The midlife dip: when the low point becomes a turning point

The Short Version

A low stretch in the middle of life is common enough to show up in the data: behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Tali Sharot says that, averaged across thousands of people, happiness follows a U shape, high in kids and teenagers, at "rock bottom" in midlife, and then rising again and staying fairly high until the last couple of years of life [1]. She is careful to call this a trend and not a rule for every person, and she offers one reason for it: midlife is the stretch of life with the least change, and the brain responds less and less to whatever stays the same [1]. Dr. Shefali reads the same years differently: by midlife the list that culture and parents handed you is mostly checked off and happiness is no closer, so the crisis is an invitation to find out who you are [2]. Mel Robbins supplies a lived case: she dates the reinvention of her business, her marriage, her mental health and where she lives to the morning of her 52nd birthday, when she woke up crying in a bunk room [3]. The three accounts differ on why the low point comes and how big the response should be, but each one treats it as a place where something better can start, and each one begins with something small [1][2][3].

Table of contents

What They Said

Tali Sharot: the dip is what a brain does with sameness

Sharot is the guest on The Mel Robbins Podcast in a conversation about why life gets boring; the summary describes her as a behavioral neuroscientist who directs the Affective Brain Lab at University College London, teaches at MIT, and co-wrote the book Look Again [1]. Her subject is habituation, which she calls a fundamental rule for how the brain and every neuron in it works: "our tendency to respond less and less and less to things that are constant or that change very gradually or frequent" [1].

Her first examples are sensory. Walk into a bakery and, according to studies she cites, within 20 minutes you can no longer detect the smell, because your olfactory neurons stop responding to something constant [1]. After a month you cannot smell your own perfume, and a cold pool feels warmer after a few minutes [1]. Then she scales the same rule up to a whole life: a new romance gets less exciting, and so does a new job, a promotion, a comfortable home or an ocean view [1]. Because of habituation, she says, the good things in our lives "don't elicit as much joy on a daily basis as you'd expect them to just because you're used to it" [1].

The midlife dip enters when Mel asks when habituation, the fact that you are now used to your life, feels most overwhelming [1]. Sharot's answer: "I think it is when things are not changing for prolonged time. And we see that in our midlife" [1]. She then describes what she calls the U shape of happiness: "So happiness is quite high in kids and teenagers. And then it goes down, down, down, and reaches rock bottom in your midlife. But then it starts going up again and actually remains quite high until the last couple of years of life" [1].

She attaches a caveat straight away. The U shape is an average, a trend in data from thousands of individuals: "It doesn't mean that for every person midlife will be the bottom parts" [1]. The curve describes a population; it does not predict any one person's forties or fifties [1].

Her explanation is a comparison of life stages by how much they change. There are many possible reasons for the dip, she says, but one is that midlife has the least change [1]. Children change constantly [1]. People in their twenties try different partners, careers and places, and learn a lot [1]. In midlife people tend to stay put, often with the same partner and kids at home, perhaps at the top of their game professionally but mostly maintaining rather than looking up or sideways [1]. Then, counterintuitively, things move again at an older age, once the kids are out of the house and perhaps you have retired: "Now you need to learn, how am I going to, how am I going to live my life? It's a totally different life now" [1]. That could seem overwhelming, and she allows that maybe it is at the beginning, "but that causes people to start learning again" [1]. Mel's reaction is that Sharot has just explained the midlife crisis and the journey of human happiness through the lens of neuroscience [1].

Two more points from Sharot shape how a person at the bottom of the curve might read their own situation. First, habituation is a double-edged sword [1]. It dulls the good, but it also works on the bad: we get used to a breakup, to losing a job, to pollution, and she says it is good that we adapt to grief and heartbreak so we can move forward [1]. Second, habituation hides problems. We stop noticing long-standing ones, whether cracks in a relationship or inefficiencies at work, and if we stop noticing them we are less motivated to change them [1]. Mel points out that this is not a character flaw: your brain is doing it to you [1].

Sharot's remedy is modest in scale. Mel frames the whole episode that way: "You don't want to blow it up. You just want to mix it up" [1]. Her image is a snow globe, where one small shake covers everything in shimmer before it settles again [1]. Sharot gives two tools for the shake, breaks and variety, and one closing idea, "experiments in living" [1]. They are set out in full further down.

Dr. Shefali: the crisis is an invitation, and the old life should fall apart

Dr. Shefali, also a guest of Mel Robbins, is described as a Columbia-trained clinical psychologist known as the pioneer of the conscious parenting movement and the author of seven books, including The Parenting Map [2]. Midlife is one topic in a conversation that is mostly about parenting, control and healing, so her view of it is brief, and it sits inside a larger argument [2].

