Why midlife may be your prime time, with Margie Lachman, PhD

For many adults, midlife is a time of competing responsibilities: raising children, helping parents and managing careers, all while confronting their own aging. Yet psychologists increasingly see these years not as a period of crisis or decline but one of growth and opportunity. Margie Lachman, PhD, author of Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife, discusses the science of midlife, including why people often become more confident and resilient in middle age, how caring for others can be both stressful and rewarding, and why the choices we make in our 40s and 50s can have an outsized impact on our health and cognitive functioning later in life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Kim Mills?

  Midlife has a branding problem. Our middle years are often portrayed as a time of mounting stress, fading abilities, and looming regrets. And can you even hear the word "midlife" without immediately thinking, "midlife crisis"? But in recent decades, psychologists who study midlife have found that this gloomy picture is mostly unwarranted. For many people, the middle years, though stressful, are also rewarding. It's a time when we take on meaningful roles in our families and communities, become more comfortable with who we are, and make choices that will shape our health and well-being for decades to come. So why does the myth of the midlife crisis persist? What does science tell us about how we actually grow and change during these years?

• 1:15Kim Mills?

  Will millennials, who are now just entering midlife, experience it in the same way their parents did? And what are the most important things you can do in midlife to set yourself up for more healthy decades? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Margie Lachman, the Minnie and Harold Fireman Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Lifespan Development Lab at Brandeis University. She has spent decades studying how adults grow and change over the lifespan,

• 2:00Kim Mills?

  with a focus on midlife and later life. The goal of her lab is to identify factors that affect how people age and develop interventions to protect health, well-being, and cognition in later life. Dr. Lachman is an APA Fellow and has published hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals. Her research has been covered by news organizations including CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and NPR. Her new book, called Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife, comes out in June. Dr. Lachman, thank you for joining me today.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:33Kim Mills?

  Let's start by a definition. How do you and other researchers define midlife? Are there set ages where it begins and ends?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, for the most part, we're talking about the 40s and 50s. And there are, of course, some people who think of themselves as middle-aged, in their mid-30s, and some people in their 60s think of themselves as middle-aged. But what might surprise you is that it's really not about the number of candles on your birthday cake. It's really something related to the central roles that people play in midlife. So it's the sandwich generation. When you're caring for your kids while also helping your aging parents, you're literally in the middle and pulled in both directions. So that's what I think of as the essence of midlife. It's less about the chronological age and more about your unique and challenging position.

• 3:27Kim Mills?

  Now, as I said in the intro, you pretty much can't say the word "midlife" without mentally hearing the word "crisis" following it. How much truth is there to the stereotype of a midlife crisis? Do they really exist? And if they do, what do they look like?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yes, so it does exist, but not for everybody. I think many people think it's inevitable, like puberty or menopause, a rite of passage that we go through. But really, what's normal is, at midlife, to look back and look ahead. And that may raise some concerns and issues that people call a crisis, but it's really just about recalibrating and thinking about changes that you might want to make. In our study called Midas, Midlife in the United States, we did ask people if they had had a midlife crisis. And we found about 25% did say they had a midlife crisis. Yet, when we looked further, what we found is that

• 4:26Speaker 02

  that the kinds of things they were talking about didn't necessarily occur in their middle years. They might have happened before they were 40 or well after the age of 50. And many of the events that they talked about were things like divorce, or job loss, or illness, that could really happen at any age. What I would say is the hallmark of a midlife crisis is when people are concerned that time is running out, or fears of getting older. And it was really a relatively small number of people who experienced that aspect of a crisis.

• 5:03Kim Mills?

  Are there other myths about midlife that you'd like to dispel?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, one that I talk about in my book is the myth of stability. And this is really this assumption that once you get to age 40 or 50, you're kind of stuck with who you are and you can't really make any changes. And some of this was really born out of what psychologists believed for a long period of time. It really is only relatively recently that even psychologists believe that personality can change. There was this notion for many years that personality was set in stone, or set like plaster, and that we really couldn't make changes. But indeed, there's been research more recently that shows that people can change naturally just by aging.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  People become typically less neurotic. Maybe they also become more conscientious. There's been evidence to show that. And the other thing is that you can change in many different ways. Many people want to become less neurotic, which is associated with anxiety and depression. And you can get help from a professional as one mechanism for making changes. But you can also make changes on your own by changing behaviors. And there are even apps there that are available for people to change personality. So if you wanted to become less introverted, for example, I meet many people in my classes or at the university who are very quiet.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  They make a conscious effort to change. And that means just speaking up more in meetings or attending more social functions, engaging in conversations. So this myth of stability really is something that we want to address.

• 6:52Kim Mills?

  So you can teach a midlife dog new tricks.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:59Kim Mills?

