You know, something I've learned doing this podcast over the last year or so is that my family members, they all have a pretty sharp wit, for example. They all love to really razz me about my home studio setup.

Wait is that an irorning board behind you? Yes.

Yes Did you know that I'm n expert ironer?

Actually, I did know that. That I did know. There's a lot I don't know. But that I did know.

Because I've been ironing your clothes since you were like a kid.

That's right. That's right.

That's. That's the. That's the thing about having a little brother.

That's Suneel. And when I call him little brother, I really mean it. He's a full ten years younger than me, which means I'm Gen X, and he's basically on the cusp of being a millennial. In many ways, I've been like a third parent to him.

By the way, I changed a lot of diapers. Just so you know, I was a masterful diaper changer by the time I had my own kids because of you. So thank you. I guess.

You know, I actually think I do remember you like literally changing one of Sage's diapers and looking at me and saying, you know, I thought a lot about you over the past few days.

The thing about having a sibling that much younger is that they sort of become a benchmark of time, meaning that anyone that's his age or younger, they're still a kid in my mind. But of course, now he's all grown up. He's 44 years old. He's a successful CEO, he's a bestselling author. He's a renowned public speaker. He has a full family life. He has a wife, Lena, two daughters, Serena and Sammy, my nieces. I'm proud of the life that he's built for himself. But here's the thing. Above all those fancy titles he stole my little brother, someone that I can talk to about anything at any time. And even when life gets in the way and we go weeks without connecting, it's never hard to pick it right back up where we left off.

You mentioned to me one time when we were on the beach, remember us taking a walk together and you're like, Hey, you know, there are a lot of shortcuts to our conversations. We're always able to sort of kind of get to things a little bit quicker. And and I think that that's like, as I'm getting older, realizing how exceedingly rare that is in life is when you have somebody, whether it be a sibling or whether it be a friend. But it's not it's very rare to have somebody that you can just have those sort of shortcuts with. And so it is an honor to have a short conversation with you today.

As we're exploring the topic of aging better on this season of the podcast, I've been thinking a lot about the last ten years of my life. Our mid-forties. Early fifties. We often think of that as middle age midlife. And in fact, the oldest millennials, well, they're now 42 years old, so they are entering the stage of life as well. But experts say that this generation, which has long been stereotyped as young, spoiled, entitled. Well, they are starting to experience middle age much differently. And their parents and their grandparents did. So today, I'm going to ask my own brother, Suneel. He's right on the edge, that millennial generation, what midlife looks like for him.

How am I truly going to be measuring myself? Right? How am I truly going to be looking at what my definition of success is? And it's very different. It's very different than than the way that I looked at it before.

Plus, a researcher who's been studying aging is going to tell us why millennials may may have a lot more to be stressed about as they enter this crucial time of life, this term midlife crisis. It's always been a mysterious thing to me. So today I get to find out what that really means.

The midlife crisis is, I think, a myth, or at least overblown. And so -

Thank God!

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.

How old do you feel?

I feel like I'm in my thirties right now.

Like ten years younger.

Yeah, about ten years younger.

I feel like I'm in my thirties too, so we're like the same age.

That's so funny. Of course. I'm ten years old. You're 20 years old. You always gotta outdo me.

That's my brother Suneel. Again, he's 44. We are really close. We talk all the time. But the thing about a podcast is that this format makes for conversations you might not otherwise have. Like figuring this out. Is my little brother really happy this decade of life?

I was thinking to myself today that I'm in my forties now. My forties have were generally better than my thirties. My thirties were better than my twenties. My twenties were better than, you know, ten through 20 teenage years. There was only one time in my life where I felt like it didn't work that way. And that was I don't think that my teenage years, you know, just give or take 10 to 20 or better than zero through ten. I felt like I hit a slump during that time.

He didn't have to explain. In fact, that was one of the shortcuts that close family and friends have. What he's describing was a truly formative time for our entire family. You see, my dad had had crushing chest pain. One day it seemed to come out of the blue, and then all of a sudden, our lives became a blur. I was the one who called 911. And I still have a hard time to this day imagining the conversation that I must have had. I think my dad is having a heart attack come quick. That's what I said. He was only 47 at the time.

