Hello there, When everything looks right and something still feels wrongI had just introduced Mark Carney to a room full of the most influential people in government, finance and tech. The crowd responded exactly as I had hoped. I walked offstage feeling the particular satisfaction of work done well. And then I locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried until I could compose myself enough to go back out there. I couldn’t explain it to anyone. I could barely explain it to myself. From the outside everything was working. Fifteen years of building a career at its peak. Work that came to me. Recognition, autonomy, a life that ticked every box. But something inside had been shifting long before I had recognized it. My body was the first to say it out loud. If that sounds familiar, this edition is for you. What's actually happening (and why nobody told you)This might sound like a type of burnout. But there’s more to it. Burnout is what happens when you have given everything to something and have nothing left. It’s also when you longer feel connected to the work you’re doing and the enthusiasm you once had for it seems to have disappeared. But if you’re willing to dig deeper into the psychology of this often frustrating and sometimes debilitating experience, you’ll recognize what I now know millions of people in midlife don’t have the language for. It’s called developmental transition. It’s a critical transitional period that marks the progression from one life stage to another, often acting as a bridge between age-related milestones. It happened to you before. In adolescence, when you started pushing against the version of yourself your parents built for you and began figuring out who you were becoming. Most people called that teenage rebellion. It was not. It was just a young person developing his or her own identity outside of what was carved for them. It involved a key component: exploration. It happens again in midlife. And it doesn’t always arrive as a dramatic breakdown. It can arrive quietly, as numbness. A promotion that should feel like progress feels like a longer sentence. A challenge that would once have excited you now leaves you cold. You keep showing up, keep performing, keep telling yourself to be grateful. And underneath all of it, something quietly insists: there is more. Why most people miss it entirelyBecause the stakes feel impossibly high. Mortgage. Family. Responsibilities. A professional identity built over decades. Most people do what I did for longer than I should have. Push it down. Tell themselves to knock it off. Wait for the feeling to pass. It does not pass. It gets louder. Research from the University of Toronto found that people will accept salaries 32% lower for work they find genuinely meaningful. That is not a rounding error. That is how much meaning is worth to people who have finally stopped pretending it does not matter. The problem is that we are living through one of the most volatile job markets in decades. AI disruption. Mass layoffs across sectors. Geopolitical uncertainty. So we stay quiet. We hold on. We mistake the signal for something shameful rather than something important. How to read what your body is already telling youYour body signals a transition long before your mind is ready to acknowledge it. Here’s what to look for:
Tears you cannot explain. In bathrooms. In cars. In quiet moments when nobody is watching. The body carries what the mind refuses to process. None of these are signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that a transition is already underway. The only question is whether you are going to navigate it consciously or wait until it forces your hand. This week, try this. When the restlessness or the numbness shows up, instead of pushing it down, get specific. Write down one sentence: What is this feeling trying to tell me about what I need more of and what I need less of? You do not need the answer. You just need to start asking the question out loud. The one reframe that changes everythingYou are not stuck. You are not failing. You are not ungrateful. You are in a transition that nobody gave you a map for. Change is the event that happens to you; the restructure, the move, the role that no longer fits. Transition is the internal journey that accompanies it. It does not run on your schedule or anybody else’s. And most people are trying to manage it with tools designed for the event, not the experience. Start by naming it. Not, "I am struggling" or "I am stressed." Say it plainly: I am in a transition and I’m willing to explore what that means to me. That single sentence does more than most people realize. It moves you from reacting to exploring. And exploring is where the work actually begins. What's coming nextThis newsletter goes deeper into the psychology, the research and the real human experience of life transitions every two weeks. If this resonated, the Safe Passage podcast goes deeper into everything in this edition. Each episode I sit down with Dr. Doug Ota, a clinical psychologist and transitions expert, and we get into the territory most people only visit alone at 2am.
Follow now so you don’t miss episode one. It drops soon and it’s worth being there from the beginning. From wherever you are, Nikki |
