Midlife can be a really crazy time for many overachievers. I have seen marriages fall apart spectacularly, people go into early menopause, people getting really ill (this is me) and overall just having a really bad time of it all.
I coach many high achieving people. I know the patterns well, I was part of this cultural pattern for years until my body started to give in. This story is important because to really understand what is driving it all we have to look through a few contextual lenses. These are, family systems, cultural and attachment patterning. That is to say, I don’t want to blame the parents all the time, it is important to take in the cultural context because that is always influencing how we show up in the world.
Many midlifers now are from Gen X or early millennial generations. We grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s. The 70s in particular were wild times. Coming off the back of the feminist revolution young girls and teens grew up with the cultural context of ‘you can have it all’, and most of us really believed we could have it all, until we started to fall apart. It was also a decade where ‘no fault’ divorce was introduced in many developed countries, which was liberating for many couples stuck in very unhappy marriages.
The roots of overachievement.
Gen X kids grew up in the 70s and 80s, often called the “latchkey generation.” Many came home to empty houses after school because both parents worked (or single mothers had to), and structured childcare was rare. All that infrastructure we have now for kids was absent.
That meant long hours alone, a lot of independence at a young age, and often a lack of emotional attunement. Parents themselves were part of a generation still reckoning with the aftershocks of war, cultural upheaval, and very limited language for emotions and feelings.
For many Gen X children, being “the good kid” or the ‘high achiever’ was the only reliable way to be noticed and valued. It is a survival strategy. Achievement became the currency of love, recognition and belonging: grades, sports, awards, responsibility. Emotional needs were often dismissed as weakness or a hassle, or parents simply didn’t have the capacity to respond. For many kids overachievement was a way out of unhappy family dynamics and in many ways a path to freedom and having greater control over your life.
Growing up in an environment where attention was scarce, wired many Gen X and millennial nervous systems to chase recognition through performance. This has an impact on relationships, on our attachment system in our nervous system, we are attracted to what feels comfortable and safe.
Fast forward to adulthood and so many people picked partners who were emotionally unavailable; because our parents were. Emotional unavailability feels familiar in early adulthood, because that’s what love felt like: absent, distracted, or conditional. This resulted in creating relational dynamics in intimate and platonic relationships that are grounded in:
Familiarity: Unavailability feels like “home,” echoing early dynamics with parents who couldn’t attune.
Proving Worth: Just as we earned love through performance, we unconsciously seek partners we have to work hard for.
Avoiding Vulnerability: Unconsciously some part of us are actually more comfortable in longing than in receiving. True intimacy can feel foreign, even unsafe.
The Hope of Healing: On a deep level, we hope that “winning over” the unavailable one will finally heal the old wound of not being chosen.
The Nervous system story
When you grow up chasing attention, your body gets addicted to the rollercoaster of longing and proving. The highs of being noticed, the lows of being ignored—this rhythm gets wired into your nervous system as love. That’s why stable, secure, emotionally available partners can initially feel boring or “too much.” It’s not boring. It’s safe. But your body doesn’t yet know how to recognise safety.
When you are chasing the high of achievement all the time, your nervous system often is in a constant state of high sympathetic arousal. That is what feels safe and comfortable. I had a boss in my early 30s who used to say to me “don’t let your achievement drive get hooked by what is going on, you don’t have to solve all the problems’. This was good advice for me and the beginning of my slow down and do it differently phase. In truth, this is also why I dislike productivity culture so much because I can see that it is repeating a system pattern and creating an implicit belief system in workplaces that people have no value if they are not in a constant state of output.
The Midlife Reckoning - Midlife is not a crisis, it is a truth telling.
So it is not really surprising we get to midlife and everything falls apart. Midlife, which developmentally is all about radical honesty with ourselves, a time of reckoning where we can let go of all the adaptive survival strategies that kept us safe so we can come back home to our authentic selves. Many people look at their partners and realise they have married one of their parents (metaphorically) and there is a deep loneliness in their marriage because there is an absence of emotional vulnerability.
The strategies that kept you safe as a child stop working. Your hormonal cocktail is shifting to prepare you for a new stage in life where the demands are different. The nervous system demands rest, presence, slower rhythms. Illness and burnout become invitations to re-pattern.
Midlife isn’t the end. It’s the portal to living differently.
For the overachiever it demands you learn a different kind of achievement.
True achievement at midlife isn’t about doing more.
It’s about…
- Regulating your nervous system so that it feels safe for your body to slow down,
- Honouring your body’s pace.
- Learning that you are worthy without proving.
This is where overachievers discover the deepest freedom: The freedom to just be.
The Healing Path
Healing isn’t about working harder. It’s about rewiring how we experience love—in the body, not just the mind. So what are some of things we should be looking at and feeling into to support our midlife transition?
Awareness Without Shame - Noticing the pattern is the first step. Curiosity, not judgment.
Understanding the Roots - Seeing how childhood and cultural context shaped overachievement helps loosen the grip of self-blame.
Reclaiming Your Needs - Allowing yourself to want presence, tenderness, and emotional safety. Not weakness—human truth.
Nervous System Regulation - Letting your body learn that consistency and safety can feel good, not threatening.
Healing Through Secure Relationships - Experiencing emotional availability with therapists, friends, or partners, changes the nervous system ‘wiring’ of the old story.
Redefining Self-Worth - Untangling worth from doing. Learning to be loved for who you are, not what you achieve.
Choosing Differently - Over time, you stop chasing unavailability and start allowing in steady, nourishing love.
I cannot stress enough how hard it can be for some people to slow down. Their survival strategy has been using their brain for excellence to keep them safe for many, many years.
Overachievers often think healing means doing more. But in truth, healing is about doing less, connecting to presence, feeling more and learning to feel safe in your body with slowness and doing only a little.
It’s about coming home to the parts of you that were never seen, and finally letting love land.