A Crash Course on the Impact of Midlife on Men Transcript

Paul Sutton: Welcome to Middleman, the show for midlife men and the people who love them. I'm Paul Sutton, and today we're going to get down and dirty with midlife.

As I talked about in the first episode of the show, middle-aged men have a bad rap. From the grumpy old man to the sports car driving man-child, stereotypes are plentiful. The fear of being dismissed or mocked means that many middle-aged men keep their worries and emotions to themselves, locked away where no one can see them, not even themselves. We're conditioned to keep our heads down and work hard, and that talking about our feelings is weak, so we end up feeling disconnected, frustrated, and lonely. It's no wonder that both suicide and divorce rates peak for men when they're in their late 40s.

Studies have shown that middle age is the time when a man's life satisfaction is at its lowest. The Brookings Institution in the United States published a research paper in 2016 that identifies three life stages. In the first life stage, life satisfaction declines consistently between the ages of 18 and about 45. Between the mid-40s and the mid-50s, satisfaction bottoms out, marking a transitional second stage of life when a sense of personal well-being and happiness is hard to come by. That's the stage that I realised I was in not so long ago, and in which many men report feelings of being lost and disillusioned.

But the good news is that once that midlife transition has passed, life satisfaction starts to climb again during the third stage of life, all the way into the 80s and beyond. This U-curve also happens to look like a smile, and for anyone struggling with the challenges of midlife, it's worth looking out and familiarising yourself with it. So, if the research shows that the midlife crisis is just a blip, shouldn't we all just ride it out and wait for things to improve? Well, no.

Middle age is indeed a transitional time when, if we understand what's happening, we can take stock and proactively plan how the second half of our lives is going to pan out. But the key to that is understanding what's happening. And as a society, we don't talk about this stuff. We don't educate men in their 20s or 30s to expect this to happen in their 40s or 50s. And so, when it does happen, it comes as a shock, a huge shock.

And so, you get a whole bunch of middle-aged men who live life stuck in their own heads. They numb those emotions by throwing themselves ever more into work that ultimately they find unfulfilling, and then they feel guilty for not seeing their family and friends enough. They spend their lives doing everything for everyone else, not stopping to check that they themselves are okay. They self-medicate using alcohol or by spending money on stuff, stuff that they probably don't need. They become lonely, vacant, depressed, and mediocre.

It was with an eye on this understanding that this podcast, Middleman, was created. The aim is to educate and reassure men about what's happening to them. It's intended to provide a safe space for them to acknowledge and address their feelings, and it's intended to give them the self-awareness and confidence to do something about it.

In future episodes, we're going to cover various practical things you can do to work through this without having to go to the expense of buying a Porsche. But the first few shows are all about midlife and what it feels like to wake up one morning and go, "Shit, is this all there is to my life?" With that in mind, on today's show, we're diving headfirst into what midlife actually is, how you can identify if you're in the mindset of a midlife crisis, and how you can start to work your way out of it. Think of it as a crash course on midlife for men.

Today, I'm talking to three coaches who work with midlife men to restore balance to their lives and to ensure that the second half of their lives is meaningful, joyful, and productive. Each of them has been through their own midlife transition and come out the other side stronger, more confident, and more optimistic. You're going to meet these guys again in the next few episodes when I'll be talking to each of them about their own stories and about specific topics in more detail. But for now, the first person I want to introduce you to is Dan Stanley, author of the book "Rethinking Masculinity," and the founder of the Men and Mountains hiking group of like-minded men. I asked him how he defines midlife.

Dan Stanley: It's a natural stage of one's journey. You know, in our formative years, our early years, we have some kind of rite of passage. It could be a first girlfriend, losing our virginity, going off to university, playing in the first team of our chosen sport, whatever it might be. And then we quickly hurry off into the world of work and get on this traditional trajectory of success. And at some point, whether it's like it was in my case, you know, becoming a father for the first time, or some kind of what I call a "life quake," a bereavement of a relative, a breakdown of a marriage that results in divorce. It could be anything.

