There is no timeline for love. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to find ourselves feeling rushed now and again. There are some biological issues at play – for example, if you’re trying to have children – and of course, many people prefer the idea of young love, when we’re at our physical peaks, but love can come at any time. What matters is understanding yourself, opening yourself up to what you’re looking for, being realistic with your expectations, and managing your standards and goals.
When we’re young, the idea of meeting someone can, for some people, feel almost unnecessary. “We have all the time in the world” or “we’re still young.” When we get older, it’s not uncommon to feel a bit more discouraged, especially when we reach the milestone age of 40 and find that many of our friends in that age group are married and may even have kids.
It can be discouraging. But you also don’t what that feeling of discouragement to interfere with your mental health, or your ability to meet a mate, or change your core values. So what can you do if you’re feeling issues? What can you do if you’re feeling external pressures, or biological ones, or you’re simply feeling upset that you haven’t found “the one.”
Recognizing the Source of the Pressure
Goals CAN change. Some people become 40+ and realize that they’re perfectly happy with themselves and who they are. Maybe they’re still looking for someone, maybe they aren’t, but overall they’re comfortable with themselves and whatever happens, happens.
For those that have been looking for or hoping for a mate, however, it isn’t uncommon to feel upset at where you are. It’s okay to be upset about not reaching your goals. But discouragement about being single at 40 often stems less from the experience itself, and more form how it is interpreted both internally and externally. For example:
Social Expectations – Cultural messages often equate success with partnership, especially by midlife. These expectations may not reflect current realities or individual preferences, but they can still create a sense of inadequacy.
Comparison with Peers – Seeing others in long-term relationships or raising children can prompt questions about one’s own path, even if those paths were never personally desirable.
Relationship History – People who have experienced loss, long-term breakups, or patterns of unsatisfying relationships may feel discouraged not because they are single, but because they are carrying unresolved emotional weight.
Uncertainty About the Future – Concerns about aging, health, or companionship can compound emotional discomfort, especially when there is no clear timeline for meeting someone.
These are all valid emotional responses, but they are not static conditions. They can be processed, challenged, and reframed with the right psychological tools.
Separating Identity from Relationship Status
A key shift in maintaining mental and emotional health is learning to separate self-worth from relationship status. This involves recognizing that:
Being in a relationship does not inherently indicate emotional maturity or stability.
Being single does not mean a person is incomplete, behind, or lacking.
The ability to form and sustain healthy relationships starts with internal regulation, boundary-setting, and self-awareness—skills that are often better developed in midlife.
Many individuals who remain single at 40 have done so not due to failure, but due to intentional choices, personal growth, or high standards that protect their well-being. Recognizing this distinction can reduce feelings of discouragement and replace them with a sense of agency.
Building Stability Without Waiting for Partnership
Discouragement often increases when life is placed on hold while waiting for the “right” relationship. A more productive and psychologically protective approach involves investing in areas of life that provide fulfillment and emotional regulation regardless of relationship status.
These areas might include:
Friendship and Social Connection – Quality relationships, whether romantic or platonic, play a central role in mental health. Intentional investment in friendship networks can meet many of the emotional needs associated with partnership.
Personal Development – Learning new skills, setting financial or professional goals, and engaging in creative work can create meaning and identity outside of relational roles.
Physical and Mental Wellness – Regular exercise, therapy, mindfulness, or other forms of self-care improve resilience and reduce the risk of internalizing loneliness.
Purpose-Oriented Activities – Volunteering, mentoring, or participating in community organizations provides structure and emotional reward that often mirror the benefits of shared life with a partner.
These efforts do not replace the value of a romantic relationship – but they do create a stable emotional base that allows future relationships to be additive rather than compensatory.
Accepting Ambiguity While Remaining Open
One of the most emotionally complex aspects of being single at 40 is the uncertainty. There are no guarantees that a relationship will form, nor is there a defined path for how or when it might happen. This ambiguity can lead to either despair or acceptance depending on how it is managed.
Psychologically, individuals tend to benefit most from adopting a mindset that is both accepting of their current reality and open to change. That includes:
Acknowledging grief or disappointment without letting it define identity
Allowing space for hope without forcing timelines
Recognizing that relationships may form in unexpected ways or at different life stages
Understanding that being “ready” does not guarantee outcomes, but it improves the experience of waiting
It is often the combination of internal stability and emotional openness that allows people to meet others in meaningful ways, especially later in life.
Remaining Single Does Not Mean Something Is Wrong
Being single at 40 may feel out of sync with expectations, but it is not an indicator of personal failure. For many, it reflects a set of circumstances, values, or priorities that have led to a different – though still complete – life trajectory. Discouragement can be a temporary emotional response, not a permanent state, especially when it is examined through a lens of emotional awareness and self-respect.
If you’re finding yourself having trouble with being single at this age, and you’re looking for help with your mental health, please reach out to Flourish Psychology today and let’s talk about what this feeling means for you and what we can do to overcome it.
Parenting is hard. This probably comes as a shock to no one, but therapy is a challenge. You’re tasked with keeping this little thing alive, all while not getting sleep, putting a strain on your marriage, dealing with the physical health issues, and on and on.