She sees midlife crises as invitations [2]. Her reasoning: by midlife, people have checked off much of the list that culture and their parents handed them, yet happiness is no closer, and their teenagers now see through them [2]. An inauthentic life, she says, will fall apart, and it should [2]. The frightening question that surfaces then, who am I?, is one you are not supposed to be able to answer yet, because you were never allowed to discover it as a child [2].

That last step leans on the rest of her argument. Dr. Shefali says parents pass down cultural institutions such as achievement, wealth and competition, so that children barely get a childhood before being prepped for college [2]. Children who feel constantly controlled conclude that something must be wrong with them [2]. Adults who were raised disconnected, she says, spend their lives searching for connection through corner offices, jewelry and cars [2]. She also names a hidden contract, in which parents see themselves as selfless martyrs and children owe them undying loyalty, and says this is why so many people feel guilty [2]. On this account the midlife question is the delayed arrival of a question that childhood never left room for [2].

Her view of pain explains why she welcomes the crisis. Psychological pain, she says, comes from resisting what is, whether a child leaving for college, an illness or a job loss, and it teaches us to surrender and discover we can be okay no matter what [2]. She jokes that she tells some clients to come back when there is more pain, because then the ego is ready to let go [2]. Her core invitation throughout is to release control, because "our children are not controllable, life is not controllable" [2].

What she offers the person in the crisis is a practice with three layers: decide to become a seeker of your own authentic truth; do the psychological excavation of seeing relationships as mirrors of your relationship with yourself; and learn meditation, which she describes as repeatedly bringing yourself back to the present [2]. Mel summarizes it as noticing when you start to control or jump to the future, and asking why [2]. Dr. Shefali's final takeaway is a question for every hard moment: "what is this moment here to show me about my unhealed self?" [2].

She adds things that bear on a midlife reckoning with family. Regret, she says, is another trap that pulls you out of the present [2]. After about age 21, she tells adult children it is time to release what their parents burdened them with and parent themselves, because "every human is a parent to their own inner child" [2]. The step after painful awareness is compassion: parents only acted from the level of consciousness they had [2]. And she says there is no such thing as a finished conscious parent; it is a daily practice of facing your ego [2].

Mel Robbins: a 52nd birthday in a bunk room

The third account is a story. In the first episode of her podcast, released on her 54th birthday, Mel teaches three steps she says she used over the previous two years to reinvent nearly every part of her life [3]. She says: "The Mel Robbins that you're hearing right now is not the Mel Robbins that I was just two years ago" [3]. She does not use the word midlife for it in this source; she gives the ages and the facts [3].

The facts of the 52nd birthday are these. She had just been fired from what she calls her dream job [3]. COVID had stopped the speaking and events business, and as a small business owner responsible for the livelihood and health care of 15 families, including her own, she panicked about making payroll [3]. People in her inner circle had lied to her and stolen from her, which is what made her feel so alone [3]. College was canceled, so her three kids were at home, anxious, angry and grieving [3]. Her husband, Chris, had just been diagnosed with long-term depression [3]. She woke up in the bunk room at her mother-in-law's house, where the family was quarantining, started crying, and filmed a video about how she felt [3]. It begins: "All right. So today is my 52nd birthday. This year is not a normal year. I did not wake up feeling excited" [3].

In the video she says she feels "stuck in between two lives," an old life that had ended and a new one she had yet to create, and that she felt overwhelmed, lost and disconnected from the things that make her feel alive [3]. Two years later she calls the woman in it "that sad, lost Mel Robbins" and says hearing it puts a pit in her stomach [3].

What makes the story useful is that the turn begins inside the same video. Wiping away tears, she lays out a plan: name what you feel, because naming it brings it out of your body so you can tame it; move your body; and follow what she calls the best advice about happiness, "happy people do things that make them happy" [3]. For her that day it was buying herself beautiful flowers [3]. She also mentions journaling and repeating the reminder "This is temporary" about the moment, the feelings and life itself [3]. Looking back, she realizes she had instinctively laid out her three steps in that video [3].

