One Monday morning a little more than a year ago, on her way to present at a board meeting, Sarah Davies, then-head of financial business services at a large U.K. food manufacturer, called her elderly father to check on him. Having not heard from him over the weekend like usual, she’d started worrying.
The phone rang and rang. Finally, she got ahold of his neighbor, who then checked on Davies’s father and found that he’d fallen at home. While her neighbors sent for an ambulance, Davies stood in the office stairwell, crying.
“What did I do? I went into the bathroom, I washed my face, I went into the board meeting, and I pitched,” Davies, 54, says.
She doesn’t remember whether she “fell apart” after the meeting. Her “entire mode of operation” at the time revolved around her “big job,” she says, and her ability to keep it together to manage her team.
But the difficulty balancing her personal responsibilities with her professional duties when both had reached fever pitch had begun taking a toll. “I can’t survive in this job,” she thought.
Right around that mid-career point—now usually during people’s 40s or 50s—professionals often find themselves pulled in multiple directions. They may have to care for both aging parents and young children, juggling doctors’ appointments and after-school sports with increasingly demanding careers. Having done their jobs for a couple of decades, they’re high enough on the corporate ladder to be managing teams and carrying extra weight. In the past, this time used to signal that the joy and relaxation of retirement awaited on the horizon.
But now, with life expectancies increasing (and financial pressures along with them), these extra-stressed professionals sit firmly mid-career—looking at decades more of work ahead.
“We know from happiness data that these can be some of the most unhappy decades,” says Lynda Gratton, a London Business School professor focusing on the future of work. In her research, she’s learned how workers in this age group experienced the pressure. They were stalling their careers, reporting the lowest levels of “calm,” and realizing that decisions they’d made early on in their work lives, such as what types of positions they were striving toward and the industries they’d entered, were still influencing their everyday routines—even though it felt like those decisions had been made by entirely different people. The problem was that these workers were so busy, they didn’t have time to reflect on how to change course.
“What I began to see, particularly for people in their mid-40s and early 50s, was just absolute burnout,” Gratton says. “People feel as if they’ve been in a race. They’ve got to where they want to be, are running out of steam . . . and yet realizing there’s another race ahead of them, [which] they hadn’t anticipated.”
Here’s what the midway mark of that race looks like for working professionals, and how some have found a way past it.
Working as the meat of the “sandwich”
Today, mid-career professionals are part of the “sandwich generation,” who are having kids later while their own parents live longer. Constantly moving between home and work responsibilities, says Gratton, carries a “cost.”
Each time the brain switches from one task to another, it must recalibrate, which requires a significant mental lift. That can leave mid-career caregivers exhausted and stressed—not to mention feeling guilty.
That guilt intensifies as the boundary between work and home blurs. That boundary started fading with smartphones, as workers became constantly reachable, but it also increased with the COVID-19 pandemic, as more people began working from home. The guilt manifested, Davies says, when she was at home, but still connected to work, or vice versa.
For Rachel Wilson, 46, this came to a head in 2024. She had a busy career in corporate finance in the U.K., and when COVID came, she started working from home, sitting on Teams and Zoom for up to 12 hours a day.
“It was just completely unsustainable,” she says, and her health suffered. Meanwhile, she had two young children and aging parents to care for. “Something had to give.”
But for many, it didn’t. “There was this ramping up of expectations around work, and none of those diminished when the stress of the pandemic eased off,” says Allison McWilliams, an assistant vice president in career development at Wake Forest University.
Many mid-career professionals also derive identity and purpose from their jobs. The thought of no longer being in the right place can take a serious toll on one’s mental health. Increased workloads, however, eclipse time for reflection.
“You want something different for yourself, but you can’t find a way through to make that next step,” McWilliams says. It becomes a vicious cycle. When stressed, Gratton says, “the easiest thing for us to do is to go into a repetitive loop,” therefore remaining on the hamster wheel.
And if you need to provide for three generations of family, you can’t jump off—even if it no longer aligns with your “purpose.”
Recalibrating for a shifting purpose
“We get into midlife, and purpose shifts suddenly,” says Davies, who now works as a corporate coach for midlife leaders.
“Suddenly we’re 50, and we’re thinking, ‘Okay, wait, there’s somebody else who made this decision to do this career for me, and they were much less mature than I am,’” says psychologist Samantha Stein. Even if early career choices feel right later, she adds, “we get to a point where we’re not challenged in the same way to keep growing . . . because we’re just good at what we do.” That, too, can lead to burnout. Instead of mastering something and then passing that earned wisdom along to younger colleagues before retiring, workers are left treading water in that mastery phase for years, exhausted by the boredom that comes from not being meaningfully challenged—unless they decide to make a big change.
Gratton calls this time the “pivotal point,” when workers need to figure out how to make the next couple decades of their careers sustainable. It no longer makes sense to have just one period of education to get us through all 50-plus years of work.
“You have to retrain, reskill,” she says. “You’ve got to be prepared in a long life to go back to being a child again,” allowing for experimentation, potential failure but, ultimately, growth.
Having long been interested in fashion, Wilson ended up buying a clothing store when she left her high-stress finance job. Though the novel demands of being her own boss can be consuming, she gets to work on her terms. “I can choose my hours and actually go pick the children up from school,” she says, realigning her work schedule with her priorities.
Of course, starting from scratch in a brand-new career isn’t for everyone. Davies often counsels her mid-career clients on reorganizing their current loads. They’ll draw up “pies” of their lives, with work, family, health, friends, hobbies, etc., occupying differently sized segments based on how much time and energy they consume.
Work “always seems to get the biggest slice,” Davies says, so she asks her clients what they’d like their pies to look like. It’s a short exercise that can serve as a starting point for thoughtful restructuring.
But maintaining a structure that feels like a healthy balance takes work. “When you’re trying to balance on one foot, it’s not a static thing; it’s rather active,” Davies says—not one and done, but a constant exercise that requires slowing down to think.
That could mean reflecting on the source of your stress. Is it “just feeling overworked,” says McWilliams, or that the industry you’re in no longer aligns with your values? Maybe the career you chose at 22, when you didn’t have a family to care for, now feels like it occupies too much of your time. Or perhaps what once seemed like a glamorous career in finance began to feel hollow, and you’d prefer a job in social services. Once that question is answered, McWilliams says, start thinking about the “smallest possible step” you can take to make changes.
“Instead of saying, ‘I need to find a new job,’ you can say, ‘I need to research some possible roles I might have interest in,’” McWilliams says. You can break that down further into asking someone who has that job what it’s like. The task then shrinks from finding a new job to having one conversation.
Ultimately, taking the time to reevaluate at midlife isn’t easy. Since starting her own business about a year ago, Davies has scaled some steep learning curves. But she’s following her interests and noticing a difference.
A few weeks ago, at a party with her former work team, everybody told her she looked younger.
“A weight lifted,” she says, “and my energy shifted for the positive.”
