The Psychology of your 20s - 91. Overcoming milestone anxiety in our 20s

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

In our 20s, we face an increasing sense of pressure to reach certain important, life milestones, such as getting into our first relationship, graduating university, finding our career path, getting engaged and so many more. When we don't meet the expectations or the timeline that society gives us, we can feel like failures and begin to self sabotage or ruminate on our faults and flaws. This week we're going to explore the psychology behind milestone anxiety - the experience of stress and unease when we haven't achieved certain milestones by a certain age - why it occurs, the influence of social comparison and conditioning, how we can combat this feeling, practice self compassion and be excited by our own journey through life, and our 20s. Listen now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode, another topic.

On this lovely Friday, we're going to discuss the concept of milestone anxiety, which is essentially the fear we get that we are not reaching certain life milestones, such as graduating, getting into a relationship, getting a first job, getting engaged, having children, as quick as those around us, and when society expects us to reach these milestones. It's a feeling that I have been struggling with recently, and I know for a fact that I am not alone. So let's talk about it today.

Malstone anxiety, this phrase, it's actually one that has been around for a while, but it's been repurposed from developmental psychology. It's usually used to describe the anxiety that parents get when their children do not reach certain developmental milestones like walking or speaking when they should be. But when we become adults, a whole new set of societal or developmental milestones arise. And it's not our parents that are fearing for us anymore,

although I'm sure they are at times, but it's us. we are the ones who are now in control, we become the primary adult in our lives, and we have to carry that anxiety that perhaps we are falling behind our peers. Milestone anxiety, it becomes a really serious fear and stressor for a lot of us in our 20s. I really wanted to do this episode this week because of a message that I received from one of our listeners who wrote in to me on Instagram about how she had never had a boyfriend. She's 25 and she spoke so candidly about the anxiety that this has caused her, especially as all of her friends are getting engaged or moving in with the people that they're dating. And I really

felt for her and so many others who I'm sure are in the same boat in some capacity or another. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to conform to this societally ingrained timeline of where we should be when. And also to achieve so much at a young age. And I think that's causing a lot of damage to those of us in our 20s because, well, our paths are never going to be the same. And they're definitely not going to be the same as people we see bragging on social media or the same as our parents or older generations. which is where a lot of these expectations originated. I think additionally, happiness doesn't always come from a conventional way of living or doing things the normal way.

There are so many people who don't graduate university until they're in their 50s, who don't meet the love of their life until they're 70, who don't get on a plane until they're in their 30s or 40s. And we need to cultivate a greater acceptance of the many different paths people have through life, instead of feeling this intense pressure to be meeting certain milestones at certain points. The thing is, though, we can realize this diversity,

we can realize this nuance, and still feel an incredible amount of pressure or anxiety that we are missing out, or we are going too slow, or that we are quote-unquote failures because of the impact of milestone anxiety. So today I want to break down the origins, the causes and the details of this experience, how to push back against this feeling and respect your own journey and your own path through

your 20s, but also through life. And for all of us out there who are feeling like we are failing or we are falling behind and missing out on key milestones, I want to provide some solaceous. and some reassurance and some answers for why you're going through this reaction and this experience and also how you can find a way forward and not feel so much pressure and not put so much pressure on yourself to be meeting certain expectations that society, your family and even yourself are putting on you. So for all of you out there who are in this boat with me, this episode is for you. I am so excited and without further ado,

I think we should get into it. One of my major inspirations for this episode was none other than the wonderful Millie Bobby Brown. Yes, the same one from Stranger Things. Recently, she announced that at the age of 19, maybe 20, she was engaged. And I think for those of us between the age of 19 to 30 who are unmarried or single, we all kind of took a bit of a deep breath in and maybe had a bit of a bit of a very bit of freak out as the comparison and the milestone anxiety set in. Because, you know, I'm almost 24 and I am

nowhere near dating anyone seriously, let alone getting engaged and then married. And that drop in our stomach is what we're talking about today. The sensation that if there are people out there reaching these massive milestones at that age, we must be doing something wrong. We must be falling behind. And I think that goes hand in hand with a sensation of, will these things ever happen for me? And what happens if they don't? We feel an immense pressure to live up to this intangible but very much real blueprint that society has set out for us around what our lives should look like at a certain age or stage of our life.