I was 11 years old when he was when he had his triple bypass, quadruple bypass surgery, you know, And that was you know, that was one of those situations where everything sort of changed. I think that, you know, having an operation like that is different today than it was back then. You know, it seems like it was just a massive, massive ordeal at that at that time. And it was. But I think part of it was because he was so young. And so I think that you might have a better sense of this than I do. But I always felt like there was a bit of shame that that sort of came with that, where I think we we didn't we stopped being as social as we as we had before we stopped interacting. And and I think in a lot of ways, mom and Dad sort of wanted to kind of go into their shell a little bit during that time. That was that was sort of the the one side of it. But the other side of it that was much more positive was that they really started to develop some very healthy habits during that time. Like, I kind of assumed, I don't know if this was right for me to assume or not. I was 11 years old, but I kind of assumed that Dad was kind of on his last leg at that time.

And I was curious, did you think he might not survive this?

I did, you know. And, you know, there was no Internet back then, so I wasn't going online and Google searching this, but it was like there was kids at school that would talk about their grandparents and they're like, Oh, well, if he hadn't had a surgery like that. I mean, he's got he's got a few years to live, you know, like, I remember like people telling me that and believing it, you know, I'm like, wow. I mean, that is like Dad's on his way out. And, you know, I think that watching him sort of turn that around me, like in retrospect, may be one of the most inspiring things that I've ever really witnessed.

You know, I never really heard Sunil speak that way about our father or really understood the inspiration he took from my father. At the same time, he was thinking my father might die. See, Senior was just a little kid when all this happened. I was already out of the house.

You know, even though you were out of the house. By the time that I was like six years old, we still had these these really important moments throughout my childhood. And as I got as I got older and I was trying to figure things out, you were the person that I sort of went to all the time when I was at these critical, critical moments. I mean, we would talk all the time, but it was kind of like, Dude, I'm lost, and I don't know exactly what to do. You know, you're always the call of, listen, you know, I just and this isn't working Whenever I'm doing right now, it's just not working. And I need to reboot things. I need to reset. And you were always the one to sort of talk me through those moments.

What are some of your your memories of those early years when you were still, I guess, you know, teen preteens sort of timeframe and I was ten years older. How would you look back on that time in our lives?

It's so funny because I look when I when I imagine those moments, I see you as so old. Like I see you as I see you as like this. Just old, like wise man. And now I realize you were 20 years younger than I am now, you know, and and it's just it's hard for me to sort of bring all this together in my mind sometimes. Time is such a funny. Yeah, such a funny thing. But for me, you know, you seem so certain and you seem so like you seemed like you knew exactly what was happening. There's always like, there was always a confidence. There was always a. You know, there was always a a grounded as what I would say, grounded ambition. You know, like you you wanted things you wanted and you knew that you had sort of, I think, big sights set for your life, but you were always very grounded in the way that you went about that. And I always found that to be kind of very inspirational, especially because, you know, when it when mom and dad would compare the two of us, they were just kind of like, Oh, my God, look at Sanjay. What the hell are you doing with your grades and with your lice? You know, and but and so they wanted me to admire you because you were smart. And I did. And they wanted me to marry you because you achieved. And I did. But what I admired more than that was that you had done all of these things and you had this character about you that you know more than anything else. That's what I wanted.

Okay, that was really nice. That was humbling. And I'm going to keep that audio clip forever. But most of all, I know that Sunil, like all of us, had seen his fair share of ups and downs in life, and I was just truly grateful that I could be there when he needed me and that I'm still going to be there as he enters middle age.

I always sort of feel that you can turn things around and, you know, I have my I have my months where I'm like, Oh my God, I'm just eating terribly and just like, not like just really not doing the, you know, the sticking to the habits that I know put me in a good place. But and I've been I think like a lot of, you know, I guess middle aged men, middle aged people generally, where we sort of have our swings, you know, where all of a sudden I'm like, oh my God, I got like, we're the where the hell that is? Like love handles. Like all of a sudden just like, emerge from. And I'm like, and so then like, now and I think you can go in one or two directions, right? You can be like, Oh, wow, that's it. This is life, you know, such is the case. Or you can be like, Hey, let me let me actually let me actually turn things around. I think that having seen dad story, there's no way for me to believe that you can't actually turn things around.

