Episode 282: U-Shaped Curve of Midlife
Introduction
Hey, welcome back to Practically Happy. This is episode number 282, the U-shaped curve of Well-being. I’m really excited to share some relatable information today with you in this episode, all about well-being across the lifespan.
I was first introduced to the idea of the U-shaped curve of well-being at a conference in the fall of 2022 as part of my studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I was invited to attend an academic conference about the science of aging and being positivity over the lifespan, positivity, and aging. It was an interesting conference, and many different speakers and topics drew my attention. I have copious notes that I took over the weekend.
This talk given by Arthur Brooks, where he introduced the idea of The U-shaped curve was probably the most impactful for me, both because Arthur Brooks is an incredible public speaker and educator. He’s a social psychologist at Harvard University and has written a bunch of books. He’s relatable and has this great way of communicating.
He also used fantastic visuals, and I love a visual. So, the slide presentation really was able to portray and aake an impact with the information he was trying to share, and it was while he was sharing this presentation about the way to feel good all throughout your life that he dropped the bomb of the U-shaped curve.
Since that conference, almost 18 months ago, I have been sharing about this same idea with my friends and family members. It seems to come up in conversation at least weekly, and I was reminded of it last week when I was reading a new fiction novel that I really enjoyed called Wellness, where one of the protagonists, the wife of this couple in the story mentions that she’s just about as happy as she thinks she should be for the stage of life.
And her husband asked what stage of life is that? And she said, the bottom of the U-shaped curve. It made me laugh out loud because I thought, oh yeah, I am that person who said that exact same thing. And reminded me of the importance of normalizing some of the transitions that we go through in our adult lives.
I thought that I would share an episode to introduce you to this idea, the phenomenon, and some research behind it, as well as some ideas that have been shared by social psychologists and researchers and self-development folks about how we can feel good even in the bottom of the curve.
Before I jump too far into the episode, I want to share a quick segment called The Book Nook.
Segment: The Book Nook
The first book that I have read recently that I loved and wanted to share, I mentioned The In the intro already, it’s the book called Wellness. This book is a fiction novel by Nathan Hill. When I first looked at it, or saw the cover, probably sometime last year, I thought it was nonfiction just based on this idea of wellness.
It looked like a self-development wellness book, and at that time I was not sure. Looking for any more nonfiction in my life as I was in a little bit of burnout mode from graduate school. When I just picked it up again at the library on the favorites shelf, I looked at the back and realized that in fact it was a fiction novel, and I was interested in reading it and seeing what it was all about.
From the first chapter, I was in this book. It’s an interesting read. Nathan Hill does a great job of developing these characters and, pulling you in to wanting to know more about them and about how they’re interacting and seeing what happens next. And I loved the pacing of it. The first few chapters are set in the 90s, where the protagonist Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in Chicago.
And I’m in love with the nostalgia of the nineties, the really subculture that they’re living in and how proud of themselves they are for sticking it to the man with the decisions they’re making. And then it pulls you forward in time to, through them.
Deciding to get married and choosing a condo to live in and having a child and it pulls them into midlife, which is where this quote comes about Elizabeth saying, I’m as happy as I ought to be in this stage of life and mentioning the U-shaped curve.
From that point on, the book continued to remain incredibly interesting and relevant and relatable to me, although Jack and Elizabeth experienced some things that I haven’t personally experienced specifically the feelings and some of the situations and transitions, the exploration of self, the sort of falling into patterns unconsciously, both as a couple and as parents that are they’re not aware of, but you can become aware of as a reader was insightful, and I hear all the time.
That reading fiction and fictional stories is fun. increases our empathy, allows us to see ourselves and other people more clearly, and to have more compassion for ourselves and other people. Sometimes it’s not just the true stories that do that but being able to read about these made-up ideas that feel so true to life can be powerful.
I loved Wellness and would highly recommend it.
The next book that I just finished is one that I’ve had in my sightline for a long time. The title is Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kid. This book is a 20-year-old memoir that recounts Sue Monk Kid’s Journey from orthodox Christian tradition to embodying the sacred feminine again, 20 years old.