Your friends are getting married. Everyone has a partner bit you or receiving promotions, buying houses. graduating or moving to some faraway city and you're not quite there yet. It can feel really terrible and new research has suggested and shown that the pressure to reach certain milestones that we deem as important is increasingly becoming a very real source of anxiety for those of us in our 20s. Between 77 to 83% of people aged 16 to 39, report feeling some pressure to meet certain milestones, such as getting married or having kids, and they feel incredibly trapped and hopeless when they don't. The fact that this is so common and yet rarely spoken about astounds me. But it also

makes a lot of sense why so many of us are feeling this way we're feeling behind in our lives. We have been sold a very traditional idea of what our lives should look like from a young age even if we don't explicitly realize it. It is in every movie we watch in the speeches and the examples given to us by our teachers and our parents, in the people we were told not to be like. it's in the behavior displayed by many of our idols and then as we get older our peers and it goes something like this we graduate high school with good grades we go to college or university we graduate from there we get a good first job great paycheck pick up a partner along the way marriage promotion nice house by 26 or 27 kids by 30 success retirement death that's the way that we were taught it should be

And within all of those chapters, there are these almost micro milestones that we feel like we have to accomplish by a certain age. And interestingly, I think we all have some implicit sense of what those are and we feel the pressure to reach them, such as dating a long-term partner, you know, 24 to 25, graduating on time before 23, certain saving goals, having savings by 22, having a clear idea. of what we want our career to be as early as 21. Very few of us are going to meet every step of that timeline. And yet we still feel so much pressure to do so. Half of the reason that we feel this implicit pressure is because of the standards that have been set by our parents and the generations before us. I don't think that we could ever really find an origin for some of these expectations.

expectations. Some of them are biological, like having kids. Others are caused by religious influences, such as getting married at a certain age and, you know, all of these ideas around purity culture. But some of the other milestones that we feel are pressure to reach, they seem to have just emerged one day, out of the blue, as fact. And regardless of where these milestones and these expectations come from, a lot of us do look to our parents or adult figures as a reference point for what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. But in doing so, we kind of forget that a generation ago, things were really different. It was more acceptable to be married by your very early 20s and to have children by 25. It was also an entirely different economic and financial

climate, you could buy property for like a fifth of the price, more or less. You know, you could buy a house on a working salary even, whereas now we don't have so much of that flexibility and that job security and that financial security. Younger generations, I think, like us in our 20s, the people who I'm sure are listening to this, all this research has shown that we are less likely to own our own homes. We are more. likely to have children later in life. The age that women are having their first child has been steadily increasing for decades. I think it's around 31 now, but back in like the 1950s, it was 22. And essentially, we are achieving these ingrained social milestones at an older age than our

parents and even the generation before them. Things are really different now. They're massively different. We are about to enter a pretty huge recession. Our approach to dating is entirely different and so much less organic with the creation of dating apps. But yet we still feel very much tied down to the same blueprint and timeline and we feel anxious when we stray from what we think is conventional. But we're also increasingly out of place. We feel really out of place as we compare ourselves to others and their success and their path through life. There's also the added pressure, I guess, from friends and family asking us when we're going to settle down, when we're going to get a real job, when we're going to have kids. I'm telling you that if one more family member

at Christmas time asked me if I'm dating anyone seriously, I'm going to explode. Because it's not like I'm avoiding it. It's not like I like feeling like I'm in the slow lane compared to everyone else. But that is essentially the crux of what we're talking about today that we feel so much pressure from all of these different sources to be doing things at a certain time. And if we're not doing that, there is all of this stigma and this pressure and this implicit understanding that we are somewhat of a failure. All of this comes down to milestone anxiety that uncomfortable. That uncomfort comfortable feeling in our gut, the nervous thoughts in our brain telling us that we are not on track, that we haven't done enough. So what exactly is it? What is that feeling? I realized I haven't