First of all, do you think of yourself as middle aged?

I didn't until your producer reached out to me and said, We would like to talk to you about middle aged lifestyle.

Did you have a certain perception before this time frame of what middle age would be like?

I guess I thought a lot about where I wanted to be by middle age. You know, I sort of had this kind of, you know, I guess, thing that I felt like I was chasing, which is that, you know, by the time that I'm middle aged, I want to be I want to have a certain level of success, whether it manifests itself with, you know, status or job or and, you know, wealth, all these sort of things. And I guess I, I always sort of kind of, you know, imagined that life was going to look a certain way when I was middle age. And that was sort of my best kind of perception of that. But along the way that things really changed. And I guess the way they changed for me is that I started to kind of realize that like. You know, with lot of luck. I was getting those things. I was getting I was getting some success. I was getting the titles. I was getting, you know, enough money to take care of my family. And it was it wasn't that that stuff was bad, but it just wasn't necessarily was it necessarily sort of, I guess, filling me up in the way that I expected it to. And so I guess, you know, I started to kind of re-orient on how am I truly going to be measuring myself, Right? How am I truly going to be looking at what like my definition of success is? And it's very different. It's very different than than the way that I looked at it before. I mean, the best way I can describe it is I really do think of like I do think that there is an outer success in an inner success. Right. And if you consider outer success to be status and wealth and, you know, you know all those other things in that bucket, and then you have inner success, which is joy. And it's, I think, a sense of meaning and maybe personal growth. I would put it to that bucket. My mistake for a long time was in believing that outer success would somehow lead to inner success. And it didn't. Never. Right. I guess at some point in time and this didn't happen with the flick of a switch, I started to reverse the flow and I started to sort of take a flier on this idea of, if I can begin with inner success, then. Eventually I had a successful following. And one of the things that has been, I think, instrumental for me over the past few years has been really starting to focus more on energy instead of time. Like I feel like. To me, I was constantly trying to crush as much time into a given day. How do I optimize my schedule in a way that's just masterfully getting as much done as I possibly can, squeezing in as many things as I possibly could do. And I started to kind of back off from that and start to realize that it's not about the number of hours that I can put towards a day, but it's really about the quality of energy that I can bring to each hour, whether it be with work, whether it be with family. One of the things I do now is that I'm constantly taking short breaks throughout the day, constantly, and I try to adopt what I call the 55 five model, which is that for every 55 minutes of work, whenever possible, I'm building in just 5 minutes of relaxation, 5 minutes of break, leave my phone behind, go to some push ups, go take a walk, you know, go hang out. Like, just do something to reset myself and constantly doing that. Right. And for the first time, when I when when I can stay disciplined with that. I actually can feel as much energy at the end of the day as I did at the beginning of the day, which was in the past, completely unheard of.

As you can hear, my little brother is full of a lot of wisdom nowadays. He's the one teaching me. So I think that's such a great idea. I think it's something we can all try. Life can get really, really busy, especially for parents as they hit midlife. It can be hard to step back. It can be hard to take a breath and really prioritize the things that we care about. For a lot of people, so Neil and me included. It's mostly about trying to find that quality time with our children.

When Sabrina is out of the house. I'm going to be how old? I'm going to be 50, but 56 years old, right? You know, if Serena ever leaves the house.

She likes her parents.

But if she does graduate from high school and goes to college, the way that you and I did shall be 56 years old. Right. That's two years older than you are right now. Yeah. You're. You're freakin doing triathlons, right? So, like, it's just a different mental model because I think maybe looking at the way that mom and dad were or maybe other people that we sort of grew up with and their parents, I always just assumed that when the kids left the house, how was going to be old? You know, there wasn't going to be much left ahead. And now I kind of realize that maybe, maybe I can do a triathlon. Maybe it's just really going to end up being the beginning of an exciting new phase.

