Your 30s are supposed to be the decade where your life starts coming together. You’ve aged out of your wild years, you know yourself better, and you’ve probably learned how to keep a basil plant alive for at least a week. So it can feel especially rude when anxiety decides to get way worse right around the same time.
A recent SELF piece explains why this happens for a lot of women. Part of it is the cultural pressure that still hangs over your 30s, even if nobody says it as loudly anymore. Kristen Jacobsen, LCPC, said, “There’s this expectation from society that by this time, you have a career path. You get married. You have children.” If you haven’t done those things, or have done them and still feel unsettled, it can leave you feeling like you somehow missed something.
That pressure gets internalized. By this age, choices can feel bigger and less reversible. A job change can feel loaded. A breakup can feel loaded. A decision about kids can feel loaded. Even people who look perfectly put together from the outside can end up spiraling because adulthood starts to feel like a series of high-consequence decisions with very little room for mistakes. SELF notes that Jacobsen sees this all the time in practice, especially when women feel they haven’t hit the “milestones” they assumed would make them feel secure.
Your 30s Might Be Peak Anxiety. Here’s Why.
There’s also the basic fact that anxiety is already more common in women. NIMH says past-year prevalence of any anxiety disorder is higher for females than males, and the FDA says women are more than twice as likely as men to develop an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. Not every woman in her 30s is doomed to be a nervous wreck, though. It does mean many are carrying a heavier baseline load while also dealing with social pressure, work pressure, family pressure, and the internet’s endless parade of people announcing pregnancies, promotions, home purchases, and suspiciously glowing skin.
For mothers, the experience can get even more intense. Jacobsen said that new moms can go through “matrescence,” which she described as “a profound identity shift similar to what we go through during puberty in adolescence.” That can make outside opinions about feeding, sleep, work, or parenting choices feel far more charged than they otherwise would.
The useful part of all this is realizing your anxiety isn’t proof that you are failing adulthood. It’s just a pretty understandable response to living in a decade where everyone expects you to be settled, impressive, grateful, emotionally evolved, and somehow still chill about all of it.
The post This Is Why You’re So Anxious in Your 30s appeared first on VICE.
