Research has found the midlife crisis may be real, and the consequences of peaking stress should be of concern to policy makers.
Stress was found to peak for people going through their 40s to 50s, with the "maximum level of work stress" reached at around the age of 45. To reach this conclusion, researchers looked at health records including hospital admissions for sleep disorder and people at risk of suicide in affluent countries.
They found people in midlife - typically in their 40s and 50s - were at higher risk of poor mental health.
The study's introduction states: "The paper offers new evidence that midlife is a time when people disproportionately take their own lives, have trouble sleeping, are clinically depressed, spend time thinking about suicide, feel life is not worth living, find it hard to concentrate, forget things, feel overwhelmed in their workplace, suffer from disabling headaches, and become dependent on alcohol."
Researchers analysed data from the UK Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey among other sources to assess a range of different depressive and anxiety disorders. The working paper states people in midlife were twice as likely to experience depression over people aged 60 or older and people under the age of 25.
Risk of suicide, which was determined by analysing mortality deaths database provided by the World Health Organisation, was found to peak in the early 50s on average, though figures were slightly earlier for women than for men.
Researchers also looked at sleep health, analysing data for Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States. They found that hospital admissions for sleep disorders were found to peak in the 50s, with people in midlife reporting the lowest number of hours of sleep per night.
They concluded that action is needed to support people who are suffering during midlife.
"We believe the seriousness of this societal problem has not been grasped by the affluent world's policy-makers," the researchers wrote.
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