The Autumn Storm in Your Forties

Why so many women in midlife start asking who they are, what antidepressant data and invisible labour research reveal, and how to weather the season without tearing down the life you built

A storm with a name

Last week the first named storm of the season swept in from the Atlantic over Ireland, Britain and northern France. Storm Austen was announced days in advance. Forecasters tracked it as it formed, gave it a name and issued warnings, so that people could tie down whatever might blow away.

There is something reassuring in that ritual. A storm with a name is a storm you can prepare for.

The storm that reaches many women somewhere in their forties arrives without one. There is no forecast and no warning. It tends to show up on an ordinary weekday: in the car park after a long meeting, at the kitchen table once the house is finally quiet, in a doctor's office where she came for something small and found herself in tears. What it brings is a question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer. Who am I, underneath everything I hold together?

Why your forties feel like the weather

Autumn in a woman's life rarely has a single cause. Several fronts tend to meet at once.

The children are becoming teenagers. They need you less for logistics and more for something harder to define, and the role you knew so well begins to shift beneath you. Your parents are getting older, and their needs are growing. Your career has often reached the point where responsibility is highest and recognition still uncertain. And your body is changing. Perimenopause can begin years before the last period, affecting sleep, mood, concentration and energy.

Each of these on its own is manageable. Together, after two decades of running at full capacity, they create conditions in which something has to give. Very often what gives is the sense of self you set aside in order to keep everything else going.

What the numbers tell us, and what they cannot

There is a figure I return to often. In national survey data collected in the United States between 2005 and 2008, 23% of women aged 40 to 59 were taking antidepressants, more than any other group by age and sex. Data from 2015 to 2018 put the figure for this age group at around one in five. Closer to home, Belgian health data show antidepressant use rising steadily over the past decade, with women using them almost twice as often as men.

These numbers need careful reading, and I want to be precise here. Antidepressants are an effective treatment for many women, and depression is a serious condition that deserves proper medical care.

The perimenopause carries its own biological risk as well. A 2024 meta analysis led by researchers at University College London found that women in perimenopause are around 40% more likely to experience depression than women before this stage. This matters for how low mood in midlife is treated. The UK's national menopause guideline draws a clear distinction. When low mood is linked to the menopause and there is no diagnosis of depression, hormone therapy is one of the recommended options, alongside cognitive behavioural therapy.

Antidepressants have not been shown to help menopausal low mood in that situation. For women with clinical depression, antidepressants remain an important and effective treatment. What women need most is a proper assessment, so that the support matches what is happening in their bodies. If any of this sounds familiar, it is worth raising the menopause directly with your doctor.

What the numbers cannot show is the life that sits behind each prescription. A diagnosis describes symptoms. It says very little about twenty years of being the person everyone else relies on.

The work nobody counts

Much of what women carry through these decades is invisible by design. It happens in the head before it happens in the world. Remembering that the school trip needs a packed lunch. Noticing that a teenager has gone quiet. Knowing when the car is due for its service, which parent needs a call this week, who is upset with whom.

Researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Melbourne measured, in a 2024 study, how this work is divided. They asked 3,000 parents which household tasks requiring mental effort they typically manage. Mothers reported handling 71% of them, fathers 45%. Both groups overestimated their own share, and fathers were far more likely to believe the load was evenly split. The work is unequal, and it is also hard to see from the outside.

The cost of carrying it shows up elsewhere. Psychologists Lucia Ciciolla and Suniya Luthar studied this kind of work in 393 mothers with children living at home. A large majority said they alone were responsible for keeping the household running. The heaviest part of that responsibility was ensuring that the children were doing well, and mothers who carried it alone reported more feelings of emptiness and less satisfaction with both their lives and their partnerships.

Emptiness is a striking word. It describes what happens when a person spends years tending to everyone's inner world except her own. The work keeps a family functioning. Because it leaves no visible trace, it rarely earns rest, help or acknowledgement. Over time, the woman doing it can begin to disappear inside her own competence.

Why the question arrives now

Invisible labour accumulates quietly. For a long time, the structure of a busy life holds it in place. Small children need you in obvious, urgent ways, and there is little room to ask what you need yourself.

In the forties, that structure loosens. The urgency of early parenting fades, hormonal shifts lower the threshold for strain, and many women notice for the first time how tired they truly are. The question of who you are is often read as a midlife crisis, something to fix quickly or keep hidden. I see it differently. It is the moment the load becomes visible. The storm shows you what has been under pressure all along.

After the storm: what stays standing

Anyone who has walked outside the morning after a big storm knows the strange clarity of it. Branches are down, leaves are everywhere, and yet you can see further through the trees than you could the day before.

Autumn in a woman's life offers something similar, provided she does not rush to tidy everything back into place. Finding yourself again rarely requires tearing a life down. Most women I speak with have no wish to leave their families or their work. They want to stop carrying all of it alone, and to feel at home in their own lives again.

That begins with a few honest questions. What have I been carrying that was never mine alone? Which responsibilities could be shared, renegotiated or set down? Where did I stop asking what I need? And what would one ordinary week look like if it were designed with me in it?

These are structural questions, and they deserve structural answers. Blame has no place in them. A storm asks for repair, and sometimes for a better design.

This is also where medical care and coaching meet. Hormones can lower a woman's threshold for strain, and treating them well can make a real difference to how she feels. Yet no prescription can redistribute the mental load, renegotiate a role at home or work, or give her back the hours that belong to her. Coaching sits alongside medical care, never in place of it. Its work is to make the invisible load visible, to separate who she is from what she manages, and to redesign the structure of her life so there is room for her in it again.

A closing thought for this season

If this autumn feels heavier than the last, consider that you may be seeing your load clearly for the first time. That clarity is uncomfortable. It is also the point at which change becomes possible.

If you would like to put your own load on paper, the free Invisible Load Audit on my website offers a calm place to start. https://www.kaathelsloot.com/invisible-load-audit

And if this letter spoke to you, share it with a woman who is weathering her own season. Every week my newsletter explores these themes further, and you are warmly invited to join.