Step one is to make a wish: ask what you want the next year of your life to look like [3]. Mel admits she could not answer it then: "At the time, I had no idea what the new chapter of my life would be or could be" [3]. What she did know was that she did not want to stay in that chapter, and she says that is all you need to know: "If you know what you don't want, it's very easy to change" [3]. Over time, as she kept asking, answers came: she did not want to travel so much for work, did not want to miss her son's high school years the way she missed her daughter's, wanted to reconnect deeply with her husband, wanted time for friends and community, and did not want to fall asleep with a to-do list on her mind and wake up panicked [3].

Step two is action regardless of mood: "Act like the person you want to become in the future, no matter how you feel in the present moment" [3]. On the low birthday she exercised, bought flowers and watched stand-up comedy specials so she would laugh a little, forcing herself even when she did not feel like it [3]. As she got clearer, the actions grew: saying no and asking for help, working on her mental health, slowing down, starting therapy that created an entirely different relationship with her husband, becoming more present with her kids [3]. Eventually she decided to sell the house outside Boston where the family had lived for 26 years and move to a small town in Southern Vermont, and saying no to other things freed the time to launch the podcast [3]. She is plain about the pace: "this stuff doesn't work overnight. It works over time" [3]. And about the method: "Brick by brick, I laid a path with my actions and now here I am" [3].

Step three is to look for proof: anyone who has the relationship, career or life you want [3]. Mel confesses that for years she did the opposite, with what she calls a stingy, jealous and insecure attitude; when a friend renovated a kitchen she would compliment the white cabinets while seething inside, because she believed someone else's success was robbing her of hers [3]. During her reinvention she looked instead for people with simpler business models who were doing the fun things she wanted to do, and kept telling herself that if they can do it, she can do it [3].

The episode carries a second story. A listener named Danielle reads her own email, which begins, "Your birthday saved my life" [3]. The 52nd birthday video was the first Mel video she had ever seen, on what would have been the last day of her life; a best friend had made her promise to give her life 24 more hours, because "a day can change everything" [3]. What struck her was the moment Mel, having laid out everything that was wrong, said she would go and buy herself flowers [3]. Danielle took from it that happiness is not a goal you are allowed only once everything wrong is fixed: "It's something that you actually have to try to do every day" [3]. That made getting out of the hole seem possible, "because I can go and do one thing today to make myself happier than I am like this minute" [3]. Mel notes that Danielle got herself ice cream [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that the low point is not a personal failing. Sharot puts it down to a rule that governs every neuron [1], and Mel underlines that your brain is doing it to you [1]. Dr. Shefali puts it down to a list handed over by culture and parents, and says you are not supposed to be able to answer who am I? yet [2]. Mel, looking back at herself at 52, starts with sympathy: it is a lot, have a good cry, here is a big hug [3].

They agree that it is not the end of the story. Sharot's curve rises again after midlife and stays fairly high until the last couple of years of life [1]. Dr. Shefali calls the crisis an invitation [2]. Mel's reminder to herself in the video is "This is temporary" [3], and two years on she describes a rebuilt business, marriage and home [3].

They agree that not knowing what comes next is no obstacle. Dr. Shefali expects the question who am I? to have no answer at first [2]. Mel had no idea what her new chapter would be and says that knowing you do not want to stay where you are is enough [3]. Sharot's parting idea is that, just as a scientist cannot know the truth before running experiments, you cannot know what is good for your life without trying things [1].

They agree on starting small. Sharot's one action for listeners is to try something new, which might make no difference or a big one [1]. Dr. Shefali's is a single question asked in each hard moment [2]. Mel's is one aligned action each morning [3].

They disagree about what causes the low point. For Sharot the trouble is sameness: prolonged time in which things are not changing [1]. For Dr. Shefali the trouble is inauthenticity: a life built to someone else's list [2]. These lead to different readings of the same feeling. On Sharot's account, a good life can feel flat simply because you are used to it, and the feeling says little about whether the life is wrong [1]. On Dr. Shefali's account, the feeling is a signal that something is wrong at the root, and it should be followed inward [2]. Each view follows from the speaker's subject in these conversations: Sharot's is how the brain responds to what stays constant [1]; Dr. Shefali's is how children are shaped by their parents' anxiety and expectations [2].

They disagree about how much should change. Sharot and Mel, in their conversation, want a shake, not a demolition: mix it up, don't blow it up [1]. Dr. Shefali says an inauthentic life will fall apart, and it should [2]. Mel's own story sits between them. Much of her old life had already ended before she chose anything [3]; what she then did was small and daily, flowers and exercise first [3]; and the result, two years later, was large: a different way of working, a different marriage, a sold house and a move to Vermont [3].