For whatever reason, depending on who we are individually or how we're living our lives, there'll be a moment at some point, usually between, I'd suggest, 35 and 50, where life really invites us to take a deeper, more informed look at who we are, how we're living, and where we're heading. It's an inevitability.

PS: So, if it's just a natural period of transition that we all go through, why does it lead to so many problems? As I've already said, it's not talked about. When it eventually dawned on me that this is where I was in life a few months back, and that was in part a result of reading Dan's book, the symptoms that I'd been experiencing, if we want to call them that, suddenly made sense. So how does midlife manifest for many men?

Greg Scheinman: I think we have a loneliness problem, a big loneliness epidemic for men in middle age who don't have the kinds of relationships, even man-to-man, really friendship relationships, that don't have the depth in their marriages that they were hoping for. They got to this place again, where they go, "Is this it? The best I'm going to look, the best I'm going to feel, the best I'm going to do, and this is not that great."

PS: That's Greg Scheinman, another author whose book and podcast, The Midlife Male, I found incredibly useful in reframing my outlook on life. What Greg describes as the "is this it?" moment is a common denominator among men at this stage of life, but a very hidden common denominator.

My final guest today is Andrew Waddell, a midlife coach, who says that, in his experience, men faced with this "is this it?" dilemma typically have one of two mindsets. They're either what he refers to as limitless, meaning that they're full of energy and ideas and are actively looking to transition into the next stage of their life, or they're self-limiting.

Andrew Waddell: Self-limitation is all around stuckness and doubt, and I think it's best summed up by Adam Grant, the American author and professor, who wrote this great piece during lockdown. I think it was where he defined the emotion, the feeling of lockdown. But actually, for me, it speaks to the feeling I see in my clients and I felt myself in midlife, which was languishing. Languishing is, if you think about the depression scale, the polarity with depression at one end, what we call thriving at the other end, languishing sits in the middle, which is why I'm always keen to say, this is not about depression, this is about apathy. It's about stuckness.

Those self-limited people know they want something better. They know they want change. They have no idea what it is. Often, they're people who maybe fell into careers in their 20s. It wasn't a passion for them, it wasn't the thing, it wasn't a vocation they'd always wanted. They just got into a career, they climbed the ladder, and then they got to their early 40s, maybe in a very senior role, and thought, "Now what? I can't do this forever, but I have no idea where to go or what to do, because, possibly, I never knew where to go or what to do."

PS: Dan is in agreement with Andrew when it comes to midlife being something of a fork in the road. Embrace it and stride forward or ignore it, hope it goes away, and suffer the consequences.

DS: For those men that lean into this transition and see it as an opportunity, it can be really enriching. For those that refuse what I term a natural transition, it can be a real point of adversity. And there's an Einstein quote that I often use when I get the opportunity to address people publicly. Einstein said that adversity introduces a man to himself, and that was absolutely my experience. My adversity holding that mirror up to who and how I was really, really stopped me in my tracks.

PS: Dan's story is not an uncommon one, and you'll hear more about that in the next episode, when we chat about how Dan overcame the adversity he mentions and also in more detail about feeling trapped and out of control in our lives. Greg makes the point that every midlife man going through this transition has their own unique circumstances, anxieties, and insecurities. He says this means midlife is different for each individual.

GS: But there are a lot of similarities. There's certainly a lot of overlap. That's why there are so many stereotypes around so much of this midlife stuff, because the stereotypes are based on truths overall. But you know, there are differences. In the men that come to me and what they're experiencing and how they're experiencing them, but again, the strategies and the tactics that we utilise to resolve them or to release them from what they're feeling and how to get better, those are the same.

But yeah, it typically falls into money, family, wife, kids, pressures, anxieties of life, letting themselves go a little bit, not liking the man that they see in the mirror, a little bit overweight, drinking a little bit too much. It's this feeling of mediocrity, that "I'm not the man I thought I was going to be. This is not the life that I thought I was going to have. My wife's not as attracted to me as she used to be. I've given so much of myself to everybody else that I don't have anything left over for me. I don't have the kind of control that I'm looking for."