really given you a definition yet and I want to get into the psychology a little bit further. So milestone anxiety, it's essentially the pressure to reach traditional life milestones by a certain age. It's a very unique anxiety that is often associated with our 20s and even our 30s, where we feel a real crunch period to get to a certain point in our life based on our reflections and what our parents did and what those around us are doing as well. And when we do not meet those milestones, this results in feelings of restlessness, feelings of unease, stress, low confidence. and anxiety. Importantly, it's not a diagnosable anxiety disorder, although some suggest that it does go hand in hand with a generalized anxiety disorder and even depression, but it's really a term that has been coined recently to describe particularly Gen Z and millennials who are feeling this pressure. And it came from a study in 2002 that really attempted to put a name to a fear

and a new face and a new wave of anxiety that were impacting people between the ages of, you know, 20 to their late 30s. All of these therapists, they were reporting that these people, these young people, were coming in with this new experience that they couldn't quite put their finger on, but it was really common and all of these people were reporting the same things. So these researchers, they went out and they tried to find the correct, term and the correct profile to describe what was going on. They did a groundbreaking study. It was conducted a few years back in the UK and essentially it identified that there were these main

milestones that those between 16 and 30 were most concerned about. And I think a lot of us can relate to these on a personal level. Having children was the number one milestone that people in their 20s felt pressure to reach with almost a third. That's right, a third of us feeling some form of pressure to have children. When I read this, I was actually really surprised because I thought that the main milestone would be marriage or a long-term relationship because partnership does seem to take a precedence over procreation, but no, that's not the case. And when we examine it deeper, I think we do feel this very intrinsic, instinctual pressure to have children, to pass on our genes and to grow the next generation. And that pressure is both external and societal,

but also internal and biological. There is a bit of a deadline to make this happen and deadlines bring dread. It's kind of hard to explain, but I think many of us hit our mid-20s. We start considering fertility. Our frontal lobe kicks into gear. And suddenly we get hit with this vision of what we want from our lives and what we need to do in the next 10 years to get there. And we are so overwhelmed by our expectations and what we want or what we desire that we become paralyzed. I always think of this scene in friends where Rachel turns 30 and she's like, okay, well, I want to have children by 35, which means that I have to be married by 33 because I want to be married by, you know, I want to be married for a couple of years before then, but I want to be engaged

for at least a year and a half and I want to have known the guy for a year and a half. So that means I need to be doing all these things. I need to be setting this plan up right now. And although that's obviously a fictional representation, it's a TV show, I remember watching that scene and being like, I get it. That makes so much sense to me. That is so relatable. And there are some other major milestones as well that can create the same degree of anxiety.

I mentioned one before, but marriage, relationships, these are a huge source of pressure for us because there is this very repetitive idea and fantasy that love is the point of life. It is the reason for living. So without it, we can feel quite meaningless and like we don't have something that is going to make us whole. Additionally, a big focus of our 20s and our various romantic relationships that we have is the pressure to meet your partner. And we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that if we are not and that if we don't have someone, that we're somehow missing out on these experiences, that somehow there's something wrong with us. We are a failure. Everyone else around us has one.

and everyone else around us seems to be meeting the loves of their life seems to be getting engaged and we haven't yet. So what does that say about me? What does that say about us? Another one that I think really deserves mention is going to university, but also things like buying a house, achieving a certain level of career success. All of these are not only inextricably linked to this internalized social narrative, but also what we see others doing, which we know carries an incredible weight because social comparison has such a deep influence on our brain and how we interpret our surroundings. If we see all of these people, particularly those close to us, meeting certain milestones, we inherently look to our own lives and compare.

