man-o-pause

The Mid-Life Brain & Beyond

Want to build muscle, improve memory and condition the brain? In a recent USA Today interview, John Ratey, M.D. recommends working up a sweat at least four or five days a week if you find yourself stressed or depressed.

More importantly, a vigorous workout can help revitalize the aging brain. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, points to a number of studies that show regular physical activity can prevent the age-related fogginess that often develops by age 65.

Exercise connects the head to the body. For example, the act of walking grounds one to the earth; weight training focuses you on your body; bike riding makes you mentally alert for cars and stray dogs!

But, I think the greatest antidote to mental fatigue and ennui is laughter.

I attended a health and fitness lecture yesterday conducted by Austin Davis, a former stand-up comedian, police officer and male adventurer. His Web site bills him as "America's funniest fitness specialist." I don't know about "America's," but he certainly is Houston's funniest professional trainer.

After a serious sky diving accident ("Is there any other kind?" Austin asks.), he decided to take control of his midlife male body. (Visit FitandFunny.net for more info.)

When I left the session, I was motivated to change some habits, both physical and mental. Prior to attending, I hadn't known I was making excuses for my sedentary lifestyle. Somehow, the laughter cleared the cobwebs in my brain. Austin Davis, with his "laugh and learn" approach, gave me the stimulus I needed.

Austin's best advice: Relax. Reflect. Re-center. Even if you don't change your eating habits, new mental habits can create a new you.

Menopause Man - The Book

"Mel Mathews is a sensitive observer of the human condition, with an emphasis on the Male Human Condition of our time. He has created a character in Malcolm Clay that is a baby boomer Holden Caulfield, a variation on John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, and he manages to take us by the hand and lead us through the bumpy terrain of current interpersonal relationships as well as anyone writing today." Read more about Mel Mathews and this USA Today review. Or look in the sidebar under "Nick's Picks" for the Amazon info page.

Menopause Man is the middle of a trilogy about a mid-life man stuck in a boring but successful occupation. I don't ususally recommend books that I haven't read, but the review describes such fine writing ("the novel calls for pause to enjoy the sheer ebullience of the verbiage") and I'm been known to devour well-written books in one sitting.

Take a look. The Malcolm Clay Trilogy may make the perfect gift for the midlife man in your life.

I Woke Up and Realized I'm Living the Wrong Life

I've noticed a 2-year pattern in my life that coincides with July 4th. I refer to it as my "personal Independence Day."

Today, I have achieved the uncommon: my 3rd midlife crisis! Call me crazy. I call it striving.

Deep inside all of us is the desire to make a breakthrough. Some of us need a breakdown (a crisis) to get there. Bruce Grierson calls it a "U-turn."

In his remarkable new book, U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life?, he empathizes with those who feel that they are on the wrong side of the psychic divide. He writes that the "second brain" in our gut tells us that the life we are living must change.

In many cases, people make the change as quickly as they discover the need for it. Thus, the infamous "midlife crisis."

Drawing on over three hundred stories of U-turners and using scientific, philosophical, literary and psychological approaches, Bruce Geirson answers the question, "What would it take to change your life?"

My own answer is "necessity." It is of necessity that I'm reinventing myself, yet again, because the reality is that the entrepreneurial life is the wrong life for me today. I launched my business with high hopes but competition has changed in 10 years. It feels like failure to admit that I must now go work for someone. I pride myself on my independence but, as the saying goes, "pride go-eth before the fall."

Aha! Here's the breakthrough: Independence is an illusion. We are interdependent creatures out of necessity. The sooner I embrace that, the sooner I can stop U-turning and get where I want to be.

Finding a Purpose In Life

Each of us were born with a unique purpose in life. Along the road to becoming, we may stumble and fall, but the quest for true meaning guides us.

In Life On Purpose: Six Passage to an Inspired Life by Brad Swift, DVM, the author advocates "transforming the world from one that's off purpose to one on purpose, one person at a time."

As the saying goes, it's simple but not easy.

In reality your Purpose already exists. One must first learn how to labor, then develop skills, goals, a plan and then strive toward the Purpose. Often people want to reach the summit before they develop skills.

I remember an employer saying, "You have to walk before you can run." I didn't like this advice one bit, but looking back I realized that I needed to develop muscles (skills) in order to reach my goals and to create a plan for my life.