PS: It seems clear from what I've read and listened to over the last few months that, as Greg says, the symptoms of midlife are common among many men, but that we all experience those symptoms in different ways and on different levels. Where one man may experience a real lack of purpose as the core element, another may feel exceptionally lonely. More than likely, though, once you do the work to identify what is actually going on beyond just feeling miserable, it's a blend of a number of different factors.

So when does that blend kick you over from having a tough time into a midlife crisis? And I'm going to use that phrase not because I like it or because I think it's particularly resonant, but because it's what's recognized at the current time to describe the point at which life just becomes a bit too much or too little, depending on how you look at it. So what even is a midlife crisis? Does it have any grounding in fact whatsoever? To find out, let's go back to the beginning and look at where the term came from. Here's Andrew.

AW: So, it was created by a Canadian psychoanalyst called Elliot Jacques in the 50s. He presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society this paper called "Death and the Midlife Crisis." He was met with ridicule, effectively, which actually set the tone for all the issues we have with midlife crisis as a term today. It was somehow seen as ridiculous and weak, and sort of for someone who was a loser. Ironically, in the paper, he talked about this client of his, and it turned out much later down the line that this client he was describing was himself. He was 36 years old, so he was already hiding it then, which again, leads to this idea that somehow a midlife crisis is something to be hidden away, to be ashamed of.

PS: I asked Andrew whether, if we reach that point in our lives, it's actually a crisis.

AW: Yes, because I think in many ways, it's a moment of complete lack of knowing what the solution is, and it's entirely disabling. So I think what I certainly see in a lot of my clients, and I certainly felt in myself, is just that sense of not being able to do anything. I have no capacity or capabilities to get myself out of this situation. Everything feels too big, too enormous. And this is where you often see people fixating on very far away solutions.

I always give the example of a client of mine who came to me, and the first thing they said was, they were a TV producer, and the first thing they said to me was, "I want to be a beekeeper." Okay? And it was like, it could be anything. My life, I was thinking, I want to be a surf instructor. Other people might be, you know, it's just, you pick on this thing that seems to represent absolutely everything that you don't have currently, but it's also so far away from the reality of your life that you can't make steps towards it. And actually, what that does is just hold you in place. It holds you completely stuck.

And so is that a crisis of action, a crisis of knowledge? Yeah. I mean, I think it's absolutely the right word for it. So I don't like midlife crisis, only because of the societal constraints you put around it, which I think really took hold in the 80s, when we fell into this big trap of what the real men do. There was this incredibly ironic situation where we had real men who were busy spending lots of money on sports cars, taking drugs, and sleeping with their secretary, and that was considered to be normal behaviour. If you expressed any emotions at all as a man, then you weren't a real man.

And so we had these two definitions of midlife crisis, which have broadly been with us for the last 30 years: either you're weak and pathetic, if not neurotic, or, on the other hand, it means being destructive and infantile in behaviour. So, midlife crisis for men is that all this idea of a testosterone-fueled kind of infantile behaviour where we go off and make crazy bad decisions, but either way, it's mocked. It's seen as being weak and it's mocked.

And I think that's the biggest issue we have and the reason that we still aren't seeing a huge number of men engaging in coaching in midlife, which is why, very tragically, we see the high suicide rates in men aged 45 to 49, which is the highest rate of suicide in the UK, is that age because there's so much social constraint around this idea that admitting to having a midlife crisis is in some ways to be either weak or self-destructive.

PS: I know when I realised what was happening to me, because I didn't for a while, going through this sort of creeping feeling for a couple of years, I guess, and then realised what was happening to me, having read a few things, and I went to my wife and said, "I think I'm having a midlife crisis." Firstly, I felt exceptionally vulnerable, yeah, but secondly, I felt exceptionally stupid saying that, and I had to follow it very quickly with, "But I'm not going to get a Porsche or go off with a 21-year-old." Do you know what I mean?

AW: Yeah, exactly. That's what I felt like I had to do because society says midlife crisis man goes buys a Porsche and starts acting like a dick.

PS: So, what role does society have to play in so many men hiding their emotions away until the point that they break, drive away the people who love them, and end up getting divorced, or, worse still, killing themselves? Andrew's point that middle-aged men are mocked by society at large is something that is backed up by Dan, who talks about the way that men are conditioned from a very early age to think and behave in certain ways. He says that midlife crisis doesn't suddenly just land upon us from nowhere, and that there's no such thing as an overnight crisis.