The copy that I was reading was the 20th anniversary edition, and I was just delighted by the insight by the. Awakening by Suman Kidd is just such a phenomenal author, and I learned more about her and her early life than I knew from just reading her more recent works. It’s a personal story, and a story of healing and freedom and wholeness, regardless of specific religious ideation or affiliation.
I found it incredibly moving and relatable. I found myself nodding along for parts of it. And having my eyes opened to some new ideas and new perspectives that I hadn’t had before. Of course, the last several years I’ve been on my own personal journey of spiritual expansion. And I’ve shared some bits and pieces of it here on the podcast.
The first real kind of deep dive spiritual episode that I shared was episode 150: Nuanced Faith within Organized Religion in episode 182 called Discovering my Divinity through Goddess, I share about the quest for a feminine divine and. The many different traditions and cultures that uphold this idea of feminine spirituality.
And then most recently, in episode 273, I share all about my own personal Expansive Spirituality and what it has looked like and felt like to discover spiritual rituals, traditions, and ideals outside of traditional Orthodox religion. If you have felt some tug to go deeper into a feminine divine, or just open your own personal spirituality, you may enjoy the Dance of the Dissident Daughter. I really liked it. I think that I will keep it on my bookshelf and refer to pieces of it often. And those are my two books today for the Book Nook.
The U-Shaped Curve
So, I’m going to take you back to October of 2022, where I’m sitting at the University of Pennsylvania campus, listening to Arthur Brooks speak about well-being throughout the lifespan. He was presenting both as a professor and as an author. His book From Strength to Strength had recently been published.
And so, he was pulling out some of the ideas that he shared in that book. At one point he flipped to a slide where there was a graph and imagine a regular plot graph. So, along the horizontal line or the X axis, this is the age of the person starting about 10 years. And then maybe let’s just say it hops every 10 years, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100.
That’s about where the graph ends because we’re talking about a lifespan. And then along that vertical Y axis, that is subjective wellbeing or one’s own perception of them. happiness in their life, how they feel about their life. Overall, do they feel pretty good? And this is rated on a scale from zero to ten.
The line as it’s plotted, we start with the ten-year-old and their subjective well-being is the highest point on the entire chart. So, we’re up there, let’s say it’s around an eight and then you go down midway, and there’s, around 15, it’s just a little tiny bit lower. And then it goes a little bit lower, a little bit lower, it bottoms out, and then it comes back up.
Now, when he first showed this slide, he didn’t have the ages at the bottom, he just had subjective well-being on the side. And so, the graph makes this steep U, and then it comes back up a little bit, but it doesn’t go up all the way back to the top. It’s not like a symmetrical U. It’s you that comes back up and then flattens out.
I remember him putting this slide up and saying, okay, this shows well-being, subjective well-being over the lifespan, according to hundreds of studies that, you know, and thousands, tens of thousands of participants globally that are conglomerated into this metadata. And this is what we see there.
This is a trend that is significant worldwide. This is what the slope of subjective well-being over the lifespan looks like. And then he asked us, what do you think is this dip down here? What do you think is the stage of life where Subjective being seems to bottom out and there are a few hands in the air and people said midlife or forties, forties, fifties.
And he said, yeah, this is your midlife. Why do you think our subjective well-being tends to be its lowest point across the lifespan during our mid-thirties to mid-fifties? And everyone laughed and someone said, teenagers, the idea that, he agreed that was one component of why our subjective well-being as a trend, as a whole tends to be lower in our midlife is because for a lot of people who choose to have families, that’s about the stage when their kids are becoming teenagers, which can be a pretty tricky time of life, both for the parents and for the kids.
He asked about other things. Maybe that you think you’re supposed to be at a certain place at that point, then you’re not there yet. And that feels confusing and disorienting. Maybe that’s when your health starts to decline for the first time you’ve been feeling good through your teens and twenties and thirties.
And there is a point at which we start to slowly break down a little bit. If you are in this stage, then you can attest to some of that. You’re not sleeping the same as you did at the beginning. In younger years, I’m finally in the last couple years realizing what people meant when I was a little girl and they told me, I wish I had your energy and truth be told, I had that same energy until I was about 35.
I had this wild amount of childlike energy that about. Six or seven years ago, really started to slow down and felt foreign to me to not have just this overabundance of energy all the time. There’s lots of different reasons why this trend seems to hold true for a lot of people, and That’s what we’re going to discuss today.
