30 Years of Research Reveals Why Midlife Isn’t a Crisis | Margie Lachman - EP 812

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

This episode explores the myth of midlife crisis through decades of research by Dr. Margie Lachman, a leading lifespan psychologist. She cha

Key takeaways

• Midlife is not inherently a crisis; the concept is largely a myth perpetuated by cultural narratives.
• People often maintain or even increase their life satisfaction into later life, contrary to expectations of decline.

Main topics

• The myth of the midlife crisis
• Longitudinal research on adult development (MIDAS study)

Notable quotes

"Midlife isn't necessarily a crisis. In fact, Margie's research shows that people can maintain their happiness, preserve cognitive abilities longer than we once thought, and experience a stronger sense of control during midlife."

Conclusion

Midlife is not a time of decline but a powerful phase of growth, self-mastery, and contribution. The research shows

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) What if midlife isn't the beginning of the decline we've been taught to expect? For more than 30 years, psychologist Dr. Margie Lachman has studied how people change across adulthood. And what her research reveals about midlife is surprisingly hopeful. In fact, she found that some of the very things we assume get worse with age can actually get stronger. Take a listen to this. Speaker 2 (0:23) No, we cannot predict how long we're going to live, clearly. The statistics are such that when you get to 40, 50, you still have plenty of time left and you can make those remaining years really awesome and you can be healthy and happy. I think it's really important to focus on things that you are gaining rather than losing, thinking about the gains rather than the losses and trying your best to minimize the losses so that you really can live. the rest of your life in a really positive way, which benefits not only you, but also those around you who are depending on you, those younger and older. It's your friend John, Speaker 4 (1:03) and Speaker 2 (1:04) welcome to Passion Speaker 4 (1:05) Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 4 (1:42) Welcome back to Passion Struck episode 812. And today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Brain, how your mind learns, changes, and heals. Earlier in the week, Dan Arley challenged us to think about the risks we take and the ones we might regret never taking. Today, we're zooming out and asking a different question. What if we're thinking about getting older all wrong? Somewhere along the way, we've come to associate aging with decline. Less energy, less possibility, less capacity to change. But what if that's not the whole story? That's what makes my conversation with Dr. Margie Lockman so fascinating. Margie is a developmental psychologist and one of the leading researchers on adult development. For more than 30 years, she's helped lead the Midlife in the United States, or MIDAS, study, following thousands of people across adulthood to understand what really happens to us as we move through life and some of what she's discovered. challenges the story we've been telling ourselves. Midlife isn't necessarily a crisis. In fact, Margie's research shows that people can maintain their happiness, preserve cognitive abilities longer than we once thought, and experience a stronger sense of control during midlife. We also talked about something I found especially meaningful, generativity, the shift from focusing primarily on ourselves to using what we've learned to help other people grow. And that raises the question, that I think is worth asking at any age. What if this isn't the chapter where you're supposed to slow down? What if it's the chapter where you're supposed to become more of who you are? So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Dr. Margie Lachman. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Margie Lachman to PassionStruck. Margie, how are you today? Congratulations on the launch of Primetime, a new vision for midlife. Speaker 2 (3:48) Thank you, John. It's really great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Speaker 4 (3:52) I'm so excited to have this conversation. I did a conversation earlier in the year with Mark Nepo on midlife, which was a really interesting and philosophical conversation. But you have spent 30 years studying midlife, which is really interesting to me that you have had so much focus on this, which we're going to get into today. But what's interesting, Margie, is culturally, I think we think of this stage as like a lens of crisis, decline, loss. How do you think we're getting the story of midlife so wrong? Speaker 2 (4:27) Yes, you're right on there. Midlife has such a negative connotation in our society. And it really stems from early interest in midlife that focused on the midlife crisis. And it gets a lot of attention in Hollywood and in novels. And people like talking about this notion of a midlife crisis. But when you really get down to it, it's not something that many people experience. I think a lot of the negativity of midlife really stems from more general negative views of aging. When people get to 40 or 50 and they start to notice some of the sort of, I would call superficial changes associated with aging, things like wrinkles or graying hair, it triggers this notion that, oh, I'm getting old. Things are going downhill. Speaker 2 (5:25) I think that really triggers this notion that there's all this negative associations with midlife. Speaker 4 (5:32) What was interesting with my conversation with Mark is that a lot of the focus that he had on midlife was around the concept of love. Has that come up in your studies? Speaker 2 (5:44) Relationships are central. Absolutely. And if you think about... Some of the theories of adult development, I think of Eric Erickson, the psychoanalyst. He talked about midlife as the central task of generativity. But prior to that, before generativity, he did talk about intimacy or love. And so in his theory, intimacy comes before generativity. So once you establish relationships. then you can move beyond yourself and start to think about other people and then to the next generation. So yes, relationships in general and certainly partners and love do play a central role in terms of well-being and health in midlife. Speaker 4 (6:39) I saw that Bob Waldinger was one of the people who ended up blurbing your book. Congratulations on that. I've really enjoyed getting to know Bob over the past few years. And I think when he wrote The Good Life, he brought a lot of attention to a study that many people had not heard of. You are also