DS: There's always going to be warning signs in advance. I think that the way that we're conditioned through educational, parental, and social conditioning as young boys who then grow into adolescents is that we're very cognitive. We try to rationalise and think critically through all the problems that we experience. It's as if we've lost our capacity to feel our way through our experience of life, lost our ability to listen to our intuition and to understand what our gut is telling us or instructing us to do. And I think because of this, lots of us, as I did, go into our heads and don't come out.

There's still stigma around poor mental health. I think unless somebody has a chemical imbalance in their brain or they've experienced significant life trauma and have perhaps a case of PTSD, in almost all cases, poor mental health is a consequence of living life out of alignment. To perhaps just expand upon that, a concept I talk about in "Rethinking Masculinity" is alignment, in that when we're physically doing what we think is right, we generally feel good about ourselves.

Conversely, when we're not doing what we think is right, we tend to feel bad about ourselves. Self-image is really important, but it's really unfortunate that in our educational systems and the way that masculinity is role-modelled nowadays, we're kind of taught what to think, not how to think, and there are consequences for that.

PS: The concept of alignment is very interesting to me because I have been quite amazed that over the last, it's only been two to three months, I've been kind of working on myself, right? So I hit this point where I thought, "I just can't do this anymore." And it's only been literally two or three months, doing little things mostly every day and working on my mindset. But what you said about when you're working towards something that feels right, you feel good, that resonates so much. And I've been amazed how quickly that has changed. Because you'd have thought you get to a point where, like you say, for me, it had probably been building up for a couple of years, didn't really know what was wrong, got to a point where I didn't want to do it anymore, got fed up, and then within a couple of weeks, it suddenly got better again. It was like, I don't know, the clouds are gone, you know what I mean?

DS: Yeah, it's a common experience for almost all of my clients. As soon as we start to bring ourselves back towards alignment, those what we would technically class as small details soon start to snowball into a significant feeling of congruence, of alignment, of togetherness, and that's kind of how these journeys usually start to happen. There'll be some kind of external catalyst that will call us to action. We will then start to take greater responsibility, and through a concept I talk about in self-leadership, we'll start to lead ourselves better with deliver. Sense of purpose into alignment.

And as soon as we're into alignment, things before, opportunities that we didn't know existed, or problems that we have perceived as significant, they all tend to fall away. And before we know it, we've built up this wave of momentum that's doing all the heavy lifting in our life. And we know who we are, how we're going to live, and where we're going to head toward.

PS: This is a really positive and important message. Just because we might have what's known as a midlife crisis in our 40s or 50s does not mean it's the end. Far from it. In fact, from a different perspective, it's the start of something, a chance to take stock, reflect, create the alignment that Dan talks about, identify opportunities, and plan for a productive, joyful, and meaningful second half of life. Greg makes a great point about how middle age is often perceived by society, and that by a simple shift in mindset, it looks a whole lot better.

GS: I think, for some strange reason, the word "middle" in "middle age" has become synonymous with the beginning of the end. I don't know how we've managed to, over time, define the middle or redefine the middle as the end. Let's go back to, hey, what does the middle mean? You're at halftime. What do we do then? We go back into the locker room, we assess what's happened in the first half of our lives, and we make a plan to come out and play the second half better than the first half.

It's this ass-backwards way that I see it. It's like, wait a minute, aren't we talking about maximisation? Aren't we talking about optimization? Aren't we talking about longevity, sustainability, all these advancements and things that we're focusing and fixating on now to live better and longer, and all these other things that we're talking about from a medical standpoint, or what our possibilities are, take all these vitamins and do this.

But why are we forgetting to actually talk about the quality of life itself? Why would I want to live to 100 if I'm unhappy at 50 and I'm not doing anything to change that, so I should just get healthier and have more energy to put that energy towards being miserable and complaining and staying in crisis? That sounds ridiculous.