Mid-Life is a Major Transition Time
I want to say that when I saw this I was sitting with some of my girlfriends from my program who are also similar age to me mid 30s you know I turned 40 about a few months after that presentation. I was just staring it in the face and they were sitting with me and we all laughed and said oh my gosh there we are like we see ourselves on this chart.
That is something that I’ve shared with people over and over again, not because I think that it’s sad and depressing, but because I think it’s relatable and honest, and too few people are talking about the difficulties that come with the transitions of middle age.
The unexpected whirlwind of emotion physical changes, emotional instability, identity shifts family and relationship changes, and just the gamut of things that you aren’t prepared for when you get to this place that, for a lot of people, seem to be real. When I shared about that quote from the book Wellness on Instagram, I followed it up with a poll to the audience that said, would you enjoy a podcast episode about the U-shaped curve?
(Spoiler alert: this is the episode that I was asking about) 91 percent of the respondents said “Yes, I could use some midlife understanding”. That was the first answer. Then there were 5 percent that said, “Meh, that sounds depressing” and 3 percent that answered, “Nah, I’m as happy as I’ve ever been”.
Even just from the, hundred and some odd people that responded to that simple poll on Instagram, there are some that A, are not interested in learning about it because it doesn’t sound very fun, and B, don’t really care about this idea of the U-shaped curve because it doesn’t seem to apply to them because they are feeling as good as they’ve ever been, according to themselves, they’re as happy as ever. That’s great.
So, this podcast, if you’re feeling like the best, you’ve ever felt and life is going amazing and there’s no problems and no troubles and you’re feeling super solid in your identity and your relationships are all super smooth, like great.
That’s wonderful. Maybe you want to keep listening so that you can relate to the 91 percent of people who are probably your contemporaries, family members, or friends that are feeling a little bit lost in midlife, maybe you yourself are feeling a little bit lost. Not on everything. I wouldn’t say that oh, my life is the worst it’s ever been.
In fact, I don’t think that I feel the worst I’ve ever been. I feel good a lot of the time. And there is some disorientation and some specific characteristics of this phase of life that I am. Really interested in learning more about, and in fact teaching more about, so that we can all feel a little bit better, if only through feeling like we’re not alone, which is such a powerful way to be in community, even though things that feel tough.
You’re Not Alone!
So, the purpose of this episode today isn’t to tell you that if you’re in midlife, or that if you’re headed for, if you’re not there yet, that watch out, it’s going to be the worst. It’s to help you understand a little bit more about what are some of the things happening and why, if you do feel a little disoriented, that’s totally normal and there are some solutions and suggestions that can help you feel a little bit better.
What is “Midlife?”
I think we’ll start with just a quick definition or explanation of the term midlife. Eliot Jacque is a psychoanalyst from the 1960s who coined this term “midlife crisis” that we hear all the time.
He noted that he had many patients in their mid to late thirties who seemed to go through a specific depressive period and sudden lifestyle changes as they confronted the idea of their own mortality.
So, this initial idea of midlife crisis seemed to be based around the idea that around midlife. You’re halfway through your life. You’ve gotten to this midpoint where you can see so much behind you, and you realize I might be halfway there. That idea of mortality feels more real than ever and being confronted by your own mortality can lead to a lot of fear, anxiety, questions, and confusion about what you’ve done with the life that you’ve already led and what you want to do with your life moving forward.
Also, it’s only about 10 percent of people, according to research, that have what we would attribute a specific midlife crisis, where they’re feeling some, real clinically depressed or anxious symptoms that are accompanied by these wild lifestyle changes, or unexpected and quick lifestyle changes, to feel better quick or compensate for losses that they think they may have.
While not everyone experiences a midlife crisis, there does seem to be a trend of this u-shaped curve representing happiness and life satisfaction bottoming out a little bit during middle adulthood and then increasing as we stabilize again into our later adulthood.
Development Continues Throughout Adulthood
What I said there reminds me. I wanted to rewind a little bit midway through the podcast. I want to remind and just mention briefly just acknowledge that generally we talk about milestones and transitions in life as being like our first 21 years. We have these. Really intricate models of what human development and human behaviors and like age-appropriate behaviors look like through the first weeks of life in the first couple years of life.
