Mid-life crisis: Blokes in their 40s and 50s hit a barrier and start to ask what it’s all about
Men can go through a lot of changes as they reach their 40s with little in the way of support. But one Adelaide based men’s group wants to change how men approach this phase of life … sans the sports car.
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It’s 7am on a surprisingly chilly Adelaide Saturday. Not that anyone is complaining. The previous day, the temperature had tipped past 40, so this crisp morning air is something to be relished.
There are about 15 blokes gathered in the CBD for what is a weekly walk. Most are in their 40s and 50s. There is a lot of chatter. Indeed, an almost un-bloke like amount of talking seems to be going on.
Most of the walkers are wearing a black
T-shirt, emblazoned with the word Wellteam. We’ll come back to Wellteam, but the broad idea behind the start-up company is to bring together men of a certain age. Men who, while not necessarily struggling in life, nevertheless recognise that they need a bit of help, whether it be physical or mental.
There has been a lot of talk recently about what happens to men when they hit their 40s and 50s. It seems an age that, for some, uncertainties creep in, self-doubts rise, there is an insecurity about what their life adds up to.
Pop star Robbie Williams even had a “moment” recently, saying he is going through what has been called the “manopause”.
“The hair is thinning, the testosterone has left the building, the serotonin is not really here and the dopamine said goodbye a long time ago. I’ve used up all of the natural good stuff. I’ve got the manopause,” he said.
Is the “manopause” a thing?
There is plenty of doubt whether the “manopause” is really a thing. It’s definitely not a verifiable, measurable occurrence like the menopause is for women. While it’s true that testosterone in men starts to decline beyond the age of 30, it’s likely the manopause is more psychological than physical. Maybe manopause is just another case of “man flu”. More in the head than in reality. But there’s certainly a whole lot of changes that can hit you all at once when you reach middle age.
These include, but are by no means exclusive to, kids growing up, caring for an ageing parent, dealing with losing a parent, looking back and thinking you mightn’t have achieved everything you wanted, asking yourself if you’ve been a good dad, facing the reality your marriage is in trouble because the kids have left home and you’re stuck with each other, giving up running because your knees are shot, realising your career has peaked, becoming more and more aware of your own mortality, seeing friends die, suicide rates climb, questioning what the future holds, starting to think about retirement for the first time and realising you probably can’t afford to, and your mates around the same age are all busy going through similar changes … so you don’t see them as much as you used to.
Jehad Rasheed is 54. A small-business owner, he is one of the Saturday walkers and joined around two years ago. Rasheed says on the surface he was doing well. Financially stable, good family life but “mentally I wasn’t quite right’’. He’d also been struggling with a back injury incurred at work. There had been operations. He couldn’t kick the footy with his young son any more.
While there is a structure to Wellteam, tasks given, goals to be achieved, Rasheed says just the act of getting out and about and talking is beneficial. And part of the benefit is talking to people who don’t know you, don’t know your history. Many of the blokes this morning agree and say they talk about stuff they would never bring up even with their oldest mates.
“That conversation of who you do talk to and who you don’t is an interesting one from a men’s health point of view, because you should be able to talk about those things with your best mates,” he says. “And I think we’re getting better at that. But there’s some things – with your mates – you don’t need to talk about. Even though that’s quite stupid when you break it down.”
Cluster of emotions – one overriding
Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation chief executive John Mannion says every age group has its significant challenges, but for men defined as middle-aged – say from mid to late 40s into their 50s – there can be a cluster of emotions that seem to come together quite suddenly. One of the most overriding ones is loneliness.
“It’s a very challenging time because there are so many things that happen to us physically during that period,” he says. “And then there’s so many psychological challenges, and financial challenges and educational challenges. And so when we reach that age there’s a lot of uncertainty; we’re not really sure where we are meant to be.” Mannion points to the landmark 1939 Harvard Grant Study on men which shows the importance of connection. He says that, ultimately, a lot of people in middle age struggle with isolation.
“The study looks at what makes us happy and it shows that connection, and people and relationships are vitally important to us,” Mannion says. “As we get older, our relationships alter when the dynamics often change and our roles change. We go from being part of the footy club to then being a husband or a partner or having a family; then you’ve got the workplace growth and development that takes place or doesn’t take place.
“Then a relationship might break down, or you’re not achieving what your personal goals and aspirations were. And all the time, the world around us is changing.”
Mannion is part of a team that holds community workshops promoting conversations around mental health, primarily for men. He estimates that in a group of, say, 80 men, upwards of 25 per cent would admit to feelings of loneliness and isolation. He says it’s important for men to be able to open up, to express their feelings, but to do that they need to conquer fears of being judged or misunderstood.