Mel's low point does not match Sharot's explanation. Sharot explains the dip by too little change [1]. Mel's 52nd birthday, as she tells it, was the opposite: a firing, a stalled business, betrayal, children sent home and a husband's diagnosis, all at once [3]. Sharot's account has room for that kind of moment in two places. She says we habituate to bad things too, a lost job among them, and that this is how we move forward [1]. And she says that a totally different life, however overwhelming at first, causes people to start learning again [1]. But those remarks were made about habituation in general and about later life, not about Mel's story, and the sources do not connect them [1][3].

They point in different directions for the first move. Sharot looks outward: a new route, a new place, a new person [1]. Dr. Shefali looks inward: seeking, excavation, meditation [2]. Mel does both, and insists on behavior first, feelings second [3].

The kitchen shows the difference in small. In the conversation with Sharot, Mel describes a kitchen that works perfectly well until enough renovation photos and a visit to a friend with a coffee bar make her hate it; Sharot says this is habituation, that your own kitchen once felt fantastic and the friend's looks great partly because it is new to you [1]. In her first episode, Mel tells of seething over a friend's renovated kitchen, and her answer there is a change of attitude: their beautiful kitchen means that if she works for it, she can have one too [3]. One answer says look again at what you have; the other says treat what others have as proof of what is possible [1][3].

Why It Works

Habituation. Sharot compares the brain to the front page of a newspaper: it cares about what is new [1]. From an evolutionary point of view, new things may need a reaction, maybe to a threat, so neurons conserve their resources for the next new thing [1]. She illustrates it with the visual illusion on the cover of Look Again: clouds of color around a fixation point. Stare at the point without moving your eyes and the colors fade to gray, then white, because the same neurons are getting the same input; move your eyes for a second and the color floods back [1]. Dishabituation. A large enough break makes neurons respond again, though maybe not as much as the very first time: step out of the bakery for 10 minutes, come back, and you smell it again [1]. Sharot points to research by relationship expert Esther Perel, who asked long-term couples when they felt most attracted to their partners. One answer was when one of them went away, say on a business trip, and came back; the other was when they saw their partner in a new situation, talking to strangers or on stage [1]. Both are the familiar seen fresh [1].

Learning. Variety, Sharot says, does two things: it gives us inputs we are not used to, and it puts us in a context of learning [1]. People with more diverse lives, who have lived in different places, worked on different kinds of projects and met different kinds of people, "tend to have a more psychologically rich life" [1]. This is the same mechanism she uses for the right-hand side of the U: later life forces learning again [1].

Anticipation. In a study that tracked people's happiness before, during and after a vacation, people were happiest the day before they left, still at their desks but already away in their minds [1]. Sharot calls things like this anticipatory events: they have not happened yet but make you happy in the present, which is also why people prefer Friday to Sunday by a wide margin [1]. Her resort surveys add that happiness peaked 43 hours into a vacation and then slowly dwindled, and that the word people repeated most about the best part of the trip was "first" [1].

The fresh start effect. Mel explains why a birthday, even a miserable one, can be a turning point. She points to a study from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania on the motivational power of such moments, which she calls the fresh start effect [3]. Researchers label anything that triggers that motivation a temporal landmark, which Mel defines as "a date or an experience or a physical thing that marks the passing of time" [3]. Birthdays, January 1st, a Monday, the first of the month, the birth of a child, a breakup, a wedding or a death all count [3]. A breakup or divorce is a major one, she says, "because it not only marks time, it also impacts your identity" [3]. As Mel explains it, these moments create a break from the past version of you, the parts you judge yourself for, and in that freedom from self-criticism you let yourself imagine the future you [3].

Behavioral activation. Mel says research shows that a small boost in mood affects productivity, focus and energy for the rest of the day, and she ties acting ahead of your feelings to what she calls a huge body of research, behavioral activation therapy [3]. Her own explanation of why it changes a person: doing small things every day, especially when you do not feel like it, "proves that you do have a choice about what you do and how you feel" [3].

Pain as the opening. Dr. Shefali's mechanism is not a study but a clinical observation: pain comes from resisting what is, and when there is enough of it the ego is ready to let go [2]. Sharot gives a neighboring reason why a jolt can help: habituation makes us stop noticing long-standing problems, and a break lets us see them, which motivates change [1]. She describes this in companies that rotate people through divisions: they return with new eyes, appreciate what they had stopped noticing, and spot problems that had faded into the background [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The curve is an average. Sharot says so in as many words: it is a trend across thousands of individuals and does not mean midlife will be the bottom for every person [1]. Nobody should conclude from it that their fifties are bound to be better, or that their forties are bound to be bad [1].

