Don’t lie to yourself — we all probably think we’re in the middle of a midlife crisis more than we care to admit.
According to a recently released study, midlife crisis usually hits ya because it coincides with life’s peak time for misery.
That peak time would be around age 47, Dartmouth College professor and former Bank of England policy maker David Blanchflower claims in a study, after examining trends in 132 countries to compare the relationship between well-being and age.
He wrote in a report for the National Bureau of Economic Research that a person’s well-being reaches its minimum point – on both sides of the Atlantic and for both males and females – in midlife. Blanchflower added, that in order to better understand age’s relationship to happiness, he studied prior surveys of self-reported well-being. Those reports, he said, generally argued that happiness across a lifetime is either relatively flat or slightly increasing with age.
His study revealed each country has a “happiness curve” or that happiness follows a U-shaped trajectory, the TV station reported. People generally reach peak unhappiness in midlife, with greater experiences of happiness in youth and old age.
Blanchflower reported for the majority of people in all 132 countries he studied even after controlling for other influences upon life happiness and satisfaction such as income, education level and marriage the theory holds true. This supports the theory age has an effect on overall happiness despite everything else going on in a person’s life.
“The curve’s trajectory holds true in countries where the median wage is high and where it is not and where people tend to live longer and where they don’t,” Blanchflower wrote in the NBER report.
In the U.S., there was a slightly larger gap between peak male and female unhappiness, according to the report quoted on FOX 29.
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