How to Get Out of a Midlife Slump: Why Design Thinking Works

Nothing's wrong. So why does it feel like everything is?

Somewhere in your forties or fifties, you might have noticed a question starting to follow you around: Is this it?

That's the midlife slump. It isn't usually a dramatic crisis. Researchers who study midlife find the full-blown crisis is fairly rare – what's common is a low, persistent flatness. Things are fine. You're just not.

I call it the "Is this it?" Dilemma, and I've coached dozens of senior professionals through it. Here's the good news: there's a proven way out. It's the same method that gave us the computer mouse, a children's MRI scanner shaped like a pirate ship, and meant we could stop queuing for tax discs in the Post Office. It's called design thinking – and it works on lives as well as products.

Why the usual fixes don't get you out of a midlife slump

When most of us feel stuck, we reach for one of two fixes. We try to think our way out – lists, journals, staring at the ceiling at 3am, spreadsheets of pros and cons. Or we're tempted to blow it all up – quit, move, start again.

Neither tends to work, and there's a good reason why. A midlife slump isn't a simple problem with a right answer waiting to be found. It's what the design theorist Horst Rittel called a wicked problem.

Rittel coined the term for messy, interlinked problems like urban planning – ones with no true-or-false solution, only better or worse ones.

Sound familiar? Your career is tangled up with your finances, your relationships, your health and your sense of who you are. Change one and the others shift too. There's no single "right" next move to figure out. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach Stanford's Designing Your Life course, make the same point: there isn't one right life for you, but many good ones you could design.

That's why thinking harder rarely works – you're trying to solve for an answer that doesn't exist. And blowing it up is a huge, expensive bet on a single impulse (that rarely turns out well).

Design thinking was built for exactly this kind of problem.

You already use design thinking every day – you just don't know it

Design thinking is a problem-solving method that starts with people, not solutions. You understand what someone really needs, reframe the problem, generate lots of options, then test them with quick, cheap prototypes. You'll recognise its results.

The computer mouse. In 1980, Steve Jobs asked a tiny Palo Alto design firm, Hovey-Kelley, to turn Xerox's $400, easily broken mouse into one that cost a fraction of that. Dean Hovey built the first prototype over a weekend from a roll-on deodorant ball and a butter dish. That firm later became IDEO, the company that popularised design thinking (and one of the people on Apple's side of that project, Dave Evans, went on to co-write Designing Your Life).

A scanner that stopped scaring children. Doug Dietz designed MRI machines for GE Healthcare and was proud of them – until he watched a frightened little girl crying on her way into one. Many children needed sedation just to lie still. He didn't redesign the machine. He redesigned the experience, turning the scanner into a pirate ship or a space adventure. The need for sedation fell dramatically.

The tax disc. Remember queuing at the Post Office with your MOT certificate and insurance documents for a paper circle to stick on your windscreen? Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of lastminute.com, sorted that headache for you. As the UK government's Digital Champion, she recommended rebuilding hundreds of government websites into GOV.UK, with services redesigned around what citizens needed rather than how departments were organised. The paper tax disc went in 2014. 

Dyson's 5,127 prototypes. James Dyson spent around five years building prototype after prototype of his bagless vacuum, nearly going broke along the way. His own-brand machine finally launched when he was 46. Every failed prototype taught him something the last one couldn't.

None of these breakthroughs started with an obvious answer. They started with a better question – and a willingness to try some things.

Why design thinking works on a midlife slump

The method that redesigned the mouse and the tax disc can redesign your next chapter. Here's why it works so well – in four principles.

1. Watch what you do, not just what you say

Designers learn more from what people actually do than from what they say they want.

Apply that to yourself. Which meetings do you dread? What do you read when nobody's watching? When does time disappear? Your behaviour is full of clues about needs you haven't put into words yet.

2. Reframe the problem before you solve it

Doug Dietz didn't need a better MRI scanner. He needed a less frightening experience. Most breakthroughs start by questioning the question.

Design pioneer Bill Moggridge put it neatly: stop designing nouns and start designing verbs. Not "design a better chair" but “how might we help people feel more relaxed and comfortable?" In midlife terms, "what job should I do next?" is a noun. "How might I spend my days feeling useful and alive?" opens far more doors.

3. Explore lots of options before you choose

When we're stuck, we tend to grab the first plausible escape route. Design thinkers deliberately do the opposite. They never go with their first idea. They widen out first – generating many possibilities – and only then narrow down. Tim Brown, former CEO of IDEO, the firm that popularised design thinking, warns that if you haven't explored lots of options, your answer is likely to be timid or a copy of someone else's.

You don't have one possible future. You have several. The first job is to see them.

4. Prototype small, learn fast

This is the heart of it. Designers don't bet everything on one big idea. They build quick, rough, cheap versions and see what happens. Brown is clear that a successful prototype isn't one that works perfectly – it's one that teaches you something. 

That's exactly why the "Is this it?" Dilemma keeps you stuck. You know you don't want to blow up your entire life. But you can't figure out what to change to make it better. A small experiment lets you learn without staking everything.

The research on career change backs this up. Herminia Ibarra of London Business School studied people who reinvented their working lives for her book Working Identity. They didn't plan and then execute – they tested and learned, acting their way into a new way of thinking. Anne-Laure Le Cunff turns this into a habit in Tiny Experiments: make a simple pact to try something for a set period, then review what you learned. Curiosity replaces pressure. Data replaces guesswork.

The 5% Plan: small enough to start this week

Most of us already know what we should do. Brown calls this the knowing–doing gap – and design thinking is built to bridge it.

Take eating more healthily. You already know what it looks like. Of the 20-odd meals you'll eat next week, could you make one of them healthier? That's my 5% Plan in action. Make one small change next week, then another the week after. Over six months, those small changes can make a real difference to almost any area of your life.

If it's your career that feels stuck, could you find 15 minutes a day, Monday to Friday, to do something about it? That's 75 minutes a week – about 5% of the time most of us already have outside of weekday working hours.

It's not a leap. It's a step small enough that you'll actually take it. And like any good prototype, each small step teaches you something about the next one.

What could 15 minutes look like?

• A coffee with someone doing work you're curious about

• Researching a course in something you've always wondered about

• Volunteering for a project at work that stretches a different muscle

• Noting, every evening for a fortnight, which work activities left you feeling most energised – and when you felt most flat

Where to start

You don't need to have the answer to get out of a midlife slump. You need a better question and a small experiment.

That's the thinking behind U-Reimagined, the design-thinking approach I use with clients. We start by working out where your fulfilment is really leaking – because the obvious symptom is rarely the real cause. Then we reframe, explore your options and prototype your way forward, one low-risk experiment at a time.

If you'd like to see where to begin, take the free Midlife Fulfilment Snapshot. It takes about two minutes and shows you which part of your life is draining you most – so your first experiment is aimed at the right thing.