And when we come up short, I don't really like to say it like that, but when we see that there is a gap between what other people are doing, what other people are achieving, and what we've done with our lives, we feel really terrible about ourselves. And that compounds to create a lot of anxiety. Interestingly, what I find particularly fascinating about milestone anxiety is that very few of us have not experienced it in some way or another. The research proves that the majority of us between 16 and 30 have at some point felt some pressure, some external force to be doing more and to be meeting these goals sooner and sooner. Yet we often endure our shame and our anxiety in silence. It's a very solitary experience, but its prevalence also

shows that most of us are actually not on a conventional path. In some area or another, we are inherently very much worried that we are not meeting the norm. It's very much a shared experience, a shared sensation that is similar for all of us. These are some of the biggest, I would say, indicators or signs of milestone anxiety. If you're listening to this being like, that sounds very, very similar to what I've been going through and to the feelings I've been having. I would like you to listen to these for a second because if you recognize yourself in these, it might be the case that milestone anxiety is something that you're struggling with. First of all, if you are constantly ruminating over the fact that you are not reaching certain milestones

and attributing that to some personal failure that you have, I think that really requires some closer examination. Ruminating is sometimes normal. However, I think when we are worrying too much about the future and whether or not something is going to go right for us, whether we're going to achieve a certain goal or milestone we have in mind, that can be really detrimental. Because the future is not always something we can control. So when we continue to think about it, all we do is experience that worry and anxiety more than once. The future is going to happen regardless of what's happening right now, regardless of what you're worried about, regardless of your milestone anxiety. But the second part of that is attributing it to some personal failure. I think back to that

listener who wrote in, who was really worried that she hadn't had her first relationship yet. Often, instead of thinking about it objectively and reflecting on the fact that dating is really difficult, that your potential partners maybe weren't right for you, that taking your time, and being picky actually statistically does contribute to better long-term relationship outcomes. Instead, we look internally and we try to identify something that's wrong with us as the reason why we haven't met this milestone yet. This can really deeply injure our self-esteem and self-confidence, which further jeopardizes our ability to achieve the milestones and achieve what we deem as important. If you're looking inwards and contemplating the fact that you're a failure,

contemplating some terrible thing about you, contemplating something that you're lacking, that's not healthy and it's also not true. There are a lot of things in your life that you can't control and it's not your fault if things don't turn out the way that you wanted them to. We may also feel a sense of failure that we are falling behind. We start seeing, those around us through a very narrow lens and only recognizing those who have what we don't have. It's called attention or selection bias. It's where our brains only select and pay attention to information that confirms our initial bias, resulting in that bias becoming more deeply ingrained.

If we think that everyone around us has jobs that they love, everyone is buying houses, everyone is finding the people for them, we begin to only see instances in which that is true, resulting in us having a very skewed view of reality, which just serves to reinforce our anxiety. We may also experience a lot of internal pressure within and almost like a revolving carousel of repetitive, negative thoughts, such as, I should have graduated by now. what if I'm not married by 30? Why is everyone else buying property but me? What if I don't have kids?

And these thoughts are on rotation in our brain. This negative cycle can be very hard to break out of, especially when we account for some of the dialogue and rhetoric that may also be coming from our family and broader society. So if you find that when you sit with your thoughts, all you can think about is what you haven't done and the milestones you haven't achieved, it may be that milestone anxiety is the problem. It's the problem and the reason why you're feeling this way.

Other signs include things like excessive worry that other people are judging you, feeling hopeless symptoms of depression, and of course, generalized anxiety, such as fatigue, low motivation, trouble sleeping, muscle tension, irritability, nervousness, nausea, the whole package, all of those things. These physical symptoms, there's a reason why they occur. There's a reason why they arise. And it's because of a number of functions in our brains and our bodies that are designed to respond to threats. And feeling like we're falling behind or worrying about the future are interpreted by our brain as very real threats to our survival. Additionally, I think anxiety can be incredibly subjective and has many of its origins in our emotional cortexes.

