A young man climbs the mountain, but when he reaches the peak, he is disappointed that it is already dark. Yet, the old man who lives there greets him with the words, “Beautiful view, isn’t it?” The young man looks at him with confusion. He can’t see anything. However, the old man doesn’t look into the valley below them but at the beautiful night sky full of stars. Even when achieving success and climbing a mountain, we often find ways to feel down. It’s all about perspective and about what we decide to see.

This is an excellent allegory of ups and downs in life Spencer Johnson introduced in Peaks and Valleys. He talks about the valleys of the daily rot and the peaks when we wander out of the valley and experience happiness and fulfillment. All it takes is a change of perspective.

U-shaped curves

Peaks and valleys, or U-shaped curves, are directing our lives. As Daniel Pink notes in When, a positive mood rises in the morning and the evening and slumps in the middle in the early afternoon.

The U-shaped curve is also visible in the effort we extend in long-running activities. In the middle, we tend to slack off. When we get triggered by the coming deadline, we increase our effort again.

What is the longest-running activity you will ever do? Living your life. Even our well-being has its ups and downs throughout life. The average person’s well-being is a U-shaped curve with the valley in their late forties and early fifties. Then it is up again. Midlife seems to deflate us as we realize that we haven’t achieved the aspirations we had in our teens and twenties.

“When you are experiencing success, approach it with humility and understanding that it may not last.”

As Spencer Johnson writes, “Peaks and valleys are connected. The errors you make in today’s good times create tomorrow’s bad times. The wise things you do in today’s bad times create tomorrow’s good times.” When you are experiencing success, approach it with humility and understanding that it may not last. You need to nurture it to stay at a peak as long as possible. You may lose it when you become arrogant, take it for granted, stop making an effort, and stop listening to others.

Johnson then notes that “The most common reason you leave a peak too soon is arrogance, masquerading as confidence. The most common reason you stay in a valley too long is fear masquerading as comfort.”

Too often, people stay in jobs they hate or bad relationships. They are unable to summon the energy and will to make a change. They seem to be comfortable even with something significantly bad. What holds them back is often not laziness but fear. Quitting a toxic job or leaving an abusive partner may seem like a no-brainer, but it may feel like a huge risk—a step into the unknown.

Ups and downs of our mind

Ups and downs don’t need to be external. Your mind can completely fabricate them. It is not only about what is happening to you but how you feel about it. It is about your view of the world and how you feel about your circumstances. You will feel much better when you show gratitude, even when things don’t go well for you. When you keep complaining about life and desiring what you don’t have, you will feel miserable and stay down longer. You can’t often control what’s happening to you. But you can control how you feel about it. Even the ancient Stoics knew that you should focus only on what you can control and not worry about things outside of your control.

How to deal with a midlife crisis

If you know that the midlife crisis is coming and that this slump is natural in any long-running activities, you can fight it. You can’t change biology, but you can mitigate its effects. It’s called the punctuated equilibrium, or uh-oh effect. When you are in the middle of an activity without showing any results, the realization that the deadline is coming is often the impulse needed to re-energize again.

Ways to re-energize your motivation during midpoint slumps:

1. Prioritize your top goals

When everything is important, then nothing is important at all. Consider the Buffett technique when you list the twenty-five important goals you want to achieve. Then select the top five goals. And then cut the rest twenty goals you felt were important but are not in your top five. They are just distractions from your truly important goals.

“Prioritize. When everything is important, then nothing is important.”

This should be relatively easier to do as we get older. Laura Carstensen came up with the term socioemotional selectivity. The idea is that our perception of time shapes our lives and the goals we pursue. As we grow older, we have the feeling that time is running out and therefore are less likely to spend our time on trivial matters. We focus more on what truly matters and on deep relationships with fewer people. When time is perceived as open-ended, knowledge-related goals are prioritized. When time is limited, emotional goals become more important.