And then, we know there’s this big transition into adolescence and we manage that and then we have this big transition into adulthood and then we’re like you’re an adult. Yeah, you made it. And the truth is that adulthood has as many shifts as possible and challenges and transitions. Like developmentally appropriate transitions as earlier ages, we just don’t talk about it as much.
We don’t recognize it as much. And this is part of why there’s a lot of adults that sort of feel disillusioned with adulting because they’re still learning and growing or they feel bad that they haven’t achieved ultimate knowledge, ultimate financial security, ultimate physical fitness because, after all we’re adults, shouldn’t we have this all figured out?
Shouldn’t we have it together? Shouldn’t we know what to eat? Shouldn’t we know how to take care of our kids? Shouldn’t we have, all the money that we thought we were going to have at these ages? This kind of questioning of what is happening. I’m like an actual adult. I’m 20 years into adulthood.
Why don’t I have it all figured out? That question stems from this social and cultural expectation that adulthood is like one phase when in fact it’s many natural, normal transitions that we need to get better at acknowledging and understanding and talking about and living through in order to feel the self-compassion that allows us to continue to learn, continue to develop, continue to grow, and be both self-aware and really kind to ourselves as we continue to experience transit transitions throughout our entire life.
Recent Research about the U-Shaped Curve
As I prepared to talk about this U-shaped curve, I went back to the research and found a couple more recent articles. So, the research has been done about this idea for the last couple decades. There’s an article from 2018. 2008 from 2008 called the U curve of happiness revisited. This study is sampling over 1500 other studies to validate that, yes, in fact, this does seem to be a trend that correlates across countries, across socioeconomic statuses, cultures, and races, and that, indeed, the U-shaped curve represents a common trajectory of happiness and life satisfaction for many adults.
Another article from 2022 simply titled is well-being u shaped over the life cycle again comments the regularity of this phenomenon is intriguing. The u shape is similar for males and females and for each side of the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, because of the size of the data sets, the turning point in is reasonably precisely determined. It goes on to say, this paper offers international evidence that being depends in a curvilinear way upon age. Happiness is approximately U shaped through the life course. Mental distress tends to reach a maximum in middle age.
Let’s just assume that all this research is correct that at least right now from what we know of tens of thousands of participants globally partaking in studies where they are stating their age and how satisfied with their lives, they are that you know all These reports piled together show this general curve, this U-shaped curve.
Why does this happen?
Why? What can we attribute to this? I know when Arthur Brooks asked us that question, we all laughed and said, raising teenagers. That can’t be the only reason because not every single person studied or asked that question is married or even has children. Teenagers can’t be the only reason that midlife may be difficult.
In fact, I know many women in their 30s and early 40s who are just having children now. They don’t have teenagers; they’ve got young kids. It still correlates with their age to be in the bottom of this dip. Let me share some other reasons that the U-shaped curve may exist. Some other factors other than raising teenagers that may contribute to this dip in well-being during middle age or middle adulthood is the realization of unmet expectations and goals.
I talked about a little bit ago, this idea that you reach, 35 or 40, and you realize that you aren’t totally a spring chicken. 40 is not old, but it is middle age. It’s very much pretty much the middle of the road there and at that point maybe inclined to look back at what you’ve experienced, what goals you’ve had, what your expectations for your life were and take a hard look at whether or not you’ve lived as well as you hoped to and that realization that maybe you haven’t or you feel like you’ve missed the mark can be disorienting.
Personal achievements, family life, all those things could be a little tricky and it may not be just personal achievements and expectations, but at 35, 40, 45, you may realize that you’re not where you expected to be in any aspect of your life, one or another aspect. Maybe you feel like you’re happy with, 10 of these 15 things that you are thinking about, but those ones that you’ve missed the mark on or where things don’t Life isn’t aligning with your expectation, feel really distressing.
It can feel tricky. Even if a lot of things are going well, because of our negativity bias, things that aren’t going well, seem to get more airtime in our brains, seem to take a bigger chunk out of this idea of our holistic wellbeing, and especially if gone unchecked, if we’re not able to talk to a coach or a therapist about these ideas and feelings, if we’re not able to bounce them around and get some validation for all that’s going right in our lives, we may be stuck in the feeling that even though, a dozen things are going right, these couple things going wrong are going to tip that scale towards feeling hard.
