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

0:00Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making millions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web.

0:36But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to$5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash hidden. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash hidden. What if midlife isn't the beginning of the decline we've been taught to expect? For more than 30 years, psychologist Dr.

1:17Margie Lockman 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. Now, we cannot predict how long we're going to live, clearly. But 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.

2:12It's your friend, John, and welcome to PassionStruck. 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.

2:53Welcome back to PassionStruck 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.

3:29Margie 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.

4:06We 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 a 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.

4:48I 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. Thank you, John. It's really great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. 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.

5:34How do you think we're getting the story of midlife so wrong? 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 it's 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.

6:34And I think that really triggers this notion that there's all this negative associations with midlife. 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? 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.

7:27So 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. 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.

8:12And I was wondering, why has it become one of the most important studies that's ever been conducted? Waldenerker's work with the Harvard study, it used to be called the Grant study, really did play up 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.

8:51And 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.

9:39And so we've learned an enormous amount of information. Yeah, well, after following thousands of adults across those three decades, what's one or two things that surprised you the most? 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 and depression as many people expect it.

10:25There'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.

11:04But 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. There are other things that we've learned 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.

11:48And 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. I recently had a conversation with a gentleman named Walter Green, who's in his early 80s. And 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.

12:32He 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? 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.

13:20and 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. It was a really interesting discussion.

13:58He 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 40s into my 50s, 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.

15:00I 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 going to make a big difference in terms of when you can really start to focus on other people or other things in terms of generativity or making changes in terms of yourself.

15:39And so sometimes midlife is just so frenetic, especially earlier in midlife. It can be very frenetic and people are an automatic pilot trying to take care of all the different things that they need to take care of. And so that kind of self-reflection and changes may not happen until later, maybe in the 60s or beyond that. And I also think this does point out another thing that I like to say, which is that midlife is not a set age per se. It's 40s and 50s is the heart of midlife, but many people feel they're in midlife in their 30s, and many people in their 60s consider themselves middle age. So depending on how you feel about where you are in terms of middle age, it might be this kind of searching and becoming, could be happening later or earlier.

16:34I think that's an important point, Margie, that midlife is more qualitative than it is chronological. If you were going to give a listener a definition, how would you define midlife? Yeah, that's really the first question I always get when I tell someone what I study, I study midlife, they say, Oh, when is midlife? And I don't have a quick answer. I, as in most academics, I usually go on to qualify the different aspects of it. So I start by saying the heart of midlife is the 40s and 50s, but I add in plus or minus 10. So that means really 30 to 60 or 30, actually 30 to 70 is really what I would say if you add on 10 and on each end of that.

17:22So I would say partly that is because when we ask people if they're in middle age or what they consider to be middle age, although the majority of people do say 40 to 60, there are many people in their 30s and in their 60s who say they're middle aged. Partly, I think that's because in the 60s, they don't want to consider themselves old, so they think of themselves as middle age. But it turns out that your subjective age, how old you feel is actually more important in terms of predicting health than your chronological age because there is so much variability. Two 50-year-olds can look so different in terms of their physical health, for example.

18:06So I think subjective age is really important. But if we want to go beyond chronological age, which I do, as I mentioned, I like to think of it in terms of the roles. So if you are in the middle generation and there are people younger and older than you who are counting on you, who are depending on you, who you're caring for, and that's really the heart of midlife. It's you're in the middle generation, you're in the middle of those who are younger and older. And that role, those roles that you have really are, I think, what I like to call the heart of midlife. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr.

18:45Margie Lockman. As you're listening, I'd like you to consider one question. What if the next chapter of your life isn't about what you're losing, but what you're becoming? Margie's research reminds us that aging isn't simply a story of decline. There are capacities we can strengthen, relationships we can deepen, and contributions we can make throughout our lives. If you'd like to go deeper, you'll find the companion workbook for the Adaptive Brain series inside the Ignited Life on my substack. Links will be in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

19:26You're listening to PassionStruck right here on the PassionStruck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Margie Lockman. I think something you just said is really interesting. I think about my high school classmates, some of them who I've known since elementary school. and then my college classmates. And you go back for reunions now, or you see them to catch up or see their pictures on the socials. And it is pretty interesting how differently we all age. I think you start seeing this most now. You were talking more about midlife just then as being kind of this junction point between different elements of your life from if you have kids, watching them growing up, seeing your parents get older, but how do you think the physical aspects of it manifest in your studies?

20:19So the physical aspects are really critical in midlife, and I think it's really important to recognize that I like to say what happens in midlife doesn't stay in midlife because the physical health in midlife has really long-term consequences for how you age. And I don't like to put a lot of pressure on people in midlife because they're already so busy with so much to do. But if we can really focus on keeping our health in check in midlife, it really pays big dividends later on. So I'm talking about things like that everyone really knows about. This is nothing new. We know it's important to have a healthy weight and to have good sleep habits and to watch your blood sugar and not to drink too much alcohol and to not to smoke and to make sure that you're so to focus on things like your blood sugar and your hypertension or blood pressure.

21:16Those things in midlife, it turns out, have long-term consequences for health in later life. So if you have hypertension for 20, 30 years starting in midlife, that's going to do damage down the road in later life. It really is predictive of health outcomes, including things like dementia or Alzheimer's disease, certainly cardiovascular disease, even cancer. So if we can take action in midlife to engage in healthy practices, then we are really doing ourselves not only a good service in midlife, but with long-term positive benefits. One of the bits of hosting an alternative health podcast is I have gotten to talk to some of the world leading experts on longevity and bio-aging, et cetera.