It is a challenge for everyone.
You may be familiar with postpartum depression – depression that occurs after having a child due to a combination of hormonal changes, stress, and more. Some people seek out therapists when they have this type of depression, hoping to get extra help coping.
But here’s the thing:
You don’t need postpartum depression to find therapy beneficial. You do not even need a diagnosable mental health condition at all.
What if, instead of waiting to see if you develop a mental health issue, you simply start seeing a therapist. What if you take a more proactive approach?
Seeking Therapy Proactively
You already know that parenting is challenging, even before having a baby. Psychotherapy is about helping someone through their challenges, no matter what they may be.
By seeking out a therapist to help you with parenting, you put yourself in a position to:
Address stress as early as possible, before it becomes something that can create problems in your mental health or marriage.
Teach you how to be more present, so that you can take in as much of parenting as possible.
Potentially help you sleep more. Sleep is limited with all kids, but if the anxiety of parenting keeps you awake, or you’re struggling to prioritize sleep, therapy can help.
Answer questions and worries you may have, and help you find the best parent you can be in yourself.
Respond to past childhood traumas and issues with upbringing to learn how to parent authentically, lovingly, and in today’s world.
If a parent does have postpartum depression, it can also be addressed at the time of therapy. But, regardless of mental health status, many parents would benefit from psychotherapy that helps them manage the challenges of parenthood early and often.
Since your own mental health outside of parenting can also affect how you build relationships, manage frustration, and so on, psychotherapy can also transform you back into your best self.
Reach Out Today to Learn More
Flourish Psychology is a boutique private practice that is happy to help parents adapt to this new part of their lives. We also occasionally run group therapy sessions for new parents, and we have options for those that need ongoing care.
If you would like to get started, please reach out to our team, today.
Many of Flourish Psychology’s patients live lives where discretion is critical and time is minimal. CEOs, content creators, doctors, attorneys, and more – these are individuals who are often tasked with work day and night, or find themselves with a busy personal and professional life where it is extraordinarily challenging to manage their mental health.
It is for these individuals that we created our exclusive mental health services. These are mental health services with significantly more availability, using a retainer model similar to the legal field that makes it possible to access mental health services on your schedule, personalized to you.
You can learn about our exclusive mental health services here.
On a surface level, it should already be easy to recognize why having your own individual therapist that is available more often when you need us most is valuable. You have access to a therapist when:
You’re in the middle of some type of crisis.
You have some rare but available free time.
You need someone to trust with your emotions or ideas.
Exclusive services allow you to have a therapist that is essentially on call, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean 100% availability, it does mean that you’re on a few coordinating steps away from someone at all times.
But this level of accessibility and higher level of care also has secondary benefits as well. It means that you have:
The knowledge that you are NEVER alone. With someone you can contact at any time whose role and expertise it is to help you, you will never feel like you’re taking on these challenges and emotional burdens by yourself.
Someone that knows you deeply – deeper than even traditional therapy. Exclusive services often mean that we can meet more often and connect much longer than traditional therapy typically allows.
A therapist unburdened by topic. Often, when you work with a therapist on a more limited basis, we have to keep the focus on the topic of need (for example, anxiety). With our concierge therapy services, this is no longer the case, as there is plenty of opportunity to talk about any emotions of challenges of note to you.
It is also simply a more catering level of care as well. We are professional therapists, and our role is your mental health, but concierge therapy allows for more services, more often, on more topics than traditional weekly or biweekly therapy allows, and that means that you have a therapist that is here to help you at every step.
If this type of therapy is right for your needs, please reach out to us today. We’d love to see if there is a fit or recommend options depending on what your needs may be.
We’re not getting enough sleep. Most of us are sleep deprived, and rarely, if ever, get a full night’s sleep more than one day in a row.
There are many issues that lead to these difficulties, and addressing them can take time as we determine why they’re occurring and work individually with how to solve them. Yet some of the potential causes of sleep difficulties, including racing thoughts, metal to due lists, and emotional residue from the day can interfere with the onset and quality of sleep.
Sleep hygiene practices are, at least theoretically, designed to address this. By giving yourself a habit/routine to help you fall asleep, you should be able to calm your mind and ease off easier than if you simply go straight to bed with your phone in your hands.
But, of course, sleep is more complicated than that, and there are plenty of times when our brains stay highly active and we have too much on our minds to relax.
Why the Brain Struggles to Transition to Sleep
Before examining journaling, it’s important to understand why sleep onset is disrupted. One of the most well-documented factors is heightened cognitive arousal – essentially, excessive mental activity in the pre-sleep period. This can include:
Persistent planning or problem-solving thoughts
Unresolved emotional tension from daytime experiences
Anticipatory anxiety about the following day
New ideas you want to remember or to-dos that you would like to prioritize
Research shows that these thought patterns correlate with activity in the default mode network (DMN), a neural system associated with self-referential thinking. High DMN activity at bedtime is associated with longer sleep onset latency and lighter sleep cycles.