So when we magnify something and we continue to focus on how we're falling behind, our minds identify that this must be important for us to respond to. This is an important worry. So it elicits an anxiety response so that we pay attention. And it comes down to one tiny, little part of our brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for our fear response

and it's hypersensitive to perceived or real threats. Perceived threats being things like milestone anxiety. So it generates an alarm response. When it evaluates that a situation or an experience is threatening and what happens after that is

the release of a bunch of neurotransmitters and neurochemicals that prepare our body to fight against this negative experience, resulting in what we know as anxiety. But that anxiety is often misplaced as we know, and milestone anxiety is an example of how our amygdala can do more harm than good when it falsely interprets a situation or a fear as dangerous. If you don't get married by a certain age, you are not in any danger. Nothing bad is going to happen. If you don't graduate on time, or your first job isn't all that it's cracked up to be, you're not going to drop dead.

Things can go wrong in life and we can stray, of course, but it doesn't mean that we're unsafe. It doesn't mean that we're a failure. It just means that we are experiencing life differently and that's really nothing to be afraid of. In fact, I think it's rather beautiful to go about life in a way that is different and unique. Interestingly, I just want to put this point in here. Studies have also suggested that men and women experience milestone anxiety very differently. It didn't surprise me that women are much more likely to suffer this form of anxiety compared to men, and with greater severity, although men report feeling greater external pressure to meet certain milestones,

whereas that pressure for women is often more internal. This makes a lot of sense to me when we consider how society treats men versus women, especially when it comes to things around dating, marriage and children. I've always thought that men seem to have a more relaxed timeline when it comes to these goals. And society gives them more time to figure these things out, whilst if a woman doesn't have kids or a long-term partner by 30, suddenly we are hearing terms around them being a spinster or a cat lady. There's a lot more stigma associated with a woman's choices compared to a man's,

which perhaps explains while my state anxiety is felt a lot more amongst women, and I think this is a remnant from a set of beliefs and a time period that is no longer relevant in the modern day. Historically, women remained in the home, and people saw their only duty as marriage, childbirth and child rearing. There was no reason to have a career or to pursue further education. So by the age of 25, 26, most women were settled down and had children, and we still feel an immense pressure to meet this outdated mould,

which I find so disheartening. Society's timeline does not have to be your time. line. You don't need to have everything figured out and all the boxes ticked by a certain age. You don't need to compare your journey to others and feel bad when you think you're falling short. Because the truth is that you're not. There is not one way of going about your goals and the milestones that you see is important. There's not one way of doing it. I always think about my grandma who didn't graduate until she was in her 60s or my mom who had children. in her late 30s and early 40s or my close friend. She didn't have her first relationship

till she was like 26 and I remember her telling me I feel so stressed that everyone around me is doing this what is wrong with me? And that anxiety is so unpleasant. It's so uncomfortable. But I want to talk about how we can be liberated from this and how we can combat milestone and anxiety and feel free to set our own timelines and agenda for life and not feel guilty or like a failure if things don't go according to plan. So all of that and more in just a second. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter and on my podcast 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health

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Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to a love-trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There is no doubt that milestone anxiety is uncomfortable, especially when we begin to internalize and think that reflects something that is wrong with us. I think a lot of us hate relinquishing control and we like to believe that we can orchestrate what happens in our lives, which is often untrue. You know, I keep coming back

to that dating conundrum we posed at the beginning, but I do think it's such a powerful anecdote to reflect on here. We cannot force love. We cannot force a healthy relationship. Sometimes the things that are most important to us, the milestones that are most important to us are beyond our control. And that can be really scary, especially when we think that everyone else seems to be in the fast lane towards achieving certain things. But life is really weird and it's unpredictable. Your friends may be getting engaged now, but five years down the line, that marriage may break apart and they're back to square one. You could have everything that you've ever wanted career-wise at 25. and then realize that you're deeply unhappy and make a huge change.