The dissonance between expectations and reality can lead to feelings of disappointment, regret, and a sense of stagnation in middle age. Another significant factor is the multitude of responsibilities that accumulate during midlife. This stage, just by nature of being in middle adulthood, often involves juggling career demands, financial pressures, raising children, caring for aging parents, and maintaining relationships.
That’s a lot of weight. Just by virtue of the many obligations that we have, those things can lead to increased stress, fatigue, and a sense of being overwhelmed. Additionally, not only are you transitioning in your middle life, Adulthood, but also your children may be transitioning, whether they’re transitioning from toddlerhood into elementary school, and that can be a difficult time for some parents, whether they’re transitioning from, elementary into adolescence and becoming teenagers.
Maybe for some of you, your children are getting ready to leave home and you’re going to be an empty nester. And that feels like a big transition that you are experiencing as a parent. All of that can contribute to lots of instability, feelings of uncertainty, not to mention that the average adult American right now usually works nine or more jobs over their lifespan, with 39 being the average age of a major career shift.
Along with that, A lot of people experience major relationship shifts in their midlife. They’ve gotten to a point where maybe they’ve been working hard on a relationship and it’s around this time that they realize it’s just not going to work, and their relationship changes or dissolves and they find themselves in a new relationship.
Period of uncertainty and transition going from being partnered or married to single again Wondering what? Dating as an adult with or without children is going to mean for them and the rest of their lives Of course, any of these things can take place at many different points along our Lifespan, it just happens Statistically that for a lot of us A lot of these things tend to happen during this midlife season, and all of these things together, even if they don’t all affect you, a couple of them can cause enough instability and uncertainty of a transition that you just don’t feel great. You don’t feel as confident and sure as you did in your late twenties early thirties, and that you probably will feel again.
That’s the great news of the U-shaped curve that statistically, once you get through this sort of adjustment period, things tend to get better. Overall things trend upward starting around 50, you’re. Global satisfaction and happiness tend to get higher and higher until your mid-seventies, and then it either gets better through the end of your life or because primarily of health concerns and loneliness, it can dive bomb again into your very late years.
But that’s not what this episode is about. This episode is about that bottom of the U-shaped curve and. Just relating to the idea that if you’re feeling some of that midlife friction, you’re not alone. There are lots of us feeling a little bit uncertain. I’m going to say that uncertainty is not terrible. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Uncertainty doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
It doesn’t have to be depressive or disappointing. We can meet some of these questions and transitions with curiosity. With openness the more flexible and adaptable and open to experience we are, the easier some of these transitions may be and for many of us having a coach or a therapist or both to guide us through some of these big transitions, disappointments, expectations, hopes for this season of life can be really incredibly effective and helpful in avoiding a lot of the negative emotions that we may fall into without that sounding board.
So, to flip to the positive for a little while, some of the opportunities for growth and self-reflection in the bottom of this U-shaped curve can be a catalyst for reevaluation, reorientation of priorities. It’s a time where you might assess your values, goals, and life choices and be led to greater clarity, have a renewed sense of purpose.
Also, as we navigate the challenges of midlife, we often are going to develop coping mechanisms, tools, and resilience that will contribute to our overall well-being as we continue to get older. The most important piece is that we understand that this phenomenon exists and that there are guides that can help us navigate through this phase with greater awareness and perspective, ultimately getting us to a more fulfilling and meaningful life than we had before.
As I’ve been working on this episode, I’ve realized that there are so many different aspects to this that I want to get into. So, I’m going to do a little mini-series on midlife, talk through a few different categories, and give some overall tips based on research of ways that we can navigate this. So, to leave you off today, I just want to talk through a couple categories.
Physical Changes
One is physical changes not, being as flexible, strong, or spry as we used to be perimenopause, which is a massive change hormonally for women that can contribute to lots of different changes in our lives. Also changing family dynamics. So that’s beyond physical. Is this relational midlife?
Relational Changes
Relationships with our parents may change as we become, take on more caretaking roles, relationships with our children as they grow up, relationships among partners may change as we’re entering this phase and maybe people are wondering whether the way that, their ride has been going as a couple is going well enough to continue and they make some decisions around that.