“Men are scared of having any conversation at the moment,” he says. “Because we’re really concerned about how we are going to be judged – are we going to be perceived as being out of date, that we don’t really know what’s really going on? And if I do say something, will it be taken in the wrong context? So, in turn, I’m not saying anything at all and I hold it all to myself so I’m reducing the risk of being judged.”
What masculinity is and what it should be
Adding to that is the debate around what masculinity is and what it should be. Phrases such as “toxic masculinity” have entered the conversation. Then there is the malign influence of people such as confirmed misogynist and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who try to twist masculinity into their own depraved worldview.
All the while domestic violence rates are unacceptable, as most starkly seen last month when four women were killed in a week. Three men have been charged with murder, while a fourth died by suicide after killing his wife.
But the answer, of course, for the ordinary bloke, is to not keep it all bottled up. The key is to reach out. Sometimes such conversations will lead to the realisation that a lot of blokes are feeling exactly the same way – as the blokes at Wellteam are discovering.
But does this mean that the male menopause, the so-called manopause, is a real thing? If we return to the experts at Harvard, the reality is you can’t really compare the two.
Howard E. LeWine, chief medical editor at Harvard Health Publishing, says men, like women, experience a drop in sex hormone levels as they age. But that’s where the similarities end.
“In men, the pace of these changes is quite different,” he says on health.harvard.edu
“In women, levels of oestrogen, the primary female sex hormone, remain high for many decades. Then, around age 50, the levels plunge over about five years. The lower levels of oestrogen cause the physical and psychological changes of menopause, including the cessation of menstrual periods. When a woman enters menopause, it’s easy for her to tell.
“For the vast majority of men, the change is much more gradual. Levels of a man’s main sex hormone, testosterone, begin to drop as early as age 30. Instead of plunging within a few years, testosterone levels drop slowly (about 1 per cent) each year for the rest of his life.
“This change is so gradual that many men don’t notice the effects for several decades.”
How it catches up on men
But then, maybe, a lot of those factors combine at once. Possibly a lifetime of avoiding the hard questions starts to catch up with men.
The founder of Wellteam is Troy Flower. Flower radiates good health. Parked beside the outdoor table where we meet is his mountain bike. The day after he is bound for Nepal to go mountain biking. The caring type, Flower is appalled this half of the reporting team hasn’t sent his poo to be checked by the government. After all, this is someone who has swept past 50 and to whom the government did send a birthday present asking for a sample to seek signs of bowel cancer. The government’s package is still, unsoiled, in the bedside drawer.
“Please do it, promise me you’ll do it tonight,’’ he says with sincerity. “You talk about shit getting real, this is one of the moments. You know, we think we’re infallible, we think it’s not going to happen to us. I feel fine. Why bother? But bowel cancer is one that you won’t know.’’
Flower is 50 himself and has had a wandering career, including as a photographer and tour guide, before dedicating himself to the cause of men’s health, both physical and mental, through Wellteam. The moment that caused Flower to reassess his life choices happened six years ago.
At the time he was a senior executive at BankSA. His official title was Head of Strategic Alliances. “I was flying into a senior leaders’ meeting with Westpac group (which owns BankSA), the suit on, flying into this fancy meeting with all of the top executives across the Westpac group,’’ he remembers.
“And I flew in thinking, I’m not a banker, I’m not really into banking, I’m not all about money. What am I doing in this job flying into this meeting?’’
Creating the “no bullshit meter”
Flower set himself a task. He put on what he calls the “no bullshit meter”. “I stopped and I wrote down, ‘Who am I trying to impress?’’’
There were the expected names. His wife and children. His parents. He went further. Maybe he was trying to impress all those people who had doubted him earlier in his life. Those who thought he was no good at business.
“When I kind of broke it down, actually, most of that’s just fake,” he says.
“So what am I doing all this for? Why am I working? I’ve got the nice office on level eight in the bank and I’ve got a team and I’ve got, you know, yadda yadda, but it wasn’t making me happy, because I was just ticking boxes.
“You’re doing stuff that you’re not passionate about, that doesn’t drive you and motivate you. You get more money, you buy more expensive cheese, you buy more expensive wine, you look at more expensive cars, you go on more expensive holidays, but the utility of any of those items doesn’t change.”
Flower decided it was time for a change.
So, was this a midlife crisis? He considers the question and accepts it may have been but if it was, it was something he accepted “thankfully”. But he’s not really happy with that “crisis” word. He calls it something else. He settles on a “midlife revolution”.
The first step was to quit the bank. The family moved to the ski town of Bright and Flower took a job as sales and development manager at Stirling Resort at Mt Buller. That only lasted 10 months before the family came back to Adelaide. His next job was as a business development and innovation executive at the Global Centre for Modern Ageing. Then Covid happened and Flower was made redundant.