You know, I did not have somebody in my life who was ten years older. I'm just wondering, have you looked at my life and said, okay, you know, it's like a weather forecast. You know, I got a little bit of a weather forecast having a brother who's ten years older.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And like, I think the forecast is like sunny and 75. You know, it's really good. I mean, you know, I really do. I think that you have been able to. I think create this. This life where I think you you know, it's so funny. We talk about balance. Balance is a word that is used very often. Balance is hard. It's really, really hard. Right. And the fact that you've been able to sort of pull together, you know, in somehow keep in this equilibrium of being a great father and a great husband. But to do all the things that you've been able to do as well professionally and and keep your health in, you know, in great in great shape where you're doing, you know, races. And it's just it really is, I think, the epitome of this this you know, there's this balance that I think that, you know, I believe is is is is possible. You know, we were talking earlier about dad and when I'm out of shape, I'm like, well, there was dad's turnaround story and I can do it as well. Right. I think of you in very much the same way, which is like, wow, Like if I'm having a tough time bringing things into balance, I only need to look at my big brother and know that it's all possible. I love our conversations. You know, they they really, really matter to me. This is no exception.

Thank you for doing it with me, little brother. And by the way, like I said, you're gonna be around a lot longer than I am. So, you know, you've got a lot riding on it. You got to take care of the whole family. After I'm gone, it's going to be you.

Gotta get my pushups in.

Your pushups in a hundred a day. All right. Thanks, little brother.

I love you, brother.

Love you, brother.

So what'd do you think of that? Just a chat between two Gupta brothers, two middle aged brothers. That's weird to say out loud, but I wanted to share some of that because I think my brother's story is such a good example of how we can think differently about middle aged. It doesn't have to be a time of crisis. Doesn't even have to be a time of uncertainty. It can be a period of reinvention, of reframing, really drilling down on what's important to us. It's also a great time to try new things and maybe even discover new passions. And it's also time to get really serious about our health. The things that you could get away with in your twenties, in your thirties. Not so easy anymore, especially for millennials.

There's been recent research showing that millennials have greater cardio metabolic problems, higher inflammation, more depression.

We'll be right back. Now back to Chasing Life.

We're going streaking!

That's a clip from the 2003 movie Old School. You remember this? It's that scene where Will Ferrell's character, Frank, is at a college party, probably having a little too much fun. Thing is, he's not a college student. He's a grown man. He just got married, has anxiety about settling down. So what does he do? He joins up with some similarly disillusioned friends to form their own fraternity on a college campus so that they can relive their glory days. Frank's wife, Marissa, played by Perry Reeves, eventually runs into him as he's running completely naked through the street.

Frank get in the car.

Everybody's doing it.

Now.

Okay.

OK so that's a pretty extreme example of a midlife crisis. But you're probably familiar with some of the more common stereotypes people leaving their jobs, their marriages, uprooting their lives, buying fancy cars. It's a well known stage of life that may have hardly any scientific basis.

The midlife crisis is, I think, a myth, or at least overblown and true.

Thank God I was I was worried. I mean, again, I'm probably way past midlife as defined by most people, but still, I. I didn't have one. So I was thinking, is it still coming or. Like, what's what's the deal?

Oh, no, you are still in midlife.

Oh, gosh. Okay.

That's Nancy Sin. She's an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She studies how stress impacts the aging process.

So this idea of a midlife crisis really came from psycho analytic thinking back in the sixties and seventies. And it was really centered on men. And it was this anxiety about aging, about your eventual mortality and having to reconcile with that. And that's leading to men making some major changes in their lives. But there's been research on trying to understand whether a midlife crisis actually exists.

It's pretty fascinating research. There's been this ongoing survey of U.S. residents aged 25 to 74. They were first interviewed nearly 30 years ago in 1995. And the bottom line, Professor Allen says, is that the survey shows that most people do not experience what we traditionally think of as a midlife crisis.

That work has found that when you ask people, they often will say about like 25% of people who are middle aged might think that they've had some major event. That was a midlife crisis. But if you really probe them about it, some of these events are things that could have happened at any point during one's life. So divorce, getting an illness, losing a loved one, losing one's job. And when you really ask people, they actually these events they feel didn't happen because of their fear of aging. So it's really estimated that maybe about 10 to 20% of people truly have something that might be defined as the midlife crisis.

And on top of that, it's not even clear when middle age starts. So quick question. When do you think midlife occurs? When are we truly middle aged?

