In Our Prime (5 page)

After I watch a series of photographs, Michael asks how I'm doing. “Fine,” I answer. He reminds me not to move, saying that the next scan takes seven minutes.

“Is there anything special I am supposed to think about?” No, he replies.

“Can I close my eyes?” Yes.

I wish I had thought to ask which part of my brain my silently humming “Ground Control to Major Tom” was causing to flash.

Richard Davidson's experiments are part of the pathbreaking research now known as Midlife in the United States. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation agreed to finance the project in 1989 as the vanguard of postwar babies were reaching their middle years. Bill Clinton, the first boomer president, was planning his run for the White House, 40-something masters of the universe were settling into corner suites, and middle-aged protagonists like Murphy Brown and Frasier had carved out a home on the small screen when MacArthur gathered some of the best minds in the country to map the landscape of midlife.

Beneath the monumental enterprise is a simple notion that middle age is the pivot around which society is structured. “
People in midlife raise
the children and care for the elderly,” Orville Gilbert Brim Jr., the
project's founder and first director, explained, “and when they succeed, they carry the young and the old along with them.”

Given the number of poets and philosophers, self-help authors and filmmakers who have devoted verse and song to the middle years, it may be surprising to learn that only a generation ago, middle age managed to escape systematic scientific study.
As Brim declared
in language that brings to mind the
Enterprise
's cosmic mission on
Star Trek,
middle age “is the last uncharted territory in human development.”

“No one knew what was going on in that world,” said Brim, who prefers “Bert” to “Orville.” Much of what we understood about middle age came indirectly from studies focused on children or the elderly, like a sideways reflection in a mirror. With a $9.4 million grant from MacArthur, Brim and his eleven colleagues agreed to throw out the whole tangle of assumptions that had grown up around this period—the expected dread or restlessness, the looming fear of death. “Millions of persons make decisions about their lives based on unsupported beliefs and imperfect knowledge . . . that are transmitted from one generation to the next as our cultural legacy of falsehood and myth about midlife,” he reported. His team started with a clean slate to investigate “the who, what, when, where, and why of midlife events and the beliefs people hold about them.”

They established what could be considered the Manhattan Project of middle age by gathering extensive information through large-scale surveys and in-depth interviews about what Americans in their middle years think, feel, and do every day. The researchers wanted to find out if—and how—one's personality, mental health, brainpower, stresses, and attitudes shift in midlife. What is the impact of education, income, intelligence, background, family structure, work, friends, religion, genetics, race, and sex? Why are some individuals more resilient than others? By looking at how middle-agers negotiate the challenges of midlife, they hoped to learn what caused people to flourish or fail in the middle years and beyond, and whether anything could be done to alter that process.

The breadth and depth of the project, dubbed MIDMAC, were unprecedented. Throughout most of the twentieth century, social scientists and medical researchers were guilty of defining the “average”
American as a middle-class white man. As for the relatively small niche of investigations devoted to midlife, nearly all of the significant ones involved men studying men. “
Considering the major studies
on adult development at midlife, it seems only men survive past the age of 40,” a scholarly assessment from 1997 dryly observed.
MacArthur recruited nearly 7,200 men
and women between the ages of 25 and 74 so that middle-agers could be compared with those younger and older. In the mix were hundreds of twins and siblings to help researchers sort out biological and environmental differences.

What distinguished the MacArthur group's approach was its attempt to knit together various disciplines—psychology, anthropology, economics, biology, sociology, and more. “No single component of aging can be understood without reference to others,” a report explained. A chemical in the brain may be the cause of someone's depression, which may in turn be the reason he withdraws from family and friends. A hard-charging, controlling type A personality may be more susceptible to coronary disease. Later on, a move to a nursing home, where she is cut off from familiar surroundings and a mix of age groups, may hasten physical and psychological deterioration.

The team also embraced a novel conceptual approach to assessing health and happiness in middle age. Traditionally, physicians and psychologists have defined success in terms of what was missing: health was a lack of illness and disease; a well-adjusted psyche meant an absence of depression and dysfunction.
Middle age begins
, one cultural critic declared, the moment you think of yourself as “Not-Young.” MacArthur, by contrast, was interested not merely in what was missing but in what was present. Rather than define middle age by its deficits—the end of youth and fertility, decreased stamina and flexibility—MIDMAC investigated what ingredients contribute to feeling fulfilled and purposeful. Researchers wanted to know what a half-full glass contained as well as what had spilled out of it.

Carol Ryff, a member of the MacArthur network and the director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, developed a list of eighty-four questions to measure well-being and divided them into six broad categories: personal growth (having new experiences that
challenge how you think about yourself); autonomy (having confidence in your opinions even if they are contrary to the general consensus); supportive social relationships; self-regard (liking most aspects of your personality); control of your life; and a sense of purpose. The questionnaire was meant to capture more than the fleeting pleasures of a few beers. It was designed to gauge whether an individual was also functioning at full capacity and flourishing. The ancient Greeks called it
eudaimonia,
and midlife researchers and positive psychologists have adopted the term to refer to the kind of profound satisfaction and meaning one derives from raising children, training for an Olympic event, completing a college degree, or helping your neighbors rebuild after a disaster. As Ryff said, “
Sometimes things that really
matter most are not conducive to short-term happiness.” Dirty diapers, screaming tantrums, and sleepless nights are not particularly pleasurable on a day-to-day basis; nonetheless, most people consider children a source of deep happiness, of
eudaimonia
.

