The Quiet Midlife: a podcast for men over 40

The male withdrawal is one of the most reliable and least understood phenomena in relationship psychology. The man disappears into himself, or the garage, or he has a sustained interest in looking into the middle distance. Let's explore.

At some point in the middle years, significant numbers of men achieve the things they've always wanted only to discover, with considerable inconvenience, that it doesn't feel the way they expected.

It's the series two finale in which I pull together the threads of what may have appeared to be unrelated topics, but actually weren't. It's also a sneak peek into what's coming for series three.

At some point in the middle years, most British men acquire a paunch. We call it a beer belly, even though many men don't even drink.

Men don't decide on a paunch or agree to it.  It simply arrives, gets bigger and refuses to budge.

Today I want to talk about where it comes from, what it's actually doing,  and —  without any dramatic overhaul required —  what genuinely helps.

It's one of the most common feelings - am I in the right job? So what's preventing you from making the jump? I'm looking at the pros and cons along with something we call the sunk cost fallacy.

You're in your 40s or 50s or older. You've just become a father, or you're well on your way to it.

You're doing all this at an age when most of your colleagues are becoming grandparents. Is this a big mistake?

Actually, no. There are clear advantages to becoming an older father, but only if you know how to embrace them.

In this episode, I'm talking about sex and intimacy in long-term relationships. My approach will be the same as I try to approach everything on this podcast, which is, honestly, without false reassurance, and without the alarming tone that some accounts of this subject seem to feel is appropriate.

The brain surgeon who goes straight to his workshop after a day rummaging inside someone's skull. The train driver who comes home and continues building his model railway. The man who buys a clapped-out Vespa scooter with the single-minded objective of getting it back on the road. What have they got in common? And why do they have a psychological edge over the men who don't?

Although this episode is directed towards late-onset epilepsy in men, something I deal with daily, the content could just as easily apply to any sudden life-changing event that comes out of the blue later in life.

Your brain is one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in the known universe. It is also, when it comes to interpreting your own life, regularly and systematically wrong. Why are men so prone to misinterpreting things? This podcast will shed some light on the processes involved.

The work of addressing shame is not about becoming someone different.

It’s the work of becoming more accurate about yourself, what you are

responsible for, and about the distance between the performance of

invulnerability and the reality of just being a person. 

In this episode, I’m talking about the mind-body connection —  the relationship between psychological health and physical health that most men treat as two separate concerns managed by two separate departments with different managers and different filing systems.

Alcohol,  in the right context,  is one of life's genuine pleasures, and the research seems to support this.  In the wrong context, at the wrong frequency, performing the wrong function is something rather different. And the middle-aged male body is considerably less tolerant of that version than it used to be.