22:07And many of the things that you're bringing up are the same things that they have talked about in depth on the podcast. And ever since I started doing this, I've, of course, have been trying these things out, trying to eat certain ways, trying to improve my sleep. I haven't had a drink now in three years. And it's interesting how these changes have expanded so much of my cognitive functioning beyond what they were before. And it really does have a profound difference on how you feel, how you act, how you're able to think, how clear you are. It does have, to me, a magnifying component to it when you start layering more of these things on top of each other.

22:54Well, that's really great to hear. And in fact, it's good because these things do have immediate effects. Engaging in these health-promoting behaviors have not only long-term effects, as I talked about, but they also have short-term effects. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't do them. We're not good at doing things for the future as much as we would be doing things that we enjoy now or see the benefits of now. But the good news is, too, that it will also have long-term benefits. But for those who haven't started or engaged in these positive behaviors yet, I like to say it's never too early to start, of course, but it's also usually not too late.

23:31Most things, no matter when you make those changes, are going to have some benefits. The earlier, the better, but they will affect your health no matter when you engage in these wonderful behaviors, such as physical activity. I can't go forward without mentioning it. I had a center called the Boston Rooble Center for Active Lifestyle Interventions. And the main goal of the center was to help people who are sedentary in midlife to become more active. And we focused on walking because walking is real positive, has positive benefits, and it's something people, anyone can really do. You don't have to join a gym or have heavy equipment and so on.

24:12And so we really tried to find what are the ways that we can help people to become more active since active lifestyle really is a panacea for all kinds of cognitive and physical outcomes. And so, for example, one of the things that we found was a big obstacle for middle-aged adults engaging in exercise was time, the time constraints that they had. So we came up with a way to help them to fit activity into their daily schedules. And that was very effective in terms of increasing the number of steps that they engaged in, for example. And when it came to the practice of walking, what did your study find are some of the ideal amounts that we should get in per day or per week?

25:00So we didn't specifically look at that. There are a lot of exercise physiologists who have been studying that. And so you probably know that originally people said, oh, you have to do 10 ,000 steps. And that turns out not to really be the case. And so when I read the physiological studies, it seems like anywhere between 5 ,000, 7 ,000, 8 ,000 steps is great, certainly more than you might do otherwise. So any additional steps. And then, of course, the other aspect is brisk walking is better than leisurely walking. And we didn't really look specifically at the different amounts or ingredients or prescription for walking.

25:42We just wanted people to increase a certain percentage each week. And each person was different. It was really based on where their baseline was. And so our focus was mainly, did they do more exercise? And yes, we weren't looking specifically to see how it benefited their health. We focused more in terms of whether we could help them to incorporate exercise into their daily lives and relied on the other researchers who were able to show how important it was for their health outcomes. Recently, and I'm going to switch directions on you here. I had Nick Epley on the show and we were talking about his great new book and focused a lot on connection, but he also revealed to me during that conversation that his PhD advisor was one of my favorite researchers, Tom Gilovich out of Cornell.

26:35And Tom's research shows that when he's looked at thousands of individuals at the later stage after midlife, that the number one regret that comes about from that research is 76 % of them regret not becoming their ideal self. Did you find any similar findings from your study looking at people who might've been asked the same question about regrets during midlife? We didn't actually ask specifically about regrets. I do mention some other work in my book about regrets. And this is work done mainly by Yuta Heckhausen and Karsten Roche, where they asked people about their regrets. And what they found was people are more likely to regret things that they didn't do than things that they did do and wish they had not done.

27:31So that's mostly what we know about regrets in my field. The social psychologists, I think, have studied regrets quite a bit more. We also didn't really ask people about their ideal self. What we did ask people is, what's the ideal age? And so I could say something about that. What was surprising to me is when we ask people, what's the ideal age? 99 % of the people mentioned an age that was younger than their actual age. And this was true for people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and up. And that was really surprising to me. The percentage of people in their 40s and 50s who said their ideal age or the age they would like to be was not in their 40s and 50s.

28:20Most people, the largest percentage, wanted to be in their 20s and their 30s. So in that regard, perhaps that's related to the work that you're talking about in terms of ideal self. I'm talking about it really in terms of ideal age, not necessarily other qualities about the ideal self. Yeah, I think about myself. I'm glad I have the wisdom that I have now. I wish we could have had that wisdom when we were in our 20s or 30s, because boy, would we make some smarter life decisions, wouldn't we? Although I like to say it's not too late to change. You learn from your mistakes. And that's, I think, one of the things we find in midlife is that people develop more confidence, higher self-esteem.

29:06They have experienced a lot of negative things, stresses, or failures. And it's that kind of experience that really helps people in midlife to grow and to move in new directions. You basically develop these skills that you have to develop through experience. And so if you go through your life without ever having difficult experiences or stresses, then when they eventually hit, you won't be as well prepared for them in later life. And one of the things I find interesting is I think a myth that people have about midlife is that as we age, we lose more control. But your research suggests the opposite.

29:57Why is perceived control often strongest during midlife? Yeah. So perceived control is measured in our study with two aspects. First, it's personal mastery. To what extent you believe that you have the abilities to carry out the goals that you hope to achieve. So can you accomplish what you would set out to do and bring about desirable outcomes? So that's what we call the personal mastery aspect of control. It's very much similar to Bandura's notion of self-efficacy. But then the other component is what we call personal constraints, because there are many obstacles in life, things that interfere with reaching goals, things that you can't always address.