A group for middle-aged men
That was May 2020 and the same month, Flower started Wellteam. He says he is filling a gap in the market. That, for middle-aged men, there is nothing tailored to their station in life. When it came to talking about men’s health, the messages all featured younger men with washboard abs or doing yoga poses on a beach.
“I looked around at all the different wellbeing conferences and wellbeing activities. And they’re all chakras, crystals, magic, potions. Not something your regular 50-something could relate to.
The idea of Wellteam is to bring men together. Flower talks of “bio-hacks’’ designed to get men feeling healthier. It could be something as simple as cutting caffeine or alcohol for a week just to see how you feel. Over a six-week program, there are around 30 of these hacks. Others include meditation, cold showers and stretching. And getting a good night’s sleep. There are weekly check-ins held over Zoom.
Wellteam has created a global community but Flower also runs the weekend walks and weekday swims to bring men together. He says it’s a way to encourage men to talk to each other, something they tend to avoid.
“From what I see, men think they’ve got enough relationships,” he says.
Which doesn’t mean they talk to each other.
“I would never go and walk and talk with any of my close friends,” he says. “They’ve also got their families and they’re also busy. So I would never speak to anybody about anything. And then you feel isolated.”
Men shouldn’t feel embarrassed to complain
Flower’s big push is to “change the narrative” around men’s physical and mental health. He says part of the reticence of men to speak or admit to a certain powerlessness in their lives is that they feel embarrassed to complain. That there is an effect on men, who have been told for most of their lives that they have it easy and enjoyed a privileged status.
While there is truth in that, it also doesn’t take into account individual life stories.
“If you look at employee assistance programs, and why men don’t participate, there was some research done that said one of the reasons is because they feel everyone thinks they’re spoiled, middle-aged men who shouldn’t complain,” he says.
Yet, at the same time, men die, on average, seven years earlier than women. And of all the people who die between the ages of 40 and 65, 63 per cent of them are men.
Suicide rates for men are also disturbing. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing show there were 2358 suicide deaths by men in 2021 and 786 for women.
Within the stats for men, the AIHW numbers show that outside of the 80-plus age groups, the highest suicide rate for men is in the 50-54 age group at 26.9 deaths per 100,000. That drops to 25.6 per 100,000 in the 55-59 group, before a sharp drop to 18.9 in the 60-64 range. The last figure backing up a theory that once men are past this crisis point, life begins to look up again.
Family breakdown a key issue
John Barry, a UK-based psychologist who co-founded the Centre for Male Psychology, says the key issue is family breakdown.
“The key issue related to suicide in this age group in Western cultures today – as well as some non-Western cultures such as Japan – seems to be family breakdown,” Barry says. “Men who are divorced are at much higher risk of suicide than divorced women or other men.”
“My own research has found that the key cause of distress to men after family breakdown is being prevented from having enough contact with their children. As long as they don’t have contact, their emotional pain continues.”
There are other stresses as well. It’s also an age where it’s necessary to look after, not only your children, but your ailing parents.
Barry, though, says there is a way through this period. That life has the potential to improve as you age. Once you make it through the “midlife crisis” stage.
“Indeed men in their 70s are often happier than men in their 40s,” he says.
Barry says one key is to “take control of the problems being faced” rather than hide away from them. Whether it’s facing up to health challenges or legal problems, men should get the support they need to help them cope. But, in an echo of Flower’s mantra, they should also look to make new connections, to safeguard both their mental and physical wellbeing.
Barry says that sport, even in older years, is a good way of “dealing with stressful feelings”. He suggests “more low-intensity activities such as playing ‘walking football’.”
“Some people try to escape very poor health with suicide but, conversely, exercise, especially team sports, can help improve men’s physical and mental wellbeing,” he says.
After the hour-long walk around the Adelaide CBD, including a stroll through a cemetery, the men sit and have a coffee. David Watts and March Marchetti used to work together but were both made redundant by the same company, on the same day.
Watts is 51 and now works for himself as a sales and leadership coach. He calls being made redundant his “aha” moment. A point where he realised he had to reassess his priorities.
“Afterwards, I went, ‘I’m never going to do that again.’ I’m never going to give one organisation everything of me. Because when it’s all said and done, you are a number and that’s it. But you have to learn that for yourself.”
Marchetti, 57, now works for BHP and has found it useful to write a daily journal. “It’s always great retrospectively to go back and have a look at that week, that day. Just to capture a sentence to summarise how you are feeling.”
Both say their wives are enthusiastic about the men’s club and the weekly walks.
“My wife’s best friend, her husband, was a couple of years younger than me, and he died of a heart attack, he was a bit overweight,’’ Marchetti says. “It reinforces for my wife, keep going, keep doing it.’’ It also reinforces the point to Marchetti and Watts to come back. There is another gathering next Saturday. Another chance to walk. Another chance to talk.
Details: wellteam.me
If you or someone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 1311 14 or visit lifeline.org.au
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