02-04-2025
Beat The Midlife Slump - Five Research-Backed Ways To Bounce Back
Why high-achievers feel stuck in their 40s — and five research-backed ways to bounce back.
You used to love your work. Now it just feels... flat. The same job that once thrilled you now leaves you staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., wondering: Is this it?
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. White-collar professionals — even those with enviable careers — are especially prone to a mid-career slump. According to a recent study by the Future of Work Research Centre at the University of Surrey in the UK, managers, professionals, and subject matter experts - including lawyers and accountants - are more likely than lower-skilled workers to experience a career fulfillment dip in their forties.
Escaping the U-Shaped Curve can be tricky
getty
We've known for two decades that human happiness follows a U-shaped curve across our lifespan. We're relatively happy in youth, dip in our 40s, and then rise again in later life. Remarkably this same pattern holds across sex, race, culture, climate, and over 100 countries (even when you strip out the stress and expense of raising kids), making it one of the most solid findings in all of social science. In the UK, the happiness low point is around age 44. Globally, the average is 46.
What makes the University of Surrey study so compelling is that it focuses on job type rather than just age. The conclusion? Even those with objectively successful careers aren't immune. In fact, they may be more susceptible.
There are many theories about what triggers the midlife slump. The most enduring and plausible is this: time painfully reveals that we haven't lived up to the soaring aspirations we held in our golden youth. And we start to feel, sometimes for the first time, that time is finite. Our strength, our career, and our life will inevitably end. The brilliantly mordant Irish comedian Dylan Moran summed it up memorably. He said there are only four stages in life: 'Child, failure, old and dead.'
Having worked on leadership development with senior executives for decades, I believe the archetypal corporate high-achiever feels this gap between aspiration and reality more acutely than most. Successful strivers are often their own harshest critics. It makes sense they'd beat themselves up about their whole lives, not just their day-to-day performance.
I know because I've been there. In my late thirties and early forties, I found myself outwardly thriving but inwardly unraveling—chasing impossible self-imposed standards, exhausted from the treadmill. I did manage to plant a lot of flags on a lot of summits: become a TV journalist, check. Work for the BBC, check. Become a CEO, check. It looked good on paper. But I was like a mountain climber who knew what to climb and how to climb it—but hadn't stopped to ask why.
My search for meaning began aged 30 when I applied for an executive MBA at London Business School. That experience, from 1999 to 2002, provided context and new tools to think about success and work. But I didn't truly begin to grasp what might be my purpose until life threw some "failure" my way. In 2008, as I admired the view from my latest career mountaintop, a storm rolled in. The global financial crisis hit. I was made redundant. My wife and I faced hefty monthly mortgage payments and the need to provide for two young sons. Right on cue aged 40, I plunged deep into that U-shaped valley of despair.
And yet, it was this moment of crisis that revealed something deeper. I began reconnecting with my childhood passions: writing, creating, communicating—and helping others unlock their potential. Through much reading (this was before podcasts), and two courses that focussed on self-leadership, I created a clearer purpose and a set of values to frame my efforts. As a result of this reflection, in my "second half," I've written two business books. The second - The Human Edge - won UK Business Book of the Year. I've spoken to audiences from Los Angeles to Shanghai and worked with global organizations at the C-Suite level.
Carol Graham and Danny Blanchflower, authors of The Mid-Life Dip in Well-Being: A Critique, observe that aging often brings a wiser approach to life. They write:
"Individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses over time, and become much more realistic in their expectations, as they age. They also become emotionally 'wiser' and have fewer emotional swings, and appreciate life more... not least as they are much more likely to see friends and siblings die."
Having experienced this transition myself—and lost loved ones along the way—my mission now is to help others navigate this moment of truth with more grace. While the U-shaped curve may eventually lift us, it can take years. Decades, even. The cost of waiting too long can be high: burnout, exhaustion, and regret. Oscar Wilde once observed: "With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone." He's pointing out, that if we fail to transform our experience into insight, we'll reach old age without being any wiser at all. With that cheery thought in mind, let's address two important questions:
With over a third of the workforce in the US and UK now aged 50 or older, the stakes are high—for individuals and companies. Some people stay stuck in that valley for too long, maybe for life. They numb with Netflix, busywork, or burnout. But there is another way. Here are five strategies to avoid that drawn from research—and hard-won personal experience:
The relentless pursuit of promotion and recognition can lead high achievers to toxic perfectionism, which is associated with anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. I've written about this in a previous Forbes article. Spotting this destructive tendency in myself has been one of the most transformative steps I've taken to release my potential.
