How to survive ‘mid-career burnout’: When caregiving, parenting, and growing work duties collide

One Monday morning a little more than a year ago, on her way to present at a board meeting, Sarah Davies, then-head of financial business services at a large U.K. food manufacturer, called her elderly father to check on him. Having not heard from him over the weekend like usual, she’d started worrying. The phone rang and rang. Finally, she got ahold of his neighbor, who then checked on Davies’s father and found that he’d fallen at home. While her neighbors sent for an ambulance, Davies stood in the office stairwell, crying. “What did I do? I went into the bathroom, I washed my face, I went into the board meeting, and I pitched,” Davies, 54, says. She doesn’t remember whether she “fell apart” after the meeting. Her “entire mode of operation” at the time revolved around her “big job,” she says, and her ability to keep it together to manage her team. But the difficulty balancing her personal responsibilities with her professional duties when both had reached fever pitch had begun taking a toll. “I can’t survive in this job,” she thought. Right around that mid-career point—now usually during people’s 40s or 50s—professionals often find themselves pulled in multiple directions. They may have to care for both aging parents and young children, juggling doctors’ appointments and after-school sports with increasingly demanding careers. Having done their jobs for a couple of decades, they’re high enough on the corporate ladder to be managing teams and carrying extra weight. In the past, this time used to signal that the joy and relaxation of retirement awaited on the horizon. But now, with life expectancies increasing (and financial pressures along with them), these extra-stressed professionals sit firmly mid-career—looking at decades more of work ahead. “We know from happiness data that these can be some of the most unhappy decades,” says Lynda Gratton, a London Business School professor focusing on the future of work. In her research, she’s learned how workers in this age g