The key to happiness in Midlife is to live a life with meaning.
On my website you will find resources to support you through midlife and help you find happiness and vitality.
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Photo by: Carmel King / The Times / News Licensing
Dr Julie Hannan
Chartered counselling psychologist, psychotherapist and author who specialises in the psychology of midlife and life transitions.
What happens when the life you’ve built doesn’t feel fulfilling anymore?
Your life on the outside, and to others, looks pretty good. Nothing is obviously wrong.
You might have a career, a relationship, a family, and a home—all the usual signs of success—and you’ve worked hard for them. But something feels different now. Even with all of this, you may feel unhappy, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled. You could also feel restless, bored, tired, uninspired, or just plain stuck.
Work that used to matter might now feel meaningless. A relationship that once felt genuine may seem superficial, distant or functional. You might think about the paths you didn’t take, fantasise about doing something completely new and envy people who seem full of energy or who have made big changes.
Or maybe change has come into your life without your choice. You might be dealing with divorce, job loss, grief, children moving out, ageing parents, menopause, illness, or just the growing sense that time is moving on and you’re getting older.
Midlife, usually between ages 40 and 65, often brings up some tough questions:
- Is this really how I want to live the rest of my life?
- Is it too late to change?
This doesn’t mean you have to start over from scratch. Sometimes it’s about understanding what has changed inside you, what no longer fits, and what you might have outgrown.
The person who built your current life—yes, that’s you—isn’t necessarily the same person who would choose it now.
Midlife is a time of psychological change. The roles, ambitions, and identities that guided us earlier in life can start to lose their meaning and drive. What once felt like success might now make you feel flat.
This can feel unsettling, but it can also be the start of something meaningful.
My work looks at what happens when the life you’ve built no longer matches who you are becoming, and how to move through that change. I help people avoid ignoring these feelings, numbing them with work, alcohol, or distractions, living in denial, or making drastic changes that aren’t needed.
In my writing and psychology practice, I explore topics like identity, work, relationships, ageing, visibility, and finding meaning as you become more yourself in the second half of life. I also wrote The Midlife Crisis Handbook to help people understand the psychological stages of midlife and how we get through them.
You can’t go back and change the first half of your life, but you still have time to live differently now and in the years ahead.
"It's never too late
to start afresh,
your future happiness
may depend on it."
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