But sometimes milestone anxiety stops us from seeing this clearly. It causes us to self-sabotage and it skews our reality so that we always feel behind. I want to talk about how we can address that now. First of all, you need to deep dive and look into and understand where this pressure is coming from in order to navigate the feelings that it brings up. Is it because you're facing a lot of pressure from your family to get married? Is it cultural? Is it religious? Is it because you had a very strict upbringing and your family was a very nuclear family who set a certain agenda and had these priorities about how life should turn out?

Are you reflecting on that and putting pressure on yourself to meet that mold? Is it because of social comparison? Are you looking outwards and seeing all these people in your life doing things that you wish you were doing? you need to know where the starting point is in order to get to the finish line, right? You need to understand why you are feeling this way, otherwise you're going to go in blind. Secondly, and this is advice, this is a suggestion that I give all the time. You need to be excited by the feeling that anxiety gives you. I'm going to explain that a little bit more because I think a lot of people often question this argument and this idea.

but anxiety and excitement, they feel very similar. They feel like a bit of nausea in our stomach. They feel like jitters. They feel like this energy in our body. They elicit the same feeling. So we can consciously change our interpretation of these shared sensations to tell ourselves that it is excitement rather than anxiety. Instead of fearing the future and what you have or have not done,

change your mindset to be excited by the possibilities. Once you address your negative cognitions and your thoughts, your outlook will also change. What if everything works out? We can be very pessimistic at times and get lost in the weeds, resulting in us constantly catastrophizing. And this is where we are always focused on the worst case scenario, that we will never achieve what we want, that we will never have children, that we will never have a partner, all of those worries swirl around in our mind.

So what you need to kind of change that mindset to is what if everything works out? This is exciting. I'm excited by the fact that there is so much freedom. I am excited by the flexibility. I'm excited by the possibilities. We also need to understand and really reflect and acknowledge on the fact that there is more than one way. of doing something. I think about this a lot when I think about having children. A lot of us assume that if we want kids, we need to have a partner first. And in some ways, that is still very much a socially

held belief. It's one that a lot of us assume, but that's not always the case. You can adapt. You are very capable of problem solving and finding a solution and a way through. If you want to have children, there are so many other options now, right? You can adopt, you can do surrogacy, you can do IVF with the sperm donor. There is so many other possibilities. So often what happens when we experience milestone anxiety is that we narrow our focus and think that there is only one way of being happy and one way of doing something. And that one way is that very traditional blueprint, you know, graduation, marriage, children, house, all of those things. But you don't need to do it that way. There have been so many people who have forged a new path and we have so many

options now so that if there is something that you really want, you don't have to be held back by the fact that the most traditional way is the best way. You also need to embrace your authenticity. I know that sounds very much easier said than done, very wishy-washy, but sometimes our milestone anxiety is actually interlinked with low self-esteem and a fear of living authentically. We hide behind convention and tradition because we're worried that we will be rejected if we choose to take the road less traveled. Let that sink in for a little bit. Often, the reason why we are so aligned to this traditional way of doing things is because we are worried that we'll be judged if we don't do it that way. If we don't get married and decide to have

children on our own, if we don't get the perfect nine to five to career and decide to go out and do a side hustle. But authenticity is really your superpower. Choosing to do something the way that you want to do it in your own creative, unique way is something that is highly, highly admirable in my eyes. And how many people do we admire who have forged their own path? Think about, all of our heroes. People like Steve Jobs, like Dolly Parton, like Taylor Swift, all of these incredible people who are highly successful, they didn't get to where they are by following the mold and the conventional path. They pushed back against what society said they should have achieved by when. They pushed back against convention. And that always makes me feel

