Health Tip

Signs of a Midlife Transformation

The following is a list of symptoms that illustrate how defining a mid life crisis is truly relative to the person experiencing the changes.

1. Looking into the mirror and you no longer recognize yourself.
2. Desiring to quit a good job.
3. Unexplained bouts of depression when doing tasks that used to make you happy.
4. Changing or investigating new religions, churches or new age philosophy.
5. Change of habits. Activities which used to bring pleasure now are boring. Unable to complete or concentrate on tasks which used to be easy.
6. It feels good to get hurt.
7. Wanting to run away from everything.
8. A desire to get into physical shape.
9. Irritability or unexpected anger.
10. Change in allergies.
11. Desire for physical -Free Flowing- movement (Running, Biking, Dance, Fast red sports cars, Sky diving, etc).
12. Exploring new musical tastes.
13. Sudden desire to learn how to play an instrument.
14. Sudden interest in drawing, painting, writing books or poetry.
15. Shifting sleep patterns (Typically to less).
16. Thinking about death, wondering about the nature of death.
17. Changes to the balance of vitamins you take. Or taking dietary supplements for the purposes of extending life.
18. Extreme changes to what you eat.
19. Excessively buying new clothes and taking more time to look good.
20. Hair changes. (Natural changes in thickness, luster, color or Assisted changes in dying hair suddenly or shaving your head bald)
21. A desire to surround yourself with different settings.
22. Hanging out with a different generation as their energy and ideas stimulate you.
23. Restarting things, which you dropped 20 years earlier.
24. Upset at where society is going. Experience a desire to change the world for the better.
25. Feeling trapped or tied down by fiscal responsibilities.
26. Leaving (Mentally or Physically) family or feeling trapped in current family relationships.
27. A desire to teach others or become a healer.
28. Desiring a simple life.
29. Excessively looking back to one’s childhood.
30. Playing again just to play!
31. Keep re-asking yourself: “Where am I going with my life?”
32. Getting fixated on new “wonder” solutions to problems.
33. Recently experiencing something extremely stressful. Stress can trigger a Midlife transformation. Some examples include: Changing Jobs, Divorce, Death of someone close, Chemical/Toxic exposure upon the body or experiencing a major illness.
34. Doing things that get you into trouble when it surprises everyone as being out of character.
35. Someone unexpectedly exclaims: “You are going through a midlife crisis!”

A Midlife crisis is actually the attempt to restart life to better fit a person’s heart. Due to existing personal commitments, it often isn’t easy to self resolve the inner conflict a person’s feels. As a result many times a person in mid life crisis will act confused or lost while trying to sort out the contradictions they feel and now have in their life. Also many times a person is trying to improve their life while not really understanding why they are acting in the manner they are. This mixture of conscious to unconscious actions often makes a person in midlife crisis unpredictable. This is also leads to the most dangerous mid life crisis symptom of denial. To confront a person in the initial stages of midlife crisis will often invoke and reinforce strong statements of denial due to the disconnect of conscious vs unconscious actions.

Most often a Midlife Crisis is defined well into the process of change. This is because it becomes most visible after a drastic shift’s in one’s nature. However, the process often has started long before the visible symptoms appear. It’s possible to aid a person to discover how to define life to fit better to what makes them content and happy. Care does need to be taken as often times a person in midlife crisis will feel trapped and in a corner without options.

Handling the Symptoms of Mid Life Crisis

Experiencing a midlife crisis is not about curing a set of symptoms. In other words this isn’t something you go to a doctor for a treatment to cure, rather this represents a time of life when a person is looking for an education to expand their life. It’s about shifting life to better fit where the person’s spirit yearns to be. A midlife crisis is a very natural biological and psychological process of a person maturing. While some of the symptoms might indicate a process opposite of maturing: at times a person needs to step backwards in order to move forward. This can also mean learning to play again since play is indeed a form of education.

Everyone evolves within their life as they get older. The truest resolution to crisis is learning to embrace the facts of one’s change and investigate methods of transformation. To do nothing is to let crisis decide how you change, Crisis still invokes change, but it’s an external change that a person no longer can control and often breaks those around us in the bargain.

Another problem is that modern western lifestyles are based upon chasing dollars and goals rather than supporting personal truth. People are so focused looking forward to their incomes and the next pay check that they forget or feel they cannot afford to embrace living to their true internal personal needs in the now. Sadly this way of looking at the problem in terms of finance only, also means just doing nothing and that only promotes and expands the crisis into happening anyway!

Understand: It is far cheaper to address and educate oneself in this process than it is to pay the longer term consequences of letting it become a full fledged crisis.

One of tht most difficult symptoms to resolve is the fact that people experiencing midlife crisis often feel separated, misunderstood and alone.
A bigger truth when in midlife crisis is that you don’t have to be alone. Rather you can find solace with those that don’t limit the transformation by outside judgments. Many times people in midlife crisis seek solitude to more easily avoid judgment from others.

I know from personal experience you can find answers that gracefully work. This isn’t easy and this is always an educational process. Finding guidance can make this process more graceful by showing ways to work around the common pitfalls. Don’t look for help that tries to define you, rather look for help that helps you avoid common mistakes! The trouble is the pressing feelings of being alone and the need to make this process one’s own path often make it all the more difficult to find outside help.

Partners of Mid Life Crisis

We must also consider the partners of those experiencing mid life crisis. Some of the signs that Mid Life Crisis partners often exhibit are:

• Becoming more judgmental
• Ignoring there is a problem at all and thinking it will all go away with only patience
• And usually 1/4th of the symptoms that the person in midlife crisis is experiencing

As stated earlier: becoming judgmental or patiently waiting for things to resolve actually only reinforce the problems of crisis..

Understand that the process of change is often as hard for the partner as it is for the person experiencing crisis. Partners often find themselves confused and even worse getting left behind as the person in crisis sometimes goes running off to search for freedom that eludes their capacity to define. This often forces partners to become more judgmental as they look for answers and this further drives a wedge between the partners. Know that the worse thing a person can do is to act in a judgmental manner that will actually aggravate a person in mid life transformation into running away straight into facing a full blown midlife crisis.

The most ironic fact is since partners are so close, is that they reflect each other. When one person is in midlife crisis, that midlife crisis is often psychologically contagious to partners. As a result, partners are often a few steps earlier in the process and this can allow the partner to approach their own mid life process more openly in terms of transformation. Since usually they are looking for answers to help their partner, partners often use those very same answers to help themselves unconsciously. Three times out of four it’s the partner who I first assist as they are usually the first person to contact me for help. Being earlier in their own process it is easier to help shift the process in transformation as they have made less mistakes to recover from and are all too eager to avoid the problems they see from the other person in crisis.