Everywhere you look in 2025, the headlines are heavy: hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, political reversals, the cost-of-living climbing, and daily news cycles that feel designed to rattle our nervous systems. All of this must be doing something to our overall health, right? For many of us, the impact is not just in our wallets, it’s in our bodies, our sleep, and in our spirit. Public health researcher Dr. Arline Geronimus calls this toll “weathering”, the way chronic stress, bias, and systemic inequities age us faster, drain our reserves, and sometimes shorten our lives.

Weathering is the cumulative effect of constantly bracing yourself, against bias, instability, or the next piece of crushing news. It can look like tension headaches in your 20s, insomnia in your 30s, or high blood pressure in your 50s and older. It can feel like always being on guard in a meeting, holding your breath when bills arrive, ignoring them, or feeling bone-deep tired even after a full night’s sleep. Weathering shows up as irritability, brain fog, forgetfulness, or a heart that races for no apparent reason.

At different stages, it wears a different mask:

How do you know if you’re weathering? Ask yourself: Do you feel like you’re always “on,” always pushing, never fully at ease? Do you find yourself grinding your teeth, skipping meals, overeating, or ignoring pain, exhaustion, or just pushing through anxiety because you “don’t have time to be sick”? Do you feel older than your years? These are signs that your mind and body are carrying more than it should, more than it was ever meant to carry alone.

But here’s another truth, even in a year like this, we can live well. Not by pretending the storm isn’t raging, but by tending to our health and spirit differently at every stage of life. Living well is not one-size-fits-all. It looks different for a young woman finding her footing, for those of us in our mid-years balancing multiple roles, and for more seasoned women who carry wisdom and sometimes weariness into later years.

Young Women (Late Teens to 20s): Learning to Name the LoadVignette: Jada is 24, the first in her family to graduate college. She landed a job in tech last year, but after her company’s recent layoffs, she spends nights refreshing job boards while student loan notices pile in. In meetings, she hears colleagues describe her as “confident,” but what they don’t see is the way she replays every comment in her head afterward, scanning for tone, worrying if she came across “too much.”

Weathering at this stage: For young women, weathering often hides behind youthfulness. It can show up as racing thoughts, stomachaches, breakouts, or restless sleep. You may feel the need to constantly code-switch, polish, or overdeliver just to be seen as enough. These invisible battles age the body long before gray hair appears.

Living Well at This Stage:

Living well as a young woman means refusing to let overwork or silence define your worth. The best resistance here is learning early that your health matters as much as your goal to get ahead.

Mid-Age Women (Late 20s through 40s): Redefining Strength in the Pressure Cooker YearsVignette: Monique is 38. By day, she manages a nonprofit program. By night, she’s helping her 10-year-old with math homework while fielding calls from her mother’s doctor. She shares custody of her son with his father and is getting used to her new life and her ex’s new wife. Her smartwatch buzzes a blood pressure alert again. She laughs it off on the outside but feels the dread inside. She hasn’t slept through the night in months, and her friends say she looks “tired.” She is tired, tired of carrying everything, tired of being strong, tired of pretending the overworked “super woman”, always busy, is her demonstrating strength. This is not strength. This is not smart either.

Weathering at this stage: Mid-age women often feel weathering most acutely. The body begins to register years of “high-effort coping.” Hypertension, weight changes, autoimmune flare-ups, migraines, and burnout are common. Emotionally, it feels like there’s never enough time, energy, or space to breathe.

Living Well at This Stage:

For mid-age women, living well means embracing the truth that rest is not an indulgence, it is survival.

Seasoned Women (50s and Beyond): Turning Weathering into WisdomVignette: Denise is 62. She’s a retired teacher, raising her granddaughter three days a week while volunteering at her church. She’s lived through recessions, elections, layoffs, and health scares. She knows the storm always comes and always passes. But lately, she feels the aches in her knees and ankles – maybe from carrying too much physical weight all these years, the impact of years of putting everyone first, and the loneliness of friends who’ve moved away or passed on. Still, when her granddaughter curls up next to her with a book, she smiles. “We made it this far,” she whispers to herself.

Weathering at this stage: For seasoned women, the accumulated strain of decades often translates into chronic conditions or the further complication of juggling multiple chronic conditions - hypertension, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease. Beyond physical symptoms, there can also be grief, loneliness, and the invisible work of carrying everyone else’s survival for so long. Yet within this season lies deep wisdom and perspective.

Living Well at This Stage:

Living Well Together: Across GenerationsVignette: On a rainy Sunday afternoon, three women sit around the same kitchen table. Nia, 27, scrolls her phone for job postings, sighing at rejection emails. Her aunt Monique, 41, stirs a pot of soup, balancing her laptop on the counter to finish work while keeping an eye on her teenage son in the living room. Their mother, Denise, 65, folds laundry slowly, listening more than she speaks. At one point she chuckles, “I’ve lived through worse, but I won’t lie - - - this is heavy.” Nia looks up, tired, and Monique’s eyes soften. They are each in different seasons, but in that moment the weight feels collective and so does the comfort.

Living well is not the absence of struggle. It is the daily choice to breathe, to rest, to find joy, and to link arms across generations.

In doing so, we turn the heavy weight of weathering into something else entirely: a legacy of wellness that defies the times we are living through.

You may have noticed a pattern in the articles that IAWH is producing lately. It is intentional. We are most concerned about all of our physical and mental wellbeing during these increasingly uncertain and stressful times.

Resources for Living Well at Any Age

References

Cheryl J. Thompson, MSPHCo-Executive Director

This article first appeared on the IAWH Health blog on August 27, 2025 and is preserved here as part of the IAWH Health Journal archive. Information reflects what was known at the time of publication. This article is for general education and is not medical advice.

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