  You know, many people fear that in midlife, that that's when they're going to start to lose their cognitive edge. But in the book, you talk about how it's actually a balance point, that it's a time when some types of intelligence begin to decline, but others grow. How should people think about intelligence, memory, and creativity in midlife?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yes. So there's two aspects of intelligence that we typically think about. The fluid intelligence, which involves abstract reasoning, analytic thinking. That's on a downward path, starting, you know, somewhere in early midlife. But the changes are very gradual and they don't really affect what we can do in everyday life. On the other hand, crystallized intelligence, which reflects the knowledge and experience that we accumulate as we grow, that's continuing to increase and it doesn't even reach its high point until much later in life. So we hypothesized that this would be the best of both worlds because in midlife, these two kinds of intelligence, in a sense, intersect. The fluid intelligence isn't at its low point.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  The crystallized intelligence is not at its high point. So you're functioning quite well. And I did a study with two economists to test this out, not in the lab, as we usually do, but actually in real life, using patent records. So we looked at inventors and their ages. And what we found is what we expected, that there was a peak in inventions in early midlife. And we thought that made perfect sense because although some things, like maybe your memory isn't quite as sharp as it was earlier, or you might be slower at processing new information, your experience and your accumulated knowledge of wisdom, those skills really come into play when engaged in work such as invention.

• 8:48Kim Mills?

  A few moments ago, you mentioned the long-term study you've been involved in, Midas or Midlife in the U.S., and you've been working on that for a very long time. Tell us about the study, what it looks at, why it's so significant, and it's still going on, right?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yes. So Midas, or Midlife in the United States, is really a groundbreaking study. We started 30 years ago when we really knew very little about midlife. We knew a lot more about early life and later life, but there was a big gap in the middle. We knew nothing, really, except from clinicians who told us about how many people were having midlife crisis. And so we were very interested to understand why some people age so well while others struggle and don't do as well, both physically and psychologically and cognitively. So we used this study, really, to follow the same people over time with a lifespan approach.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  And we started with a large sample, and we've now studied them for over 30 years. We've added additional people to the sample. And so as we follow these people over time, we're able to see what are the factors that lead to better outcomes in a variety of different areas. And the payoff, really, for this kind of long-term longitudinal work is that if you identify problems early on, you can intervene before they become a crisis. So we find that the investments that you make in early adulthood and midlife really have long-term effects on later life. So the sleep that you prioritize, or the friendships, the activity that you do, they

• 10:29Speaker 02

  really do what I call compound interest for your later years.

• 10:36Kim Mills?

  You started looking at the idea of midlife in grad school, and there really wasn't a lot of research. What was the traditional thinking about midlife back then that made it so uninteresting to researchers?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So when I started in grad school, this lifespan

• 10:57Speaker 02

  An approach was relatively new. In fact, what we really were taught was that growth and development pretty much came to a halt in adolescence. And a lot of that stems from early theorists like Freud or Piaget, who really thought that your cognitive or psychological development was done by the time you reached adolescence. So the first issue was, is there any change or growth or development beyond adolescent? And then from the other end of the lifespan, there were a number of studies going on and a number of people who studied aging and old age, namely the gerontologists and the geriatricians. And they were focused more on the problems of old age, like the illnesses of old age and issues

• 11:43Speaker 02

  that weren't really tied to growth and development. So this, the first issue that really attracted my attention was this notion that we could grow and develop in positive ways throughout adulthood. Then what we saw was most of the initial work in this area was comparing college students and older adults. There was a big gap in the middle. So we wanted to see how people age just by comparing older people with younger people. And that really led to some misleading conclusions. These cross-sectional studies comparing people from different birth cohorts who had different experiences. And we didn't really know much about what happened in the middle. We just assumed it was a straight line.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Whatever happened in young adulthood was kind of on a downward trajectory. And the middle was somewhere in between. We also really didn't think there was much going on in midlife. We thought, okay, yeah, menopause is certainly going on, hormonal changes, but we didn't think much else was going on of interest psychologically. Well, that was a misconception for sure. Because we've now since then learned quite a bit. So that's really where things started, this interest in midlife. And the other thing I would say is that initially it was very hard to study people in midlife because we would try to bring them into our labs to test them on cognitive.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Test or personality and they're very busy. They're working. They have families. They didn't have any time really to spare to come into our labs. So it was got so hard to get people in middle age. I think a lot of people threw up their hands and said, let's just hope, let's just focus on the freshman college students in intro psych and the older retired people who had time and were interested in coming into the lab.

• 13:30Kim Mills?

  Wow, that's a big gap there in the middle.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:34Kim Mills?

