered , it’s not because we’re better at it than men, we have just been socialized to believe this is what we should do. and so, when a woman’s life hits the halfway mark, and she notices that all she’s got under her belt are some well taken care of people, with her dreams buried in her back pocket, it makes sense how she may feel a little, well, annoyed.