Midlife Anxiety and Depression - A Friend?

I saw this cartoon in the New Yorker around the last Presidential election. I saved it because it made me relax a little about my newfound, chronic anxiety.

This new, crushing anxiety was such a departure from my normal personality, I started reading everything I could find about it. What I discovered was, the anxiety was there all along, midlife just blew the lid off it.

One excellent resource I found was Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari.

In the book, Hari tells a story about a doctor in London who prescribed a group gardening project to a handful of his severely depressed patients. As the weeks passed, most of those patients saw a massive improvement in their mental health. Months later they’d even started a little gardening gang to keep refreshing the city’s blighted green spaces.

Committed, regular, cooperative gardening with other humans? In service to the community? In fresh air and dirt? Why is anybody surprised that they felt better? This is how humans are designed to live.

Currently, 1/6 Americans are on a mood-altering medication.

But it isn’t how we live anymore and while I believe meds do save lives, I wonder how many of us are medicating what can be useful signals and avoiding the source illness altogether.

What’s the source illness?

Loneliness, isolation, lack of purpose, lack of devotion and minimal contact with the natural world, plus a 24/7 cycle that feeds us a relentless drip of fear and hopelessness.

What if the anxiety is not the enemy per se, but a fire alarm demanding you to attend to things you can no longer tolerate?

Meds or no meds, wouldn’t you want to get to the bottom of that?

Anxiety and depression can be normal at midlife.

There is a statistically measurable dip in life satisfaction for humans (and some primates) which occurs between ages 45-50. It’s marked by an increase in generalized anxiety, malaise and depression.

Psychologist Carl Jung would say it’s perfectly normal break in the phases of your life - like adolescence, except nobody questions what that’s for. Midlife is a similar transition, a break to consider how you want to live the second half of your life.

It’s a tremendous opportunity but because it feels yucky, we medicate it. What would it look like to treat it like a signal, not an illness? Recognize it. Allow it. Investigate it. Nurture it as the wise Tara Brach recommends.

Also, sometimes your circumstances are sad or fearsome.

At midlife, people often experience the three big identity shifts: Divorce, empty nest or retirement. It’s normal to be sad when your marriage ends. It’s normal to grieve the loss of day to day kid management. It’s painful to watch your company do just fine without you.

That stuff can sink anybody but left unaddressed or self-medicated with Chardonnay or shopping, it will get worse. So you have to act on it. Do do you need Zanax or do you need to get on purpose?

It might be both, but it’s definitely the latter.

I’m leading a group of women through this process starting January 6th.

If you are suffering from anxiety because you get up each day but don’t know where to point your feet; if you’re trapped in fearsome thought spirals about what’s next, if you wish you had someone who understands the struggle and opportunities that present at midlife book a call with me.

We can talk about where you are and where you dream of going.