Just turned 40? Congratulations! With this milestone comes a new perspective on life, and many of the worries that once felt like a big deal will no longer feel as significant. Ultimately, as you enter this new chapter of your life, you’ll realize that certain things just aren’t worth stressing over anymore. To give you a head start, here are 17 things that just aren’t worth worrying about after turning 40.
Perfection
According to Verywell Mind, “Perfectionists are often critical, driven by fear, have unrealistic expectations, fear failure, and are defensive when they face any criticism.” But once you get to 40, you realize that you cannot do everything perfectly and stop setting unrealistic goals for yourself.
Fearing Failure
In a similar vein to the last point, when you get to 40, you stop fearing failure and start taking risks. Instead of worrying about what might go wrong, you adopt a positive attitude. You have developed enough self-confidence by this point to trust your foresight and reach out for what you believe in.
Fitting In
Konstantia Dimitriou, mental health expert and founder of Calm Little Minds, gives some fascinating insight into why we care about fitting in, saying “We fear being ostracized or isolated if we deviate from what is considered ‘normal.’ The pressure to fit in can be particularly strong during adolescence,” but as you enter your 40s, you gain the confidence to be yourself.
Negative Occurrences
Being optimistic is an essential part of life as you get into your 40s. Pessimism only brings you down and makes life harder than it needs to be, but that’s hard to realize when you’re younger. However, once you have more experience, usually by 40, you’ll find yourself naturally becoming a more optimistic person.
Impressing Your Boss
Statistics from Workforce.com show that “a quarter of Gen Z workers hesitate to take their lunch break because they worry about what their bosses might think.” But once you get past 40, you are no longer overly concerned about impressing your boss, as you already have a good reputation at work.
Reversing Skin Aging
According to experts, says MedicineNet, “skin aging typically starts around age 25. In our mid-20s, our bodies gradually start to stop producing as much collagen as before, which causes our skin to lose elasticity.” When we reach our 40s, we have to accept that aging is just a part of life.
Pleasing Everyone
When we’re younger, we are keen to do whatever we can for others just so they will like us. But by age 40, we realize that pleasing everyone is simply impossible and takes the fun out of life. We are now more concerned about our internal happiness.
Denying Gray Hair
WebMD says that “half of all people have a significant amount of gray hair by the time they turn 50.” Being in denial about gray hair is something that is not worth doing after 40, as most of us will already have many gray hairs by this point.
What Others Think
We tend to worry about what other people think about us and what we do when we are younger. But the desire to fit in and stick to the status quo diminishes as we get into our 40s and are no longer afraid to express ourselves.
Past Mistakes
When you reach 40, there’s no point in continuing to labor over past mistakes. You must accept that you cannot change the past and decide to learn from your mistakes instead of beating yourself up about them. Instead, you leave the past in the past.
Making Comparisons
Comparing yourself to others is not worth doing after you reach age 40. By this stage in your life, you’ve realized that everyone makes progress at different stages and in different ways. So comparing yourself to others only makes you feel down and is counterproductive.
Following Fashion
In the past, we may have been very concerned about sticking to fashion norms. But by 40, you have grown into your own person and can decide which fashion norms you will stick to and which you won’t without caring about what other people might think.
What Might Happen
We often spend so long worrying about what might happen, although these things never occur. Worrying about things unnecessarily just isn’t worth it after 40. This is because we know that our minds are our own worst enemies and learn to ignore any unnecessary concerns.
Impressing Others
After 40, we begin feeling more comfortable in our skin and are aware of our limitations. Because of this, there’s no point in bending over backward all the time to impress others when this could be harmful to us. We do what we reasonably can to make others happy, and that’s it.
Technology Trends
When we are younger, we worry about fitting in. We often get ourselves into debt just trying to keep up with the latest technology trends. But once we reach our 40s, we realize that the world of technology is moving too quickly and that trying to always have the latest gadgets is impossible and unnecessary.
Unrealistic Body Image
When we are in our teens and early 20s, there is a lot of media pressure for us to have a certain body image. But by the time we get to our 40s, this pressure has diminished, and we are able to feel happy in our own skin.
Perfect Relationships
When we are teenagers, the media feeds us the idea of the perfect relationship, and we strive to find that. But as we get older, we understand that we all make mistakes and cannot expect perfection from one another, even from our partners. A couple that tries hard will survive.