[1][2][3] The phenomenon is described as a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person's growing age, inevitable mortality, and possible lack of accomplishments in life.
[6] Many middle-aged adults experience major life events that can cause a period of psychological stress or depression, such as the death of a loved one, or a career setback.
An American cultural stereotype of a man going through a midlife crisis may include the purchase of a luxury item such as an exotic car, or seeking intimacy with a younger woman.
Psychologist Oliver Robinson's research characterizes each decade of life by describing frequent occurrences or situations particular to those age periods.
[12] Individuals experiencing a mid-life crisis may feel:[15] Physical changes that commonly occur during these years are weight gain, wrinkles, sagging skin, and hair loss.
[17][10][18][19][12] Regular exercise and maintenance of a nutritious diet may help to sustain one's physical and mental health during these years of transition.
They also experienced a greater sense of motivation to deviate from stagnation and a desire to help the younger generation thrive.
[22] Although mid-life crisis has lately received more attention in popular culture than serious research, there are some theoretical constructs supporting the notion.
[24] Erik Erikson's life stage of generativity versus stagnation also coincides with the idea of a mid-life crisis.
Erikson believed that in this stage adults begin to understand the pressure of being committed to improving the lives of generations to come.
[4][26] The balance (15% of those surveyed) had experienced major life experiences or transitions such as divorce or loss of a job in middle age and described them as "midlife crisis".
The debate of whether or not there is a midlife crisis is being answered through recent research that attempts to balance such factors as response bias and experimenter effects in order to establish internal validity.
The above mentioned research does not support Levenson's model of a single age in the middle years that is a designated time of transition and potential "crisis".
[29] Recently, a new study by Giuntella et al. (2022), circulated as a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research, attempts to provide hard evidence on the presence of a midlife crisis.
They find that "midlife is a time when people disproportionately take their own lives, have trouble sleeping, are clinically depressed, spend time thinking about suicide, feel life is not worth living, find it hard to concentrate, forget things, feel overwhelmed in their workplace, suffer from disabling headaches, and become dependent on alcohol."
Given access to a rich set of controls, their results do not depend on a single nation, nor is a function of the presence of young children, nor related to workers' productivity.