Oh, it depends on who you ask. Often people think it begins around 40 and ends around 60 or 65. But if you ask a younger person, like I often do this in my classes, I'll ask undergraduate students, When do you think a person enters midlife? And young people might say thirties or 40. But if you ask an older person, an older person might say, you enter midlife around 50. But in part, I want to move away from just like this emphasis on chronological age and think more about the social roles that people occupy during midlife. Like, that's one of the ways that we can really define midlife is like, what are the responsibilities that people have and what are their lives look like?

I want you to think about that for a second. What kind of responsibilities does someone in midlife have? For me it is husband, father of three teenage daughters, son of aging parents. My career as a surgeon and a journalist. And did I mention I have three dogs as well to throw into the mix? It's a lot to deal with. But here's what surprised me. Midlife might be harder for Sunil than it was for me or our parents.

Middle adulthood has become more stressful in more recent years. And so there's been research from the midlife in the United States study where they compared middle adulthood among adults back in the 1990s, which was a period of relative economic prosperity and compared that to adults in the post Great Recession era. And so for the more recently, these adults after the Great Recession had more health problems, had greater psychological distress, despite being more educated and also had greater financial instability. So it really seems like adulthood now is more stressful than it was several decades ago.

Is it expected to be a pendulum swing so that my brother, who's a decade younger than I am, might his midlife be less stressful than mine? Or is this something that's progressively getting more stressful?

It seems to be progressive, and this is due to this backdrop of societal factors like rising health care costs, rising education costs, greater student loan debt among millennials, the difficulty in buying housing.

So again, millennials are now starting to enter middle age, depending on how you define it. This is a generation that, like Gen Z has long been stereotyped young, spoiled, self-obsessed. They're the ones accused of bringing about the end of various industries. Cable TV, the traditional taxi and Professor Sin, who by the way, is a millennial herself, says this group is finding that middle age and the milestones that usually come with it look very different than they did for previous generations. Here's some context. The three bedroom house their parents may have had by the time they were in their early thirties now seems out of reach for someone who graduated with mountains of student debt and lived through the Great Recession only then to be hit with inflation not seen in 40 years.

Besides worrying about square footage, there's low inventory, sky high prices and bidding wars and now rising mortgage rates.

They've dealt with global political instability, a once in a generation pandemic changing climate, vanishing generational wealth. It's left some millennials feeling like they're not in control of how these crucial years are playing out for them. And maybe because of all of that. A higher share of millennials are staying single compared to previous generations and choosing not to have children at all. Professor Senn studies how huge stress events like the ones I just mentioned can impact our health and how we age. And let me be clear, it's not just the major life stuff like divorce and disease and death, but also smaller daily stressors like problems at work, friction with the parent, that kind of stuff that can really start to stack up in midlife.

There is so much research showing that your stress in early adulthood and middle adulthood really sets the stage for aging. And for millennials, it's particularly important to talk about in the context of millennials, because we as a demographic group are the largest living generation. You know, so there are more millennials than there are baby boomers alive right now. And that means that as millennials age, we will have a massive impact on health care, on economics and and society. And there's been recent research showing that millennials have greater cardio metabolic problems, higher inflammation, more depression. So that really poses some great burden and a lot of challenges as millennials age.

And to make things even more complicated, middle aged means caring for their own kids and older relatives at the same time. It's the true sandwich time of life.

But it also at the same time means that middle aged adults are really the bridge between different generations. And so it is immensely stressful but at the same time hopefully rewarding.

I imagine this is a very personal thing for for a lot of people, like how they think about their own aging, how they define, as you say, midlife, you know, all of that, the relationships, intergenerational. I just think it's really interesting to think about this stage of life with people have trepidation. I think going into midlife, I think some people have talked about this inverted you curve where you are happiest young, young in life and then you're happiest again when you get older in life. But that middle part's just just challenging. And I'm just trying to define it better for myself and for people.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, I. That inverted you curve for emotions or life satisfaction. I feel like it doesn't actually explain everything. When you think about control beliefs, like how much we feel in control of our lives, which is a huge predictor of mental and physical health. Those control beliefs tend to be much higher among people in their middle adult years. So people are feel more in control in terms of their work. They're often contributing to the next generation so that generate activity with mentoring younger colleagues, with raising children, for example. And these control beliefs are really important. And so when I think about psychological well-being, I, I'm not thinking just of happiness and stress, but also what's your sense of purpose? Do you feel that you're living a life that is meaningful?

