Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

One in four middle-aged American women is on antidepressants.

From the outside, no one may notice anything amiss. Women might drain a bottle of wine while watching TV alone, use CBD edibles to decompress, or cry every afternoon in the pickup lane at school. Or, in the middle of the night, they might lie wide awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. There has yet to be a blockbuster movie centered on a woman staring out her car’s windshield and sighing.

Gen X women spend lots of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings.

Generation X marks the end of the American dream of ever-increasing prosperity.

This stress is compounded by the hormonal chaos and associated mood swings of the years leading up to menopause. In a cruel twist, the symptoms of hormonal fluctuation are exacerbated by stress, while the symptoms in turn raise stress levels.

the years between thirty-five and forty-five are the “Deadline Decade,” during which people might feel they are running out of time.

Gen X childhoods were lived in a haze of secondhand smoke,

Gen Xers are “the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.”

“I feel like I’m dealing with the death of some dreams that I had,”

Don’t ever compare your insides with their outsides. There are people, I guarantee you, who think you have the perfect life because they don’t know what you’re struggling with.”

It is notoriously hard to make new friends in middle age.