With this framework in place, the MacArthur team's first task was to create a comprehensive database on middle-aged Americans. Starting in 1994, thousands of subjects answered telephone interviews and filled out lengthy forms that asked:

 

Are you sad, nervous, restless
, fidgety, calm, satisfied, curious, optimistic, cheerful, creative, hardworking, softhearted, responsible, outspoken, active, careless, broad-minded, talkative, sophisticated, adventurous?

Are you bothered by cold, heat, loud noise?

Do you talk about your problems to a rabbi, priest, therapist, social worker, doctor? Attend meetings for alcoholics, addicts, people with eating disorders, widows, empty nesters, cancer sufferers?

Do you have pain when you have sex; do you leak urine?

Did you confide in your mother; did she love you; did she punish you; did she understand you; did she push, grab, or slap you; did your father? Did you stomp out of a room when angry or sulk?

Do you feel obligated to serve on a jury, raise the child of a close friend who died, call your parents regularly, give money to
a needy friend, testify in court about an accident you witnessed, collect contributions for heart research, pay more in taxes so those worse off than you would be helped?

How much do you drink, smoke, eat, sleep, worry, tremble, get the chills, get hot flashes?

How often do you say hello to your neighbors; how often does your family get on your nerves?

Have you ever been born again; have you ever been catheterized; have you ever been on welfare?

How would you rate sex you have now; ten years ago; how do you think it will be in ten years?

Even as the surveys were being administered, the team updated its questionnaires.
In the early 1990s
, for example, the public discussions of menopause surrounding the publication of Gail Sheehy's
The Silent Passage
and Germaine Greer's
The Change: Women, Aging and Menopause
reminded researchers that they had neglected to address this universal event.
All in all, respondents answered
a hundred pages' worth of detailed questions, revealing their most intimate feelings, embarrassing behaviors, physical idiosyncrasies, and emotional tics. The nearly two thousand twins who participated received little packets instructing them to gently scrape the inside of their cheeks and mail back the results for DNA testing.

Almost 1,500 of the participants sat through additional telephone interviews eight nights in a row to enumerate the precise kinds of stresses they faced each day. Another group of 750 subjects answered detailed questions about turning points and crises in their lives as researchers scanned for hints that might forecast such events in advance. Other, smaller clusters sat through extended interviews to talk about social responsibility, their strategies for handling stress, and how they defined “the good life.”

After MacArthur's funding ended, the federal government officially adopted the project and renamed it Midlife in the United States, or MIDUS, in 2002.
The National Institutes of Health
awarded $26 million to forty professors and scientists at sixteen universities to expand the
research into the future, transforming it into a long-term, or longitudinal, study—the gold standard in science. The snapshot of middle age was turned into a motion picture. MIDUS, now headquartered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has collected what may be the most comprehensive data ever assembled in a national survey. Since then, organized professional interest in middle age has continued to spread: to neurology, where researchers are examining the brain's operation; to orthopedics, where clinical practitioners are developing new procedures to deal with a more active generation of middle-aged weekend athletes; to biology, where scientists are tracking the midlife roots of heart disease and dementia.

The results will be described in more detail in later chapters, but in the first two decades of MIDUS's existence, it has punctured some of the most stubborn myths about midlife in America. Theories about a midlife crisis and empty-nest syndrome were blown away like feathers in a windstorm, as were the imagined ranks of sweaty women raging against menopause and middle-aged husbands abandoning decades-long marriages for dewy young trophy wives.
Midlife was a “watershed period”
when people began to shift from taking care of family to becoming more active in community and public affairs. Stress reached a high point as worries about children, money, aging parents, and other responsibilities piled up. But as burdens grew so did confidence in one's own capabilities. People reported feeling more in charge of work, marriage, and finances as they entered the middle decades. That sense of control—that you can personally take steps to influence what happens in your life—is both a crucial source of happiness and a catalyst for taking action to stay healthier.

The latest research into the middle-aged brain is slowly revealing the intricate and enigmatic workings of the human mind and body. Along with other investigators, Richard Davidson has discovered that this three-pound handful of gray and white matter is much more adaptable in midlife than previously thought. Nerve cells do not die off in droves, and the ability to think more conceptually can actually improve with age. At the same time, middle-agers are much more experimental and open to novelty than previously imagined.
Freud rejected patients
“near or above the fifties” for psychoanalysis, claiming, “the elasticity of the
mental processes . . . is as a rule lacking.” But further study has revealed middle age to be a time of psychological complexity, when individuals become less neurotic and more open, reflective, and flexible.

Overall, the majority felt healthy, in control, and satisfied. They had left behind the tumultuous adolescent years, and had worked through the struggles and uncertainties of embarking on a career and family. They learned how to more skillfully handle crises and were better equipped to screen out petty stresses and disappointments and to manage the strain of juggling a job and family.
When researchers asked people
over 65 what age they would most like to return to, the majority bypassed their teens, 20s, and 30s in favor of their 40s.

“
From many points of view
, midlife permits many of us to feel on top of the world, in control of our lives, and well enough pleased with what we have accomplished to seek new outlets of both self-expression and giving back to society some of what we have earned—and learned,” Alice S. Rossi, a member of the original MacArthur team and a former president of the American Sociological Association, concluded.

This description of middle age comes surprisingly close to matching the definition of
eudaimonia
. Corey Keyes, a sociologist at Emory and a MIDUS investigator, cites studies that show individuals who are flourishing or “functioning well,” as he translates
eudaimonia,
have lower rates of disability, heart disease, and chronic physical illness compared with people who are merely “feeling good.” They also have nearly half the rate of mental illness.
In 2010, Carol Ryff and her colleagues
found physical evidence: MIDUS participants who scored high in
eudaimonia
had lower levels of a protein called interleukin-6, which is associated with cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's.