At 16, I had three part-time jobs: waitress, gardener, stablehand. I was also interning at a nearby Cornish newspaper, which turned into a job that led to me moving to London at 17 for a journalism apprenticeship.
I did this at the same time as working weekend shifts on national newspapers. Newly qualified, I landed in a hectic daily paper newsroom which eventually led to me taking my dream job of editor-in-chief on the glossy mags. I was always busy and thrived on stress.
I married at 30, had my first child at 33 and my fourth at 43. Life was full on, and I loved it. I wasn’t alone in this, I had female friends in different industries who relished the combination of career and domestic busy-ness, lawyers, nurses, doctors, engineers flourishing at full speed. And those women I knew who took on mothering full time hurled themselves at it with tireless 100 per cent daily commitment. We all coped well – until one day, somewhere in our mid-forties, we didn’t.
Almost overnight, the stress that fuelled us became a problem, it ambushed us out of the blue and our Generation X ability to push on through, our endurance mentality, suddenly seemed to fail us.
I began to have panic attacks about workload and our family to-do list. Around me, women of a similar age were melting under the weight of increasing responsibility too. Many of us were in senior positions, managing ambitious workloads alongside parenting teenagers (more difficult than toddlers) or grappling with the unexpected grief of an empty nest.
Some of us were re-entering the workforce, or caring for ageing parents, facing illness of our own or that of close friends. News of divorces, deaths, financial problems, or the shock of redundancy, filled our WhatsApp chats. We were overwhelmed and inexplicably physically and mentally broken.
I could feel my confidence slipping away. Daily, I fantasised about being knocked over by a car so I could go to hospital and work out what was wrong with me, and why my peers and I felt this midlife burnout.
Around the age of 48 I found out what was at the root of our unravellings: it was the perimenopause, which I’d never heard of before. This is the 10 or so years before menopause, when fluctuating hormones affect every part of your mind and body.
I was prescribed HRT, which gifted me back my sleep, stopped the anxiety and gave me more energy, but I was still struggling to cope with stress. I couldn’t do more than one thing at a time any more and failed to manage my workload. So I set out to find out why, and wrote a book about it. For What’s Wrong With Me? 101 Things Midlife Women Need To Know I interviewed therapists, career coaches, physicians and older women to find out how they’d coped with this messy middle bit.
If you combine perimenopause and all those family responsibilities with that Gen X endurance ethic and its self-critical attitude to failure, it is easy to see why we’re struggling. But we’re also lacking an effective toolkit for coping with midlife. There’s no clear roadmap so it catches us by surprise. We can’t see any role models because no other generation has had to work, parent and be carers under the unrealistic ambitions of the “have-it-all” generation.
Midlife, I found out, requires “a softening” of our attitude, it asks us to be more vulnerable and seek help; something we are not used to. Our “windows of tolerance” around stressful situations shrink and we need to adapt to that, so learning to ask for support is vital, which means that at this stage our connections to others must be strengthened.
Indeed, all the science shows that loneliness really is a killer, so nurturing the friendships of those women around you is life-changing during an unravelling.
The therapist Julia Samuel told me that we live or die by the quality of our relationships with others. It’s this that predicts how positively we deal with what she calls the “living losses” of midlife. And by living losses she means things like the loss of our youth, our fertility, our roles as mothers, the loss or evolution of our past identities and of course the loss of the physical women we once were as our bodies change.
We’ve also gone from an Alpha to Beta state in therapy speak: as Alphas you’re in “gathering resources” mode, as Betas you’re in “enjoying the resources” mode. Many Gen X-ers feel guilty about this “enjoyment mode” and we’re so discombobulated we keep “gathering” – we haven’t switched out of “strive” mode.
We are also confused about identity. If we lose our confidence, and then we begin to feel we don’t know ourselves, how do we present ourselves to others? All this requires us to be kinder to ourselves, to mute the critical inner voice. As the psychotherapist Philippa Perry told me: “Those illogical criticisms in your head, the ‘I can’t copes’, that is really your inner voice saying ‘please slow down’.” If we don’t slow down, stress derails us. I’ve found this slowing down is a welcome liberation from constantly coping.
During my wobbly years I made changes – or established regulating behaviours as the experts referred to it – which helped. Now I block out time in my diary to do nothing, I’ve stepped back from the endurance mindset and my inner voice is kinder.
I discovered that science shows stress reduces our optimism bias, and so it was a good thing having less of it in my life. A positive mindset is crucial for midlife stability.
I nourished my connection to my friends, I learnt to say no without feeling compelled to explain myself, I read the work of psychology professor Ellen Langer, author of Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, which advocates adopting a “what IS possible as you age” mindset.
These simple epiphanies made me feel more youthful – not younger, just better about getting older. They are epiphanies my manic, ambitious previous self would have poo-pooed. They run alongside daily exercise, staying hydrated and finding a hobby that soothed my soul (swimming).
Midlife is a bittersweet state of constant change, but it shouldn’t feel like an exhausting state of transformation, more an evolution. It’s not for the fainthearted, but if you know it’s coming then you can be prepared, which makes the whole thing more hopeful and much less stressful.
What’s Wrong With Me: 101 Things midlife Women Need to Know by Lorraine Candy (4th Estate, £16.99) is out now
