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

by Ada Calhoun

Economist Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution, told me that a typical forty-year-old woman in America now makes $36,000 a year working full-time. After child care, rent, food, and taxes, that leaves only about $1,000 for everything else.

Lying there, I thought of all the things I really should do or absolutely should not have done until either I’d cycled through my full list of regrets or it was time to get up.

Chafin has these women ask themselves questions designed to give them a sense of freedom from obligation: “Can you do anything to change this situation? Can you look at it a different way? Can you accept it for how it is? And just let it go?”