Because journaling externalizes internal dialogue, it has the potential to reduce DMN activity and shift the brain toward a state more conducive to sleep.
The Power of Sleep Journaling
In these situations, you may want to consider keeping a sleep journal next to your bed.
Sleep journals are, essentially, journals where you can write down anything and everything that is on your mind when you are trying to go to sleep at night. It doesn’t necessarily matter what you write down, and you never need to force yourself to write down anything if you’re feeling tired (it differs from a gratitude journal in this way, as those types of journals are designed to be completed daily).
Rather, it’s a place for you to put your thoughts on paper in order to get them out of your head.
Journaling at night can reduce mental overactivity and create psychological closure that supports sleep onset. This practice is not simply about venting thoughts onto paper. The type of journaling, the structure, and even the timing all contribute to how journaling interacts with the brain’s sleep-regulating systems.
What Happens When You Journal Before Bed
Journaling operates at the intersection of cognitive restructuring and emotional regulation. Several peer-reviewed studies have found that the right form of journaling can measurably affect key variables tied to sleep, including sleep latency (how long it takes to fall asleep) and overall sleep quality. For example:
A 2018 study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology found that individuals who wrote out specific tasks they needed to complete the next day fell asleep significantly faster than those who journaled about completed tasks.
Another study published in Behavioral Sleep Medicine showed that expressive writing – where individuals write about their thoughts and feelings – reduced symptoms of sleep-onset insomnia in people with anxiety.
Keep in mind these are examples of *different* benefits. The first study looked at something called “cognitive offloading” where moving thoughts out of your mind (your working memory) and onto paper basically tells your brain “don’t worry, you can’t forget, it’s written down on paper” which frees up additional resources and helps the brain disengage from active processing.
The second study showed that writing out our emotions and feelings is a form of processing. Anxieties and stresses often occur when emotions feel unresolved, or when they’re bouncing around in mind without being fully processed. Writing out these emotions help us process them, allowing us to have some closure and, eventually, sleep.
Remember, these thoughts may not all be stressful. Imagine you’re someone that loves writing, and – when you’re supposed to go to sleep – you have this great idea for a story. Your mind can’t relax if you’re worried that you may forget the idea. If you write it down, your brain knows you can’t forget it, and you can hopefully relax better and ease yourself into sleep.
Addressing Sleep for Mental Health
Sleep may not be directly responsible for the entirety of our mental health, but it becomes extraordinarily difficult to cope with stress and address our psychological challenges if we’re not also prioritizing sleep. Journaling may not solve all your issues, but if an active mind is keeping you awake, consider taking out a journal and testing out those benefits.
In the mental health world, the term “obsessions” has a very different meaning than it does in casual conversation. In casual conversation, “obsessions” are things you want or desire. They’re things you’re happy to think about often, or things that you like to do.
In the mental health world, “obsessions” are very different. They are typically thoughts that you *do not want* that “intrude” your mind over and over again. Most of the time, these thoughts also cause distress, as they’re often on topics and subjects that a person finds upsetting.
One of the challenges of obtrusive thoughts is how hard they are to control. The more you try to push them away, the more they come back. This is actually by design. Our brain is, in some ways, specifically designed to make sure that the more you try to stop a thought, the more often the thought will occur.
Why Can’t We Stop Intrusive Thoughts?
Psychological studies have shown that it takes a lot of mental energy to avoid thinking about something. So much energy, in fact, that your brain needs to remind you of it in order to remember not to think about it. There are different terms for this, but one of the most popular is called the “Pink Elephant Problem.”
What is the Pink Elephant Problem?
The Pink Elephant Problem is a study that shows that if you tell half a group of people to think about a pink elephant, and half a group of people not to think about a pink elephant, the group told not to think about it ends up thinking about it more than the other group. It takes so much energy to avoid thinking about a topic, that you end up thinking about it more.
What Does the Pink Elephant Problem Have to Do With OCD?
Imagine you have an intrusive thought that causes you distress. Because it causes you so much stress and anxiety, you try to push it away. You try your best not to think about it. Suddenly, you’re running into the pink elephant problem. Your brain spends so much energy trying not to think about it that it ends up thinking about it more and more often.
How Do You Break This Cycle?
Part of overcoming these intrusive thoughts is breaking this cycle and making it so that you *can* forget. To do that, you have to actually embrace the thought. Remind yourself that your intrusive thoughts do not define you. Remind yourself that pushing the thought away does not work. You may even want to think about the thought on purpose in order to make it something that you no longer obsess on.
Is That All There is To It?
No, addressing OCD does take a lot more energy and effort. You may have to address the initial causes of the obsessions, the compulsions, what causes you the most distress, and even forgiving yourself for your thoughts. Those all take time and energy, and benefit from working with a therapist.
But if you stop attempting to push down those thoughts, accept that you have them, and focus on moving forward, then the thoughts not only should occur less – they should also cause less distress when they do occur.
Ready for OCD Help?
If you are someone that struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder or intrusive thoughts, reach out to a therapist today. Through therapy, you can gain more understanding of the cause of these thoughts and develop cognitive tools to help you control them. Contact us today to learn more.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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