To rethink life's second half, it's important to let go of the futility of thinking all your efforts have any right to be perfect. The relentlessly humbling route march of the aging process helps. For example, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in your own infallibility when you can't peruse a menu without reading glasses.
Reframing the crossing of the mid-life border helps reduce shame and regret, and opens the door to reinvention. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks in his book From Strength to Strength argues life is defined by two curves. The first curve - our youth – is characterized by rapid growth, high energy, and outward success. The second curve is by defined by wisdom, inner peace, and meaningful connections. 'Decline is inevitable, but despair is not,' he writes.
Corporate advisor and leadership expert Horacio Hurtado is so inspired by the possibilities of midlife that he's launching a new podcast this summer: Second Half – Success Beyond Success. He's co-hosting it with Miguel Gowland, his business partner and co-founder of WALK, a global organisational change consultancy*. 'Midlife isn't a crisis; it's a quest,' Horacio explains. 'It's a chance to stop climbing and ask: Who am I beyond my success? It's an opportunity to rediscover who you really are.'
Rather than seeing the flattening of your upward trajectory as yet another imperfection to feel guilty about it's an opportunity to recalibrate. To realize, change is scary, but it can be the start of a more meaningful narrative. A new story in which you cut yourself a little slack, show yourself more compassion, and embrace failure as part of learning.
Because we may have achieved a little - even if it isn't quite as much as we thought we might have - the questions that often dominate our 20s and 30s start to lose their magnetic power:
How can I win a fancier job title?
How can I get a promotion?
How can I increase my paycheck?
What once felt like markers of progress start to feel hollow, especially if they've come at the expense of other passions or people.
Midlife is a perfect moment to start asking different questions. Jungian analyst and author James Hollis PhD, in his book A Life of Meaning, observes:
With this in mind, one of the most powerful things you can do is pause and audit your definition of success. To ask:
Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, has spoken candidly about this shift of emphasis. She reached the pinnacle of corporate success — leading a Fortune 100 company, and was praised for her strategic brilliance and performance. But behind the accolades, she was grappling with a quieter truth: success had come at a cost.
In her memoir My Life in Full, she writes about the strain of trying to meet the relentless demands of work while being present for her family. 'There were days and weeks when the guilt and the fatigue overtook everything,' she reflects. As she approached midlife, she began to re-evaluate what success really meant — not just as a leader, but as a mother, wife, and daughter.
This shift in perspective didn't erase her ambition — it clarified it. Nooyi began advocating more vocally for workplace policies that support caregivers and redefining leadership to include empathy and humanity. She redefined success not as accumulation, but as integration.
Part of the midlife malaise can come from comparing ourselves to peers and feeling like we don't measure up. It's not just youngsters that now waste their time doomscrolling. Research shows people aged between 45 and 54 years old spend around two hours each day on social media.
During the long COVID years, I saw what was happening to my mind and tried to create a different kind of social media connection: I started a series of WhatsApp groups to reconnect with old friends. Three college friends and I helped each other through the pandemic. Years later, we continue to connect daily. That small decision to rekindle a true relationship has brought unexpected joy to all of us.
My experience chimes with 85 years of research. The Harvard Study of Adult Development —the longest-running happiness study in the world—found that the quality of your relationships is the clearest predictor of long-term contentment and health. My golden rule now: try to surround yourself with people who value who you are, not just what you've achieved.
Acknowledging that time is limited isn't morbid—it's liberating. It strips away illusion and invites clarity. When we fully grasp that we won't live forever, we start asking better questions: What really matters? What am I waiting for? Mortality can be a wake-up call—not to fear death, but to live more vividly. It's the pressure that turns intention into action.
Many philosophical and spiritual traditions view this awareness as essential. The Stoics practiced memento mori—a daily reflection on death—not to dwell in gloom, but to sharpen focus on living wisely and fully. Buddhism teaches impermanence as a path to compassion and non-attachment. In Christianity, Psalm 90 reminds us to 'number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.'
You don't have infinite time—so how do you want to live today? What conversations need to happen? What joy are you postponing? What legacy are you quietly building, moment by moment?
The realization is this:
The next logical step: don't drift. Instead, actively set a direction for your second half. Good questions to help are:
Intentional planning helps prevent the kind of drifting that often deepens midlife dissatisfaction.
Maybe midlife isn't a crisis, it's a crossroads. A moment to pause, reframe, and reconnect with what truly matters. Not the end of your story, but the beginning of your most meaningful chapter. I find eight hours of solid sleep has been harder to come by post-40, but perhaps we can hope to wake up at 3am with clarity, rather than confusion. The pen is in your hand. What will you write next?
