Your birthday can trigger a lot more than a party. Especially when approaching a new decade, birthdays can be loaded, stirring up a range of emotions and reactions
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“H appy Birthday!” These two simple words can spark feelings of gratitude joy and blessing — or send people spiraling into an abyss of despair. Likewise birthdays can paradoxically shock people into a state of paralysis or trigger extreme change and growth. No other day in the calendar conjures up such diverse and personal reactions ones that differ according to the individual and then change as we age.
Of all birthdays the “nines” seem to trigger the most extreme reactions. “I remember when my 29th birthday was approaching” shares Ilana who was a secular single professional at that time. “I had a successful career a nice apartment — but I worked long hours and was constantly stressed. And I felt painfully alone. I realized that if I didn’t completely overhaul my life it would just continue down the same path. I’d be 30 and still climbing the ladder to somewhere I didn’t want to go.”
This type of reflection the year before aging into a new decade is typical according to a 2014 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Years 30 40 50 [are] psychologically consequential. They seem big they seem looming and they seem more important to us than the others ” notes Hal Hershfield a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles and co-author of the study. “They make us step back and think about how things have been going up until then and how we want them to go moving forward.”
Hershfield’s study revealed that people “in the nines” were more likely to question whether their lives held meaning. “We can essentially approach that search for meaning in adaptive ways or maladaptive ways” he commented citing research that shows how higher rates of divorce marriage suicide and other life-altering decisions were made as people approached the “nines.”
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