very comforted and a lot less alone, knowing that there are people who, you know, that there are people who have done this before me and knowing that sometimes the normal, quote unquote, normal way of doing things doesn't always lead to the greatest outcome or the best version of you. I think we also need to understand our relationship to social comparison. If you are experiencing milestone anxiety, if it's a massive stressor in your life, this often derives from our inherent tendency to view what others are doing and hold ourselves to that standard and thereby we impress a level of self-judgment that doesn't need to occur, that isn't healthy. You need to understand and I think really focus on your relationship to

comparing yourself with other people. A big source of that is social media. It is very easy, and I don't need to say this, but I feel like I kind of want to, I want to reinforce this idea that it is very, very easy for people to display a perfect version of their lives on social media. And now we even have things like LinkedIn, where you can almost brag and be very performative in terms of your career. I don't think that's particularly healthy, but it is a reality of life that there are more points than ever to compare how your path in life compares to others. and when that becomes negative and toxic when we are doing it regularly, often that can be a massive trigger for milestone anxiety. So I did a whole episode on this on social comparison. Go back and listen to that. Go back and listen to how we can stop comparing ourselves to

others because I do think that it's an amazing way to kind of prevent milestone anxiety and to put us back on our truth path and make us feel comfortable with the way we're doing things. another tip is just to focus on what you have achieved. We can be really, really negative and mean towards ourselves. We can be really hard on ourselves. And often what that results in is kind of a self-inflicted blindness around the good things in life and our successes. There are people who are probably looking at you wishing that they had what you had, wishing that they had hit certain milestones that you've already hit.

It's all incredibly subjective. And that's important to remind ourselves at times. everyone like we like we saw has experienced milestone anxiety in some form or another so you are not alone you are not the only one who was experiencing this and your path is no better or no worse than anyone else's i think that you have to kind of look at the full picture and really sit back and be happy with the reality that life isn't always going to go according to plan but that doesn't mean that you're a failure. The traditional way of doing things, that is a remnant from a very, very outdated model of our reality that has been socially ingrained in us from childhood.

You don't need to have a partner by 25 in order to be happy in the future. You don't need to have kids by a certain age. Those milestones are all constructed. They're all imagined. And you are very much free to be your own person and to do things in your own time without the fear that you're a failure, without the fear that you are missing out, without the fear that somehow by not doing things conventionally, you're never going to be happy because that's not the case. I really don't think that's the case, but our brains can make it such a huge point of fear and such a huge point of anxiety. So if you're going to take one thing away from this episode, It's that society's timeline does not have to be your timeline.

You can do things at your own pace and still be a happy, amazing, intricate, beautiful human. So I really hope that that leaves you with a sense of positivity and a sense of happiness and security around your future, especially to that amazing person who wrote in. But I'm sure her story is one that is very shared and one that a lot of us feel very much attached to and very similar to. There's something in all of our lives that we feel like we're missing out on

and we feel like that we're not doing at the pace that others around us are doing. So this is just your reminder to slow down, take life easy, and to treat anxiety the way that it's supposed to be treated as just a reaction, just a response, it's not the truth. But anyways, I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. I really did. I needed to hear this stuff. You're not alone. You know, when I was looking into this and all the psychology and the science, it brought me such a sense of solace and such a sense of peace that I'm not alone in experiencing these things. So I really do hope that you got something out of this, that you found it important. If there is someone in your life who needs to hear this, there is a friend who is worried about these things. You should send them. this episode. It might help them out. Or don't, that's all right. You can gatekeep it if you'd like to. And if you have any suggestions for further episodes, if you'd like me to expand on this topic in some

form or another, please feel free to follow me at that psychology podcast and let me know your thoughts. Let me know your suggestions. I love hearing what everyone else is going through, what I think is relevant and universal for those of us in our 20s. I think, as always, it's such a valuable decade and we really do need to make the psychology and the science around it more accessible. So thank you for listening along. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify wherever you are listening right now. I read every single review that is left.

Whenever I'm having a hard day, I go and read them. So I just want to thank you for all of the support. And as always, we will be back on Tuesday with another episode. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.

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Listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian.

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