  Um, what are the characteristics, the personality traits of people who hit midlife and, and age well? I mean, you can see that they're going to do okay.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we're interested in personality and also a number of other psycho social type factors. So there's been a number of longitudinal studies that are focused on conscientiousness as a personality trait. And this is basically people who are hardworking and care about really producing good work and good outcomes and they're very interested in doing well in all of their different endeavors. And these are the people who have the best health and they live longer. So a number of longitudinal studies have shown high conscientiousness leads to much better health outcomes and even longer life. So that's one example.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Some of the other factors that we find are purpose in life. People who basically have a sense of meaning. They know what it is that they are doing while they're getting up in the morning and feel that they have, uh, make important contributions. And this is related also to things like longevity and to a lower risk of dementia. So those are some examples.

• 14:54Kim Mills?

  Well, are there differences among the various generations? Like have baby boomers handled midlife differently from Gen X? And what's happening to the millennials who are the latest group of folks to hit midlife?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is something that many people are interested in. Millions of millennials are entering midlife. The oldest millennials are in their early 40s and they are really nervous about midlife. They are expecting a midlife crisis. And I think rightfully so, this time in history has a lot of stress and a lot of concern and a lot of issues that are affecting people's lives. And we've looked actually in some of our studies at generational differences. We don't know much about millennials, unfortunately, because they're not in midlife yet. A very small number have just started midlife and we haven't really studied them much. But when we compare baby boomers with Gen X or even the silent generation, the older

• 15:54Speaker 02

  generation, we have shown some cohort differences with Gen X showing more negative outcomes with regard to life satisfaction, higher depression, and greater loneliness.

• 16:06Kim Mills?

  We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk with Dr. Lockman about how people can navigate the work, caregiving, and other responsibilities that pile up in midlife without becoming overwhelmed.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 16:48Kim Mills?

  One of the stressors of midlife is the fact that many people at this stage are caring for so many other people. I think we've talked about this a little bit. They're raising children, they're helping with aging parents, maybe they're helping their neighbors, or they're mentoring younger colleagues. How can people navigate this pileup of responsibilities without becoming overwhelmed?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. So...

• 17:15Speaker 02

  The roles that people have in midlife can be overwhelming for sure. Many people in midlife are caring for not only their own children, but also their elderly parents. And there's very little time for yourself. So this can be stressful. But one of the things I like to emphasize is that this caring for other people is actually good for your health. There's been a lot of research to show that those people who are engaged in interpersonal relationships, taking care of other people, interacting with other people, those people have better health and live longer. So one thing is to just think about this as a good thing in that people are indeed doing something good for themselves, as well as for other people.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  That said, it's also important to realize that you can focus more on other people and neglect yourself, and that's not good for your health. What we find is that a balance between giving support and receiving support is really what's most helpful in terms of one's own social well-being and physical health. So that's important to keep in mind. And I also wanted to point out that this notion of caring for others is really central in midlife. And people in midlife are really cut out for this. Eric Erickson, a famous psychologist, talked about generativity as the major task of midlife.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And he meant basically caring for younger generations, certainly your own children, if you have children, but also for people in the community and people at work. So this is a central task of midlife. So if people recognize it and they realize that it is good for their own psychological and physical development, I think that helps. That said, people have to put things off sometimes because you are so engrossed in the lives of other people and do have to delay some of the things that you might want to do for yourself. But I think of that as a good thing and I call it shelving, the shelving approach, where it's not that you're not going to be able to do it, not be able to go back to

• 19:26Speaker 02

  school or and earn the degree that you want, or take the courses that you want, or go on the trip that you want. You have to shelve it. That is, put it on hold for later. And that really is liberating in a way, because what you're thinking is, it's not that I can't do it, I just can't do it now. And it's something that you can look forward to when you do have more time and you're less focused on the lives of other people.

• 19:50Kim Mills?

  Are there other things that people should be thinking about in their 40s and 50s to set themselves up for healthy aging? I know you've done a lot of research in this area.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yes. So, one of the things that's really important to acknowledge is that once health in midlife does have a long reach into later life, so things like your blood pressure in midlife is very important for cardiovascular and brain health in later life. Some studies show even more important than the blood pressure in later life. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have good blood pressure in later life, but it's just the blood pressure in midlife sets the stage for how things go much later. Other things, such as physical fitness, your weight, your sleep habits in midlife, they all are predictive of health outcomes in later years. So therefore, in midlife, it really is important to nip

• 20:40Speaker 02

  health problems in the bud and help avoid problems later on. The one thing I call a panacea is physical activity. And I call it that because every study shows the positive benefits of physical activity, whether it's walking or other forms of activity. It really does pay off in terms of your physical, cognitive, psychological health. And people who engage in regular physical activity have a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, frailty, dementia, depression, and they live longer. So, I don't know of really many other things

• 21:24Speaker 02

  out there that can claim to have such widespread, long-term effects. And I do recommend engaging in regular physical activity, starting in midlife, if you haven't already started that.