PS: I mean, he's right, right? And that's where this podcast is coming from. Yes, over the first few shows, we're going to look at some of the common symptoms that men experience in midlife and where they come from. But beyond that, we're going to get a whole lot more positive. Change your mindset, change your life. Greg presses home the point that age is not something to fear, and that the second half of life shouldn't be about living perfectly, but it should be about getting the most out of life that we can. It should be all about embracing a mindset that focuses on what's really important to you and about depth in your life.

GS: I do want to wake up happy, and I do want to go to bed tired, the good kind, and I do want to wake up with energy. I do want to break a lot of these statistics and stereotypes about how, after the age of 17, they say you've only got 10% more time left in your life to spend with your kids. You spend like 90% of your time with your kids between the years that they're born and like 17. No, I tell my boys every day, we're going to be on the other side of that statistic.

Somehow, someway, I think 50s to 70s are going to be the most expensive years of my wife and my life in a good way, meaning we're still young and energetic and healthy, and now we have more time, we have more experience. Now is the time to go climb the mountains. Now is the time to come visit you in London. Now is the time to do all this stuff. I may not want to do it at 70, I don't know, or it may be different, but the point being, I know a lot of very old 30-somethings, and I know a lot of very young 60-somethings. It's really all how you look at it.

I think people have spent a lot of time trying to grow up too quickly, trying to chase what success looks like in a traditional metric: salary, title, achievement. We went through it: cars, houses, money, whoever the Joneses are, and they arrive at a place where they go, "This ain't it." It's part of it, don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against money and success, but they've forgotten about experiences. They've forgotten about depth. They've forgotten about hobbies and fun or redefining fun. Fun all of a sudden became, you know, at whatever adult fun looks like. We have to have group dinners, we have to play golf, we have to dress a certain way, we have to go out drinking, and we have to do this versus like childlike youthful exuberance, embracing of curiosity, expanding your horizons. That, to me, is what middle age should be all about.

PS: It's an inspirational message, and one that many men could benefit from hearing, me included. One of my questions when I started addressing things and talking to all three of the guys you're meeting today was, how the hell did we end up in this frame of mind in the first place? I mean, it really isn't rocket science to say that if you approach life with a positive mindset, you're going to get more out of it. And yet, in midlife, we seem to lose that. Why? In the last few years alone, we've had a huge prompt to live life the way we want to. So why haven't midlife men leapt all over that?

DS: In our not too distant past, COVID was the wake-up that we needed, but we very quickly rushed back into the rat race, back into the societal definition of success. My frustration is growing in a sense that I think most of us are starting to become more aware that how we're living our lives, in terms of overworking and under-living, kind of trying to buy our way into happiness and out of unhappiness, and how there's a kind of disconnection in terms of our relationships. I think more people are becoming aware of this, but are still really, really resistant to step outside the conformity or the expected norm of modern-day men.

AWl: I mean, I think the fundamental realisation is that they can't do it on their own, and that, in itself, is quite a big breakthrough moment, because I think a lot of us feel like we somehow should just figure it out on our own.

PS: All three of today's guests are coaches for midlife men. Between them, they've spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of men all experiencing very similar things, men who finally got to a point where they've reached out for help. But what's the start point? What do we need to start thinking about in order to change our mindset and move into a life of thriving? Greg has five tips to get your brain going.

GS: Number one, knowing what's important is what's most important. You have to define that. Now that I know what's important to me and what success looks like, number two, if you don't know where you're going, you are never going to get there. That's the map. You have to have a destination. I wanted to stay at the top of my game as a multi-million dollar producer in this firm, working with the kind of clients that I wanted to work with. I wanted to have a podcast downloaded by thousands of people every month. I wanted coaching clients. I wanted to take experiences with other guys, you know, challenge myself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I wanted to live the fit life, which is time with my family being healthy. That was in my plan. Now I had to reverse engineer back to how I was going to make that happen.