Vocational Changes
And then another category is our vocation or career. Whether or not that is going well and how we feel about it changes in finances and financial stability and then of course spirituality and recognizing spiritual changes.
Spiritual Changes
I think Sue Monk Kidd was about midlife. She was in her early forties when she wrote Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which of course was a massive journey and about a 10-year spiritual transformation that she underwent during her midlife.
All these things can be interesting on their own. And I will dive into each of them individually a little bit more in podcasts to come, but to leave you with just a few. Very high-level tips today. The first one would be to work with a coach or a counselor as you’re navigating some of these changes.
It’s so much better to do it in partnership to not rely on yourself or even on your friends and family members to hold all of that for you, but to engage the assistance of a professional. If you’re feeling like crisis II, like trauma and you’re really feeling depressed or you’re needing some clinical help, then a therapist is a great way to go.
If you feel like you could just use some support and advocacy and maybe work towards a mindset shift and some self-exploration with goal setting, that’s where a coach can come in handy, and I am taking on new coaching clients right now and I offer a free coaching call to anyone interested in exploring whether or not working with me as a coach would be a good fit for them.
Feel free to head to the link in the show notes or my coaching page on my website, livefreecreative.co, to sign up for a free call and to dive into seeing if coaching is a good fit for you.
Three Tips for Coping with Midlife Challenges
Learn to Accept Change
So, the first tip is. Learning to accept change. That’s a big thing. But just acknowledging and recognizing that there are circumstances beyond your control and taking a deep breath while you lean into acceptance.
Maintain a Sense of Purpose
Number two is trying to maintain a sense of purpose. I really love to do this through journaling, but just keeping a hold of what it is that you love and that what you’re good at your interests, how you’re making a difference in your own life and other people’s lives, how you’re connected to the world, some of that can buffer against some of the disappointment and difficulty that arises with this transition.
Prioritize Self-Care and Health
Tip number three is going to be general. Prioritizing self-care, sleeping, eating a little bit better making sure that you’re walking, that you’re breathing deeply, and that you are doing some strength training, those things will all help contribute to your overall physical well-being during midlife.
Adjust your Perspective
And the last big one can be to adjust your perception of midlife and aging by Taking a wide-angle view, maybe reading books about people who are in midlife or older and the successes and joys that they find, maybe reflecting on your own accomplishments, practicing gratitude, asking yourself how you’ve grown and how you’ve contributed to your life so far.
And then, projecting forward into what things you hope to accomplish and what relationships you hope to deepen and what joys you hope to experience in the coming years to keep yourself forward facing and feeling good. I will dive into each of those a little bit more detail in upcoming episodes, but overall, I just wanted this episode as an introduction to this u-shaped curve to normalize for those of you who feeling some of the effects of generalized midlife bleh, the bottoming out or the disillusionment, transition, changes, disappointment, unexpected emotion of this time of life.
You’re not alone!
Know that you’re not alone. Know that this is normal, that a huge percentage of the population is feeling some, if not all of this, and that you’re not alone. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with your life. This is a natural and normal transition in aging, in really having a chance to be introspective and to make some evaluations as we do throughout our lives.
And it’s all going to be okay. There’s more to come. I hope that you have enjoyed this episode, and if you have questions about managing midlife and feeling well, feeling a sense of well-being and confidence and competence throughout midlife, please send me an email at miranda@livefreecreative.co.
I’m planning, like I said, to put together some more episodes on this and to work on a group coaching program specific to women in midlife who would like to learn more about the physical, vocational, relational, emotional, and spiritual transitions that we experience during this time, and how to support ourselves through them.
Conclusion
As always, I want to just thank you so much for lending your attention here today. I really appreciate you tuning into the show and spending some time with me today. I hope this episode has felt a little bit different. and relatable to you in whatever phase of life you’re in, whether you are squarely in midlife, whether you’re approaching midlife, whether you’ve passed through it and are sailing up the hill on the other side, just to call out again, that if you’d like to explore coaching with me, you can sign up for a free exploratory call on my website through the link in the profile.
And get excited about a fall adventure trip for women coming up in early, probably early November in Utah. I’ll have the dates and final details for that available in the next couple weeks. Have a great one. I hope today’s episode helps you feel a little bit more practically happy, and I’ll talk to you again next week.