Marny Lishman is a psychologist, and she still ended up in a shopping centre too tired to choose a box of cereal.
You are more tired than you used to be, more irritated at the people around you and at the world in general, and still waiting for the part where life gets easier.
She wrote Crisis to Contentment during her own midlife fog, the stretch she calls feeling like a grumpy version of Ben Affleck. The research she cites has happiness running in a U shape across 132 countries, bottoming out at 47.2. Grumpy men are her favourite clients.
She offers no quick way through. Her first instruction to a man who has hit the wall is the least heroic one going: stop, take the leave, do nothing. The ones who stop, she says, rarely go back to the life that wore them out.
Her wisdom for a middle-aged man: grab a backpack, leave the phone, and go.
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Meet the Guest
Dr Marny Lishman
Dr Marny Lishman is a Doctor of Psychology, author, speaker and mindset coach based in Australia. She spent more than 15 years in clinical practice across private practice, government health prevention programs and professional training, and she is a regular contributor to Australian radio and television on wellbeing, resilience and midlife psychology.
She has written four books: Burnout to Brilliant, A Beautiful Mess, Crisis to Contentment, and Only You: The Unexpected Gift of Being Alone. The last two grew out of her own experience, the first from her midlife fog and the second from learning to be content on her own.
On tape she describes herself as a mental health professional and a social scientist, and says the part of writing she loves most is the storytelling.