So number three, aggregate, curate, and eliminate. Listen to all these conversations like the one we're having now, all the noise out there. There's everything you could listen to: the Hubermans of the world, the Attias of the world, these science guys that go deep down all these rabbit holes, where you can listen to common sense guys. You can listen to all of it. But the key is you've got to curate it down to what works for you, and then you've got to eliminate what doesn't. I don't use a lot of statistics and a lot of science because for most normal guys, if you will, we don't need to major in the minors. That's stuff like, "Hey, if you're an Olympic athlete and fractions of seconds matter to you and all this other stuff, you may care about mixing your blueberries and bananas or not doing that together." But for the rest of us who are just trying to function normally and live happily, we've got to focus on what really is going to work and be applicable to us.

Number four, and this was a big one, show me your calendar, and I'll show you your priorities. The amount of time, Paul, that I was wasting and squandering and giving away to people, places, things that didn't deserve it, was astounding. And when I wiped it clean and started to only put things back onto my calendar that aligned with my priorities, everything opened up. So for all the guys out there that say, "I don't have time," and "I don't have this," you sit with me for an hour, and we will prove that you've got the time. The question is whether you want to do it or not, and how you want to utilise it.

And then the last one, which is super important, is grace, gratitude, and latitude. We are way too hard on ourselves, and we've got to be kinder. This is a process. Progress is a process. It takes time. We didn't get here overnight. We're not going to get out of this overnight. "Oh, but Greg, you're so consistent." And, you know, "Listen, I don't know that kind of consistency." It's like, sorry, bullshit. You're consistent. We're all consistent. You just happen to be consistently making the wrong choice. We now have to apply your consistency to making the better choice the majority of the time, and when you make the better choice the majority of the time, the majority of your life gets better.

PS: Make better choices, see better outcomes. Pretty simple, right? It's a message of taking control, living a life rather than letting life happen to you. That's what I was doing up until a few months ago. It's why I felt so lost and so miserable. And if I can change to a mindset of living my life in just a few short weeks, then I'm damn sure that you can do it too. I've made lots of small changes, nothing groundbreaking, nothing that will blow your mind, but the combination of all of those things has been incredibly powerful. 

On Middle Man, I'm going to talk to experts in each of those fields to find out what we can do, how we can do it, and why such small changes can have such a profound impact. So please subscribe right now in your favourite podcast app and sign up for the newsletter at middlemanpodcast.com. But to finish off today's show, here are Dan and Greg with some further thoughts on the power of taking control.

DS: We all have our own journeys, and getting out of the passenger seat and back into the driver's seat through making conscious choices, leading ourselves well, always lends itself to a more favourable and enjoyable experience.

GS: You are the CEO of your own life. Once you start thinking like that, things start to change. Now, you wouldn't accept underperforming quarter after quarter in your business, so why would you accept it in your life? Now, all of a sudden, it's "Show me the business plan for your life. Show me your life plan." And you've got one, and you are the CEO of your own life. So maybe you don't have to be the first one in at work and the last one to leave. Maybe you do. Like, here's the amount of time that you have, but as your operating system says and the standards that you set for yourself, "I'm going to exercise three days a week. Here's how much time I have. Here's where it goes.

I'm going to be at 80% of my kids' games instead of staying away at the office. I'm going to take my wife out for date night, you know, once a week or once a month, whatever it might be." I mean, we are literally time blocking everything. And there are metrics for success in every one of these categories, and the key is to make them realistic, measurable, quantifiable, achievable. That's what a standard is. 

A standard is achievable. A goal is something that should be a little bit beyond what you think you're capable of achieving, but if you just operate to the minimal standards of acceptable midlife behaviour that you set, everything is going to be better. And by the way, those actions that you take and choices that you make, the outcome is going to become inevitable. That goal that you thought was so far out of reach, it ain't that far. When you've done 300 workouts this year, when you've read three books, when you've eaten a certain way, when you've performed a certain way, everything gets elevated. The game slows down.

PS: I hope you found today's show interesting. As men, we really don't talk about this stuff enough, so if you did find it useful, please pass it on to someone else who you think might benefit from listening. We can make a difference. Next week, I'm talking to Dan about feeling trapped and being out of control of your life.

DS: Men who don't know who they are, that live without purpose and direction, that put forward this persona of being strong and decisive when actually they're anything but. And lots of men fear to feel lost. By trying to protect our family from our experiences, what we actually do is create a little separation.

Paul Sutton: Take care, and I'll see you then.