Your 40s can feel like the decade where your body starts charging surge pricing. Same job, same life, same responsibilities, but the recovery period? Not the same anymore. One late night turns into a two-day hangover. A workout you used to shake off now makes it hard to walk for a week. And if you don’t get a good night’s sleep, your day’s shot.
A recent explainer published in The Conversation argues that midlife fatigue peaks in your 40s because biology and workload collide. The biology part is not some sudden cliff. It’s a bunch of small costs that add up right when many people sit under max pressure at work, at home, and in their own heads.
One obvious cost is muscle. The NIH’s News in Health says that adults start losing muscle mass around age 30, around 3 percent to 5 percent per decade. Less muscle means daily movement takes extra effort, including the “basic” stuff like hauling groceries or taking stairs. That’s before you add stress, poor sleep, and the general reality that sitting all day isn’t the best choice.
Sleep also changes over time, and the energy hit can drag down your mood and patience. The National Institute on Aging notes that as people age, sleep gets lighter and shorter, and waking during the night becomes a regular occurrence. Research published in JAMA found a steep drop in deep slow-wave sleep from early adulthood to midlife. Deep sleep is your overnight maintenance window. When that window shrinks, life starts collecting interest.
Women usually pick up extra issues in midlife because, of course, we do. Hormones can swing around and turn into the enemy of sleep and temperature regulation. Then come the responsibilities, the caretaking, and the constant planning, and your brain never really gets a break.
Here’s the part people need to hear. Your later decades don’t guarantee nonstop exhaustion. Medical experts say strength training is one of the best ways to support muscle mass and mobility with age. Your 40s can be draining, but they don’t have to define the decades after.
The post Scientists Pinpointed the Most Exhausting Decade of Your Life appeared first on VICE.
