Women have much more justification for a midlife crisis than a man, argues writer and health campaigner Kate Muir

Should you have a midlife crisis? Absolutely. It’s unfashionable nowadays not to have one, and women need to reclaim some of this territory from men with red sports cars and Rapha bike shorts. I’ve done three years of research into every aspect of midlife revolution - mind, body and spirit, so let’s just get this straight – women have much more justification for a midlife crisis than a man.

For a start, our brains completely rewire in perimenopause and menopause, in our forties and fifties when the hormones estrogen and progesterone go down the drain. We literally change character, and we should embrace that, and make a five or ten-year plan for the future

Some of us mourn the loss of fertility, while the rest of us are just overjoyed that we are period-free and can wear white jeans every day if we want. Then, for parents, there’s "empty nest syndrome", which I prefer to call freedom – no longer will you have to clean out coffee mugs oozing mould from under their beds. You just have to send them money and occasionally love more often than you’d anticipated. When they fledge the nest, so should you. This is your next adventure.

I have written a book about all this, How to Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis. Divorce peaks around 45, right in the middle of perimenopause, and we need to be more alert to that "couplepause" and creating a map together (or separately) for the next half of our increasingly long lives. When I was researching the chapter on couples and renovating relationships, one........

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