2. Consider James Dean effect

James Dean effect is when people tend to rate shorter lives that end on the upswing better than longer lives, even with bigger achievements, but ending on a downswing. A life that is short and exciting is seen as preferable to a longer life that is duller.

Studies showed that it is not the entirety of life that counts but the quality of the end of the life that is disproportionately important for judging the whole quality of life. If your last years are good, then all is good. If your last years end up in misery, then your whole life will feel bad.

It is a variation of the peak-end rule as formulated by Daniel Kahneman. We tend to remember peak and end moments and therefore are more comfortable with bigger pain that slowly lessens than the shorter one that is the biggest at the end.

3. Mentally subtract positive events

Think about positive events that happened to you in your life and go back in detail to what actions, even small ones, led to them. Consider that if you didn’t take that one small step, all the great things wouldn’t happen to you. You may discover that your life isn’t that bad after all, and even small steps today can have a substantial positive impact in the future. Be grateful.

4. Write yourself a few paragraphs of self-compassion

Think about what fills you with regret or disappointment, and then write down how it makes you feel. Then you can write a short letter to yourself expressing compassion, imagining what someone who cares about you would say to you.

5. Set interim goals and publicly commit to them

Create a slight pressure on yourself by sharing your goals with other people. You will then feel obligated not only to yourself to finish the goals but also to others. You create a bit of peer pressure. Their questions about how it is going will remind you that there is a job to do and will help you persevere.

6. Don’t break the chain, the so-called Seinfeld technique

When you have a problem, keep going. Forget about the ultimate goal but take it one day at a time to avoid breaking the chain.

Let’s say you decided to exercise to be healthier and in better shape. It requires regular and consistent effort for an extended period of time. There might be days when you don’t feel like exercising, but you are doomed when you start making exceptions. Better is to pick up a calendar and mark it every day when you exercise. Once you get a string of consecutive marks, it is easier to condition yourself that you don’t want to break the chain and make the mark also today.

After a while, you can look back and see that you have been doing it for months. Now you really don’t want to break the chain, so you keep going.

7. Picture one person your work will help

Big life goals can often be daunting, especially if the picture of success is a bit fuzzy. What may help is to make the goal more emotional by clearly seeing a specific person with a name who will benefit when you successfully finish. It might be your customer, colleague, spouse, or child. Whoever it is, once you are clear on who benefits and picture their joy and gratitude, you get the fuel to keep going.

8. Learn to anchor your feelings in reality.

People who go through tough times often encourage themselves or others by saying, “One day, we will laugh about this.” The obvious question to ask at these times is, “Why wait?” Why not start laughing about it right now if you are content that you will laugh about it one day? You may hate rain or cold, but you can do nothing about it.

“You can’t change the weather. So why feel bad about it? Rain is just rain. Don’t act like it is the end of the world. Sunshine is just sunshine. Enjoy it but don’t act as if it will last forever.”

You can’t change the weather. So why feel bad about it? You can as well decide that rain and cold are part of nature, part of life. You may as well decide that you enjoy occasionally getting wet and cold. It allows you to enjoy it even more when you get to a warm house, get dry clothes, and wrap your hands around a steaming cup of tea. You will feel alive.

Things are usually not as good or as bad as they appear. Rain is just rain. Don’t act like it is the end of the world. Sunshine is just sunshine. Enjoy it but don’t act as it will last forever.

Final thoughts

You don’t need to climb to the peak all the time. It is OK to rest for a while and enjoy a plateau. As you go through your life, there will be times when a career will be important, but there will be times when it won’t. When your kids get born, you may want to focus on raising them. When you see a worthy cause, you may wish to volunteer your energy to it. When you spend years climbing the career ladder, you may want to step back and renew your body and your energy.

Only because your career plateaued doesn’t mean you should feel depressed. Use it to reflect on your life, renew your enthusiasm, and get climbing, possibly to another peak.

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What is your take on the topic? Do you think that midlife crisis is real? When you look at your life do you see the ups and downs? What did you do to have as many ups as possible? How do you make sure your downs don’t last too long?

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