Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have journaling and find this particular advice very pollyanna usually - but it might help in your case: Start keeping a gratitude journal.

A trick my therapist taught me that I've found VERY helpful - for a different kind of thought pattern I found upsetting: When your brain starts doing this "ooh, look at that house, her husband is so handsome, you've never won a writing award" nonsense - acknowledge the thought, and then tell your brain, "Hey, thanks brain. Very helpful right now. Appreciate it, jerk."

It's a way to acknowledge that your thoughts are your thoughts but they aren't "real" - you don't have to give these dumb, harmful thoughts SO much real estate. Just be like, yes, I am having these thoughts. And I have lots of other thoughts, too! Brains are thought-producing machines and they don't always do it in a way that is maximally helpful.

Also remember - yeah, you don't have to be happy all the time. Sometimes you can be jealous, upset, petty, whatever. And that's part of being human.

To the extent that your feelings here are revealing wants or goals you didn't realize you had - can you work toward those goals? Do you actually want these things? To the extent they're not - yeah, acknowledge them, focus on what you're actually happy about and grateful for, and move on.

OP here and this is helpful, thank you. I too hate journaling! My therapist had me start journaling last year and I feel like it's made it worse, like it gives me an outlet for thinking about these things and what I'd like is to cut short these thought processes because they are so unproductive. I like the idea of just talking to my brain like "ok, thanks for weighing in." Like an annoying friend who points out unhelpful things you can't do anything about.

I am PP - and yes, exactly! I have a super fun fear of driving over bridges, and I use that trick with myself now when I have to go over a bridge. Does it cure me of the fear? No! Heck no. But it gives me something to do and sort of takes a bit of the SERIOUSNESS out of the picture.

Maybe instead of a gratitude journal you can start a btchy unhelpful thoughts journal. Just for you, as a place to vent or whatever. Like take the pressure off of yourself to be happy and perfect all the time. Sometimes you want to be a little mean and sorry for yourself! Why is that so bad? Just make sure no one ever sees it!

OP again. This made me laugh. Truthfully I don't feel sorry for myself! My life is great in so many ways. It's more like I'll go out to dinner with a friend who is a doctor and he'll talk about how much he loves his job, and I'll come home and find myself thinking, "huh I wonder what would have happened if I'd put all the time and energy and effort Bill put into becoming a doctor to the same, if I'd have that kind of job satisfaction." This is a weird and ridiculous thought because I literally never had ANY interest in becoming a doctor, it is 100% not the job for me, and also, my job is actually pretty good. But it's just this weird trick my brain plays on me that results in me up at midnight wondering if maybe I didn't try hard enough at life or something, even though I'm comparing myself to I don't really even envy. I mean -- med school, internship, residency, fellowship, long hours, plus you know, all that icky body stuff. I don't want that! So why on earth am I suddenly oddly wistful that it's not something I did? It's so weird, and as someone who has never really experienced much envy or jealousy as an adult, I don't know what to do with it.

That's why I'm suddenly getting why people do weird things at midlife. I think your brain plays these weird tricks on you and tries to convince you that what you have isn't good enough and people get frantic. But I have an amazing family, a great partner, a nice house, a solid career, nothing I want or am going to throw away. Instead I'm just having this isolated yucky feelings of like, I don't know, missed opportunity or something? I know it must be common because there is so much ink spilled on midlife issues, but I'm almost embarrassed to be going through it myself. I guess I thought I'd avoid it because my life is mostly pretty great save for a few bumps in the road that could happen to anyone.

I just had a birthday, can you tell

Anonymous wrote:This thread reminds me of a Star Trek the Next Generation episode, titled "Tapestry." Captain Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) is given an opportunity to time-travel back to his youth and make different decisions, but then it changes his present and future. He chose to avoid getting in to a bar fight in his youth, and then he travels back to the present to find out he is no longer a Captain and he now has a safe, boring job on his ship where he won't get noticed and will never get promoted. Also, this episode came out 31 years ago, so I'm clearly middle-aged now.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tapestry_(episode)

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That’s not an age thing so much as a mindset thing. It’s common to think that the grass is always greener.

For me, it comes back to self acceptance. I accept that I’ve done the best I can with what I have and others haven’t had to live my life, so comparing myself to them is a purposeless activity.

For me it's an age thing. When I was 25 or even 35, I didn't think "what if I did this for living" or "what if I lived in that city" or "what if I had another kid." I contemplated those things as real options because they were.

By 45, many avenues in life are closed off to you. I think for women, in particular, the end of your fertility is such a firm closure on an era of life where you are making choices about the kind of life you will live. In some ways this is reassuring. But it's also scary. There's no going back.

Oh sure, you could move to another city or go back to school for a new degree or find a new spouse. But these changes cost more the older you are. I have always been someone who embraced the challenge of a new city or a new job, but the older I get, the more obstacles there are. And being a parent changes the math on everything. The degree to which my options are prescribed by how they would impact my children is dramatic.

So midlife "grass is greener" is different in quality than what you might experience when you are younger. It's less about envying what someone else has and more about realizing you are far less free in your choices than you once were, and that can make it harder to make a big change even when it's clearly what is needed. Very different in quality than the way people might envy friend's lives in earlier stages of life.

I agree. I can’t stop asking how I got here or why I thought this is what I wanted. And I got everything I wanted, but what I want at 45 is not what I thought I wanted at 30.

Anonymous wrote:OP, you ruminating on these thoughts -- any thought -- again and again, is what's not healthy. Your problem is not about middle age, your life path or any particular decision.