associated with a study called the MIDAS study. And I was wondering, why has it become one of the most important studies that's ever been conducted? Speaker 2 (7:09) Waldenerker's work with the Harvard study, used to be called the Grant study, really did play out the importance of longitudinal work. They are one of the longest lasting studies of adulthood and also the importance of social relationships. Absolutely. Now, the study that I've worked on is called Midlife in the United States. known as MIDAS. And it started over 30 years ago. At the time, there was very little known about middle age. As a developmental psychologist, we tended to focus on children or adolescents. And then as a gerontologist, where I really started, I focused, as did others, on later life and the problems of old age. And it was in the middle 90s, about 30 years ago, that the MacArthur Foundation realized that there was this huge gap in our life course about midlife. And all we really thought about midlife was that it was a time of crisis. And so they were able to provide funding for us to conduct a longitudinal study. And it's been going on for over 30 years. And we've added new participants to our sample. But because we selected people, who were 25 to 75 at the time, we've been able to study people as they make the transition into midlife as well as out of midlife into later life. And so we've learned an enormous amount of information. Speaker 4 (8:32) Yeah, well, after following thousands of adults across those three decades, what's one or two things that surprised you the most? Speaker 2 (8:41) Well, one thing is there's just no way to summarize midlife neatly. There is so much variability in terms of the nature of midlife. And as we get older, the variability and variation increases dramatically. So it actually makes it very difficult to study midlife and to characterize it. That said, we can talk about some average changes. And one of the things that we have found is that it's not all downhill and it's not all despair. Speaker 2 (9:12) depression as many people expected. There's been a lot of talk about midlife is a low point, a time of crisis, a time of despair, and we don't find that at all. We do find individual differences. There are some people who are happier than others, of course, but people tend to maintain their level of happiness throughout adulthood. As we follow them over time, we essentially see that people who start out pretty happy remain fairly happy. Now, that said, if we look at them more closely on a daily basis. Some of our studies study people in a day-to-day kind of variation. And there are certainly ups and downs that people will have, and sometimes they're happier than others. But people typically will return to their general level of life satisfaction. And also life satisfaction, if it does change, it actually seems to increase even beyond midlife into early old age, the 60s and early 70s. Speaker 1 (10:10) There are other things that we've learned Speaker 2 (10:12) about cognition. Cognition doesn't decline as much as we thought it might based on some of the early cross-sectional studies. When we follow people longitudinally, we find people are able to maintain their memory well into late 50s, early 60s. And even when we do find some minor changes in memory, It's not the kind that we should worry about that you're getting Alzheimer's or dementia. And it's also not the kind that's going to affect your everyday life per se. It might show up in the lab or the kind of tests that we give people, but it's not something that's going to necessarily affect your everyday life. Speaker 4 (10:52) I recently had a conversation with a gentleman named Walter Green, who's in his early 80s. We weren't talking about midlife. We were talking about a movement he's doing now called Say It Now, which is really about say what's important to people who mean something to you now instead of waiting for their funeral to make it happen. But while we were doing it, he brought up kind of the four paths of his life. He said the first path was discovering me. Then he said the second. path of his life was making me. And then when he described midlife, he called it becoming me. And now that he's in this later stage of his life, he was saying it's more expanding me. Does what he said and becoming me resonate with you at all when you think about midlife? Speaker 2 (11:47) That is so interesting. I really love that. It's such a great way of thinking about the life course. Yes, I think it does. if you think about what happens in midlife, it's really a time when people reflect. You get to the midpoint of life, and it's a natural time to be looking back to see where you've come, what you've done, and then there's half your life left to think about where you want to go. And so it's a natural time, I think, to be making changes. And I don't think everybody sees it that way. I think a lot of people have this notion that It's too late to change. We're basically who we are and there's nothing you can really do. So I think becoming really does resonate in the sense that it's a time when you can make changes and decide that either you're not happy with how things are or you want to go in different directions. And there's plenty of time left really to make those changes. Speaker 4 (12:45) It was a really interesting discussion. He was the CEO of a... fairly large company. And he said during the making me stage, and this relates with me, we are so focused on making money, raising a family, if you have kids, doing all those things that you don't spend a lot of time self-reflecting and a lot of time doing introspection. And he said that that fundamentally changed for him in the midlife phase where he started to reflect on more the lessons of his life and how does he turn those lessons into new chapters for how he could live a more earnest or a more becoming type of life. And I thought it was a really interesting way to think about it because I myself have, as I've gotten from my forties into my fifties, I've experienced the same thing, a lot more introspection and how I want to use the talents that I have to serve humanity instead of, I felt. Earlier in my life, it was more about serving more a narrow aspect of that. I Speaker 2 (13:50) think partly it depends on what your roles are and where you are in terms of life stages. And that's one of the things that we find is that depending on where you are in terms of work and family, do you have children or do you not have children? Did you have children in your 20s or in your 30s or in your 40s? And so depending on how old your children are, depending on what you are doing at work, those kinds of experiences are