Dr. Swift outlines a proven, systematic, spirutally based, and practical approach to begin to live a life at cause including a number of exercises to clarify your unique and "purposeful path."

Some confuse the means or the process to be an end in itself. Working to make money is not your Purpose, for example. Work is what we do on the way to Becoming. With a false purpose you eventually reach a dead-end street. I think this is at the root of why men in midlife question their choices.

A purposeless life is a confused life. In a family unit, if everyone is allowed to do their own thing, the family degenerates. If they don't work together, play together, plan together, they are like an instrument out of tune. When a parent gives a child a goal, he helps to integrate that child to a larger purpose, even if is only to clean his room. A synchronized family is a harmonious family.

And that's how we begin to transform the world, one person at a time.

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Additional references: The Purpose of Life, Torkom Saraydarian, p. 20.

The Tao of Midlife Crisis

I've written on this topic, as regular readers know, but today found an articulate, focused, elegant, and uplifting website created by Casey Kochmer called PersonalTao.com.

The truth, he writes, is that "Midlife Crisis is really a midlife transformation."

An excerpt: "....Midlife Crisis represents a deeper possibility for a person to become their dreams. However, those dreams are hard to realize within an unsupportive society and without clear personal understanding of the actual experience. People often end up hurting themselves in the process of trying to change. A person's life carries a lot of momentum from the past that tumbles them about heedlessly upon trying to change to be something new.

Midlife Crisis is an unfortunate label applied to those working through these transitional times of their life. So the first step to understanding this process is to understand what crisis is: Crisis is a turning point when change must happen to prevent the break down of the former order of things. Crisis is not a time of trouble: unless doing (sic) nothing. Crisis is a time for transformation and opportunity."

He offers a free online book or download for those interested in experiencing the Tao Way.

The Unexamined Mid-Life

The middle third of your life cycle is like a "black hole," according to Mark Gerzon, author of Coming Into Our Own: Understanding Adult Metamorphosis. "As a result, we don't know what the hell we're supposed to do with those years. They're the lost years of adulthood," he said in a Psychology Today interview.

He wrote this book because, he says, "I had a war going on inside me between the voice that said, 'You're finished growing, you're done, it's a done deal:' and another voice that said, 'You've only begun to explore what life is about.'

"For me, writing this book was a way of strengthening and deepening and consolidating the voice that said, 'You're going to grow for the rest of your life.' That other view that grown ups are done growing is a myth that needs to be retired."

Mid-life feels like a serious either or proposition: Either we change or we die. Acknowledging the hollowness within, even as we succeed externally, challenges our sense of self. But a lot can happen between 40 and 60. YOU get to write the script.

Is the Quarterlife Crisis the New Midlife Crisis?

Upon graduation from college, a 20-something received a book called Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. As with many gift books, it sat on a shelf gathering dust. Fast forward five years and the title resonates within the drone of one's seemingly mundane life.

If you're mentally and emotionally paralyzed at that age, you're not alone. A friend responds to another's query, "Am I going crazy?"

"It's like the new midlife crisis for young people who start to question what they're doing. Everyone's having them," said the friend.

If you've been satisfied with the memories of your early successes, then your complacency can breed a subconscious fear of failure. I've experienced this in my own life and witnessed it in those close to me.

I do believe, however, that facing oneself at 25 will minimize the midlife crackups so common in later life. Remember: You'll be a man turning 40 in a New York second.

I'm hoping this "quarterlife crisis" concept will catch on just as Gail Sheehy's Passages was the definitive read for the Baby Boomer generation. Questioning one's purpose in life is ageless. Finding a purpose in life is an ongoing quest.

You can run, but you can't hide. Life is a constant stream of evaluating and re-evaluating goals and priorities. And at each stage of life, those goals and priorities change, as they must in order to keep growing and thriving.

The key is to face it, embrace it. Have courage and committment. Change is the only constant.

Adapted from Writers' Digest, January/February, 2006, "This Writer's Life," Kevin Alexander, pp. 32-33.

Male Midlife Crisis Murder Mystery

Now we're talkin'. I love a good mystery and want to share this synopsis:

A quirky cocktail of obsession, adultery, revenge, hazardous waste, golf, murder, fatherhood, and love, A Trout in the Sea of Cortez is a smart, sarcastic, and riveting mid-life crisis murder mystery.