The nervous system changes throughout our lives, and those changes ask something of us, a quiet awareness of what each new stage actually feels like. When you hit your mid-40s, you begin to sense that you are no longer moving through the world the way you once did. The aging process becomes real. You feel it in your body. You catch a wrinkle or a gray hair, and even if you look great for your age, the chemistry inside you is shifting in ways that affect your emotional world directly. One cannot happen without the other. A physical change will ripple into your psychological world, your emotional world, and your overall sense of well-being. What often goes unrecognized is that anxiety can arise simply from a chemical imbalance that is new and unfamiliar.
As we get older, our responsibilities come into sharper focus, and we can both see and feel ourselves aging. In our early 20s, most of us have very little to protect. Then suddenly there is a six-year-old in the house, and that alone introduces an entirely new baseline of anxiety, even when life is going well. We are wired to protect our children, and that vigilance raises our stress levels whether we like it or not. Nobody tells you how relentless it is. Having children increases anxiety exponentially, in ways that vary from person to person. And without a clear understanding of what is happening in our chemistry, we tend to assume our psychological world is the same as it always was, and we blame the wrong things for what is actually a new and unfamiliar anxiety.
What this means, practically, is that the breathing exercises that were always important now become mandatory. As our chemistry shifts, our breathing patterns must shift with it. We have to get honest about the things that are keeping us from landing in the right nervous system, and we have to do something about them.
By the time you hit 50, building new regulatory habits can feel harder than it once did, but it is not impossible. Writing is one. Psychotherapy is another. Developing a spiritual point of view, one that helps shape how we interpret reality, is a third.
We do not come into this world knowing the nature of reality. And not knowing the nature of reality makes everything feel less predictable. That uncertainty, more than most people realize, is one of the quiet engines of anxiety.