What midlife stress does to your brain and how to stop it spiralling

Was it forgetting a dental appointment for the first time ever that tipped me over the edge? Or was it the oversized panic that squeezed my chest the day I realised I’d failed to wash one of the kids’ uniforms for school that sent me spiralling into a ball of anxiety? 

Instead of laughing off these little bumps in the road, they unexpectedly ballooned in huge worries, snowballing their way down a hill of gloom into a sense of overwhelm I’d not felt before. I was used to being busy, managing a family of four children aged seven to 18, writing a book, editing a weekly magazine and co-hosting a podcast so I wondered where this feeling came from? I’m an organised, multi-tasking grown-up, but if one thing went wrong I now illogically catastrophised about the rest of my to-do list being a disaster too.

If this sounds familiar, then you must be in midlife as well. It seems there’s a new tribe in town: the inexplicably overwhelmed over-40s. So what’s going on and is there a way to stop us spiralling when that sense of overload hits?

Firstly it’s worth knowing we can definitely lay some of the blame at the feet of our overscheduled busy modern lives. Our 40s and 50s bring extra burdens and midlifers are often called the backbone of society. We may face the grief of empty nest, the stress of caring for elderly parents, serious health niggles, the weight of our big jobs or redundancies from them, divorce peaks between 45-49, as do suicide rates for women.

It’s a lot and according to neuroscientists all midlife brains undergo a remodel, so it’s no surprise they deal with things differently. The weight of these multiplying roles and changes in brain function mean we need to start taking more care of ourselves as we age and how we live day to day has to change.

I spoke to the psychologist Dr Emma Hepburn about the reason we appear to lose our ability to cope with stress post-40 and she told me that it is down to the huge level of cognitive demand we put on our already full brains. “Responding to midlife demands significantly increases our cognitive load at a time when we have limited cognitive capacity,” she says.

The leading neuroscientist Dr Lisa Mosconi, the author of The Menopause Brain, explains that male and female brains respond differently to the midlife overwhelm. She says chronic stress, which may have been building over years for us as a generation, bankrupts our hormone production which affects brain health and men and women’s brains differ because of our differing hormone production.

“It is a complicated time of life,” she tells me. “Resilience to stress is diminished at a time when we seem to have more of it. This is because of the changes in hormonal concentrations in the brain as we age. Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol are not good for the brain’s grey matter.” Our grey matter is the bit of the brain we need for almost all our bodily functions and emotions.

Why midlife men and women are in stress overload

Our bodies rely on one molecule called pregnenolone to make both our sex hormones and our stress hormones. When we are under stress, the brain will steal pregnenolone from oestrogen production in women to make more cortisol to deal with whatever crisis it faces. If we remain in stress mode for too long, our oestrogen gets even more depleted. For women, that may mean more symptoms of perimenopause (the 10 years before menopause when all our hormones are fluctuating before they leave for good) including increased anxiety or mental health issues.

For older men, Dr Mosconi says, the effect of stress overload may be even more negative. Women’s brains often produce oxytocin, the feel-good hormone, to cope with stress which helps give our brain’s grey matter more energy to function well. 

The presence of this calming hormone results in “tend and befriend” behaviour in women, studies show. So women under stress may be more likely to look for help from other women to reduce stress. But men go it alone, they don’t get oxytocin and their grey matter may be more severely affected by extra cortisol. Their brains may freeze, according to Dr Mosconi. They withdraw, and their brain activity shuts down, the energy is depleted. This means the brain is taking up less glucose (which fuels it) and a cascade of health issues could follow alongside mental anguish. It’s a vicious circle. 

Sleep is also affected which in turn affects brain health negatively and increases general inflammation in the body which is also bad for the brain. “The brain is a complex organ,” Dr Mosconi points out. “Menopause and perimenopause is a significant renovation of the female brain. But while there is some cognitive slippage for women during this phase, the average woman’s brain still outperforms the average midlife male brain.” This is impressive because surveys show globally that stress levels are consistently higher in midlife women than any other age set. This stress puts both genders in what Dr Hepburn calls an “exhausting state of hypervigilance”.

So what can we do about our midlife spiralling? 

Dr Mosconi advises lifestyle changes like better nutrition, less or no alcohol, a look at how we may be ingesting chemical toxins in the house, movement and mindfulness; something Gen X still like to roll their eyes at.

“Better sleep is the most powerful thing to keep our brains working well but it may be harder to achieve quickly in midlife,” Dr Mosconi says. “So I advise starting with more daily exercise or movement to tackle cognitive decline, there is much science behind it. Many pathways to the brain are activated by exercise which promotes better blood flow. It cleans the brain of toxins, reduces cortisol and fires up brain energy which makes it more efficient and reduces inflammation in the body.

“The body responds well to change but the brain is its own show, it needs consistency to adapt and change. It’s good at learning something new but not so good at change, the hardware of the brain is not plastic so be patient. It will take a while to learn how to deal with stress better at this stage of life.”

There is good news though, as Dr Hepburn points out, because once you realise you are in a state of hypervigilance you can develop coping strategies relatively easily.

“The midlife brain is packed with knowledge. If you remove the threat alert, the brain is great at reminding you that you have all these skills to sort out problems and cope well with your increased mental load. You just need to give it space to do that.”

How to help your midlife brain beat overwhelm

Improve your social capital 

Having a good support network is why some cope with the midlife brain spiralling and some don’t. According to Dr Hepburn, it is extremely helpful for brain health if you can “talk out” your problems. One of the biggest predictors of a longer life is our social interactions with others, and connection also provokes the production of feel-good hormones which calm a spiralling brain. Earlier this month, a US survey showed English people aged between 46-65 were the “loneliest” in Europe. In the journal American Psychologist, the researchers report that our lack of “social safety nets” leave us vulnerable to loneliness, which is unhelpful for brain health and perhaps has led many of us to complain of this new found inability to cope under duress. 

Learn self-hypnosis

Dr David Spiegel is a Stanford psychiatrist who has made it his life’s work to reduce the medicalisation of mental and physical health. I ask him about midlife overwhelm and he says simple daily self-hypnosis switches the brain between alpha and theta waves and encourages it to “hyper-focus” on one thing; for example, being calmer in certain situations. 

“Elevated threat arousal starts a feedback loop between brain and body. You tense, your brain says what’s wrong, then your body feels something is wrong and so it tenses: we can interrupt this loop with regular self-hypnosis and teach the brain to turn down these alarm signals. It’s you telling the brain to tell the body you can cope, it’s going to be OK”. On his Reveri app, he teaches soothing cyclical breathing techniques and guided self-hypnosis for better sleep, focus and stress relief. 

Find out about MBSR (meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction)

This area of wellbeing is often poo-pooed, but Dr Mosconi says coping strategies developed under the banner of MSBR have been studied and shown to improve our quality of life as we age. Kirtan Krya is a chanting meditation that takes 12 minutes that has been shown to reduce stress. Dr Mosconi also says MBSR research reveals that, combined with cognitive therapy, it can prove just as effective at preventing a relapse of depression as antidepressants in women. Practising yoga for at least 12 weeks has also been shown to reduce fatigue (particularly in menopause).

Schedule rest

Gen X are culturally programmed to believe rest is lazy, but it is vital for brain health and should be scheduled in the same way anything else is in our diaries. Productivity overload is a modern day epidemic and if you want your brain to have more energy then you have to stop and give brain and body a break.

What’s Wrong With Me: From Unravelling to Reinvention a Midlife Memoir by Lorraine Candy is out in paperback now