• 21:40Kim Mills?

  You've been looking at this question for a long time. I'm wondering, do you still get surprised by anything as you're doing your research?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yes, I do. So the thing that surprises me the most is how important your attitudes and beliefs and mindset are. As a psychologist, I wanted to believe that because that's what I'm interested in. I'm most interested in how people think about their lives, the attitudes that they have, the beliefs that they have about their sense of control, their purpose in life, their optimism. So we set out to look at these psychosocial factors to see to what extent they are in fact related to your outcome. And we found they are. They really do have a big effect on your health and well-being.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And so that, it surprised me, but it was really something I was hoping to find. And we are focusing on that to a large extent because these are beliefs and attitudes that you can actually change. And so most of what we do is really looking for factors that are modifiable, modifiable factors that we can address that can have long-term benefits for health.

• 22:54Kim Mills?

  How has this research affected the way you live your own life and the way you approached your midlife?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  That's interesting to think about that. Yeah, I think it has had an effect on me. Probably the most obvious is that because I was very aware of all the changes that come with age, I knew what to, I knew what to expect with aging. And so I don't think I got as nervous or upset or worried about aging, the aging process, as many other people who may have been more surprised by the things that they were experiencing. And so I also realized all the positive changes that could come throughout life rather than focusing on the negative. So I tried to focus more on the gains that we would experience rather than the losses that we all do experience as well.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  So I was very well aware of that, what I call risk factors and protective factors, and I tried to incorporate them into my life as, as best as I could.

• 23:58Kim Mills?

  Any other important lessons that you want people to take away from the book or from your research more broadly?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  I would say it's important to choose a positive mindset. There's a lot of research out there by others and our work as well that show that negative attitudes about aging are really harmful. And negative attitudes about your ability to carry out your everyday tasks, thinking that all the changes that are associated with aging, it's all downhill, rather than focusing on all the positive things like gains in confidence, gains in self-esteem. Those things are really important to focus on. So, right now, many people feel stressed because the world may feel like it's totally out of control. There's so many things going on with the economy and climate and other things.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  And so, it's hard to adopt a positive attitude. But positive attitudes such as optimism, a sense of control, knowing your purpose in life, they're all related to better health and longevity. So I think it's important that people adopt a positive mindset. I might add also specifically with regard to midlife. The title of my book is Primetime. And I picked that because I think it's an important reframe for people to embrace. Because we have been sold a negative picture of midlife, a narrative of decline, the beginning of the end. But our research really shows something very different. This is a really important time in midlife.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  You have a lot of experience and more clarity about what matters and many skills that you've honed over the decades. And there's also a lot of time. So I think it's important to approach midlife with this mindset. And then it really can be seen as a fulfilling time, a period of growth, enjoyment, and opportunity.

• 26:01Kim Mills?

  So to wrap up, what's next for you? I mean, I know you just finished a book and you're probably relieved. But given that you're not done doing your research, right? So what else are you looking at?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yes. So what we're focusing on now is really continuing to understand what are the risk and protective factors for healthy aging, starting in midlife? Because we really want to take a prevention approach. What can we do in midlife to not only enrich the midlife period, but to optimize healthy aging? And one of the things that we're working on is what I call a psychosocial prescription for healthy aging. And this is really related to the psychosocial factors. I mentioned some of them earlier, such as having a purpose in life, a sense of control, where you feel that there are things you can do to reach to your goals and outcomes, even though there are many constraints and obstacles.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  But also, social support. Those are things that we find are indeed related to health and wellbeing in midlife and beyond, in later life as well. And we're interested in why these factors are related. What are the mechanisms? How are they related? So we're focusing on behavioral factors, of course. Things like, people typically will think about not smoking, and low or moderate drinking, physical activity. But we're also really looking at other factors, such as inflammation, stress hormones. Stress is a very important factor that we have started to look at. So maybe these psychosocial factors reduce stress.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  There's some evidence for that. If you have social support or a sense of control, you're less likely to be stressed. And we know stress can kill. We know stress is very damaging for health. So we're really trying to understand This psychosocial prescription, how it works? What are the factors? And inflammation turns out to be a very important mechanism. Chronic inflammation, which we measure in our Midas study. We can see that those who have a higher sense of control do have lower levels of inflammation. Those who have higher social support have lower levels of inflammation. And we know that inflammation, it's sometimes called inflammaging because inflammation

• 28:24Speaker 02

  is infected, tied to so many outcomes of disease in later life. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia, for example.

• 28:34Kim Mills?

  Well, Dr. Lachman, I want to thank you for joining me today. I think you've given our listeners a lot of important, helpful tips.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I enjoy talking with you.

• 28:45Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Nils.