I think that's such a such a good point. I think that's maybe one of the most most inspiring sort of things I've heard in terms of how you look at midlife. What about when you get older, though, and you're no longer working, you're retired from your professional life, Does your sense of purpose and all these things that you're talking about then diminish? And is that is that correlated with happiness or lack thereof?

Not necessarily, because older adults we know are the backbone of the volunteering workforce. And so I think people naturally try to engage in activities to the extent that they are physically and cognitively able to. People try to foster the their sense of purpose and to give back to the next generation. So so with older adults, I don't think it's a dark period at all. Older adults are actually happier.

That is really refreshing to hear. Even with all the things that are so out of our control, there is so much we can do to fill our later years with fulfilling activity and a sense of purpose. But Professor Sin does give an important caveat. It doesn't mean that all of the daily stress is just magically wiped away as we get older.

Just being a very active person means that you're going to be exposed to both stressors and positive events. So there has been research done on middle aged adults who report few or no stressors, and they do differ from the typical adult. So. So this like 10% of the sample from the midlife in the United States study, they reported no stressors at all across a one week period. But they also tended to not have as much social connection. So that's I think that's the downside of trying to avoid stress or not having enough stress is that you might not be challenged and you might not have more of those opportunities that bring you purpose in your life.

Again, as you're talking, I'm thinking about my own. Like, how would I write my own stress? I certainly wouldn't say that I have no no stressors. But I do think that things that I used to really let bother me don't bother me as much. But I think some of that just comes maybe with your own maturity in life, you know, and just sort of recognizing what is a big deal and what is not a big deal. And when you're younger, you it's harder to navigate that. But maybe you just have to go through these things in order to recognize that they either were or were not as big a deal as you thought they were. Mm hmm.

It's that life experience is so valuable. And there's been research done comparing younger and older adults, even when they're exposed to the same stressor, the older adult is less likely to attend to the negative aspects of the situation where their attention might be more drawn to positive stimuli. And and older adults are more likely to just kind of let things pass compared to a younger person who whereas a younger person might really exacerbate the situation.

If you wanted to, to accelerate that quality of your life, the ability to focus on the good aspects of a situation and minimize the bads. Can you teach that? Can you learn that, or is that just life experience?

Well, I think the best way is life experience. But I know as a psychologist, I'm supposed to say you can teach that. And in fact, I have done research on what I call positive psychology interventions. They're now called positive activity interventions or wellbeing interventions where you can teach people to build up the skills for enhancing their gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, strengthening their relationships, and teach people how to deal with stress better. But I think it's not just about like emotion regulation, but it's also the fact that life is different for you than it is for your brother. Even with similar circumstances, for someone you know, as they get older, the kinds of stressors that they experience are going to be different than for a younger person. And it's also the case that as you get older, you might. So those who are kind of at the peak of midlife, you have more resources for dealing with stress and that's why things matter less.

I'm going to ask a question to Nancy now instead of Professor Sin. This is just your opinion. What is the best time of life, do you think?

Yeah, it's so hard to say, but I'm going to say where I am right now. I am so looking forward to my 50 years now.

There you go. See, I'm just glad I could do that for you. That's great.

These conversations with Professor Sin, with my brother Suneel, I think they've really unlocked something for me. As I near my mid-fifties. There is so much more that I can do that I can experience. Middle age doesn't have to be a middle or the beginning of the end. Instead, it can be the start of something new and exciting and fulfilling. For those who haven't reached middle age yet, it can be a really powerful way to think about what's coming down the road next week. On Chasing Life When aging and beauty standards collide. Why one TV star says, Why do we have to choose?

Understand the difference between what you truly should be as a person and what is marketing. They're just trying to sell you something.

We'll be back next Tuesday. Thanks for listening.

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by David Rind, Xavier Lopez and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. Also, a special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealyy and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health.