The explanation is partial. Sharot says there are many possible reasons for the dip and offers lack of change as one [1]. She does not claim it is the whole account [1].

Novelty is not always the answer. Sharot says the urge for something new is not all bad, since the drive to progress keeps us moving forward, but she calls it a delicate balance [1]. The kitchen you now hate may be a perfectly good kitchen you have stopped seeing [1]. Her tools are meant to restore joy in what you already have as much as to add new things [1].

Small shakes fit a good life gone flat; they may not fit a life that is wrong. Sharot and Mel's advice in their conversation is aimed at a life, job or relationship that has become too routine and that you do not want to blow up [1]. Dr. Shefali is talking about something else: a life that was never yours [2]. The sources do not say how to tell the two apart. Sharot's exercise of imagining life without the partner, the job or the kitchen [1] and Dr. Shefali's question about what the moment shows you [2] are the nearest things either offers to a test.

Dr. Shefali's account is short here. Midlife takes up one section of a conversation about parenting and control, and the material gives her reasoning without studies or numbers [2]. Her claim that every inauthentic life will and should fall apart is her view [2].

Mel's story is one person's. Her three steps come from her own two years, and she presents the research behind them in her own summary: the Wharton study by name, behavioral activation as a body of research she promises to cover later [3]. Her low point also came from outside events in an unusual year, not from a slow midlife slide [3].

It takes time. Mel's reinvention took two years [3]. Danielle's rebuilding took a year [3]. Sharot's creativity boost from a change of setting lasts only about six minutes, though she says those minutes can be crucial [1].

Some low points need more than this. Mel's husband's depression was a diagnosis, and part of her own turn was starting therapy [3]. Danielle's story involves thoughts of suicide, and what kept her alive first was a pact with a friend and a promise of 24 more hours [3]. If a low point includes depression or thoughts of ending your life, the advice of a doctor or mental health professional matters more than anything in this article.

What To Do With It

1. Read the low point as common and temporary before you read it as a verdict. The average curve bottoms out in midlife and climbs again [1]. Mel's line to herself on the worst morning was "This is temporary" [3].

2. Name what you feel, then move. Mel's plan in the birthday video began with naming the feeling so she could tame it, and then moving her body, because motion changes your emotional state [3]. Journaling, dumping her thoughts onto paper, was part of it [3].

3. Do one thing today that makes you a little happier. Flowers for Mel, ice cream for Danielle [3]. The point Danielle took was that you do not have to fix everything first [3].

4. Ask what you want the next year of your life to look like, and accept knowing only what you don't want as a first answer. Mel says to be patient with the question; her own answers arrived over time [3]. Her homework is to record a voice memo from your future self, a year on, describing what your days look like and what you changed [3]. You do not need a birthday for it: she says you can turn the page today [3].

5. Take one action each morning that fits the person you want to become, whatever your mood. Each action is a brick [3]. Expect it to work over time, not overnight [3].

6. Take a break from your own life, or imagine one. Go away for a few days and come back; Sharot says most people can still manage a little break, and things look resparkled on return [1]. If you cannot, use the exercise she credits to professor Laurie Santos: close your eyes, imagine your life without these things, the partner, the job, the kitchen, then open them [1]. Where you have the choice, take several long weekends instead of one two-week trip [1].

7. Add variety at any scale. A different route to work, an online course, a new skill, a new podcast, a friendship with someone unlike the people you usually spend time with [1]. See your partner in a new setting [1]. Move from the office to a coffee shop or hold a walking meeting [1].

8. Put something on the calendar. Book the holiday, the class, the night out, the hike; small things count, and the looking forward is itself a source of happiness [1].

9. Ask Dr. Shefali's question when a moment hurts: "what is this moment here to show me about my unhealed self?" [2]. Notice when you start to control or jump to the future, and ask why [2]. Practice bringing yourself back to the present [2].

10. Treat it all as experiments, and look for proof. Add something or take something away, such as leaving social media for a few weeks, and see what it does [1]. Find people who already have the life you are wishing for and let them be evidence that it can be done [3].

Sources

1. How to Make Your Life Exciting Again: Dr. Tali Sharot on Habituation, Novelty and Joy · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. Dr. Shefali on Conscious Parenting, Letting Go of Control and Reparenting Yourself · The Mel Robbins Podcast
3. Mel Robbins' 3 Simple Steps to Change Your Life: Make a Wish, Act Like the Future You, Find Proof · The Mel Robbins Podcast