The Truth About Putting Yourself First: Why Midlife Women Struggle to Prioritize Their Own Needs
You've spent decades being the reliable one. The problem-solver. The person everyone turns to when life gets complicated. Now, somewhere between managing our aging parents, supporting our adult children through their own transitions, and maintaining a career (or a business) that still demands everything you've got, you're wondering: When do I get to matter?
If you've ever felt guilty for wanting time to yourself, or found yourself saying "I don't even know what I want anymore," you're not alone.
The challenge of self-prioritization in midlife isn't just about being busy, it's about untangling years of conditioning that taught us our worth comes from taking care of and serving others.
The Weight of Invisible Expectations
Most midlife women face a perfect storm of competing demands. You're likely navigating the "sandwich generation" experience. You know… caring for multiple generations while trying to maintain your own relationships, health, and sanity. But beyond the obvious lies something deeper: a lifetime of internalized messages about what it means to be a "good" woman.
From childhood, many of us learned that our value came from being helpful, accommodating, and selfless. We absorbed the idea that wanting things for ourselves was somehow selfish or wrong. These beliefs don't just disappear when we hit midlife—they often intensify as we face new pressures and experiences. And nowhere do these old messages show up more powerfully than in the guilt that follows us everywhere.
The Guilt That Follows You Everywhere
Guilt might be the most universal experience among midlife women trying to prioritize themselves. It shows up in countless ways: guilt for spending money on yourself instead of your family, guilt for taking time away from responsibilities, guilt for even wanting something different than what you have.
This guilt often stems from what psychologists call "role strain", the exhaustion that comes from trying to meet everyone else's expectations while ignoring your own needs. You might find yourself thinking, "I should be grateful for what I have" or "Other people have it worse," effectively shutting down any conversation about what you actually want or need.
The truth is, guilt is often a sign that you're dealing with old programming that no longer serves you.
Learning to recognize guilt as information rather than instruction can be the first step toward reclaiming your right to prioritize yourself. But even when you start to work through the guilt, you're still left facing something else: the feeling that there simply aren't enough hours in the day.
When Time Becomes the Ultimate Currency
"I don't have time" might be the most common phrase in a midlife woman's vocabulary. Between work deadlines, family obligations, household management, caregiving and social commitments, the idea of carving out space for yourself can feel laughable.
But time constraints often mask deeper issues. Sometimes "I don't have time" really means "I don't feel I deserve time" or "I don't know how to say no to someone else’s demands." It's worth examining whether your time limitations are actually about logistics or about permission: permission to disappoint others, permission to be unavailable, permission to choose yourself.
Many of us, when we look deeper, discover that we actually do have pockets of time, but we've automatically been filling them with other people's needs or busy work that feels productive but isn't necessarily meaningful. This automatic filling of time often happens because we've become so accustomed to meeting everyone else's expectations that we don't even realize we're doing it which brings us to one of the biggest barriers to self-prioritization.
The Family Expectation Trap
Family expectations can be particularly challenging because they often operate under the surface. No one explicitly tells you that you must be the family coordinator, emotional manager, and default parent for adult children. These roles often evolve gradually until they feel like facts rather than choices you made.
The expectation that you'll always be available, always say yes, and always put family needs first can make prioritizing yourself feel like betrayal. But these expectations often exist because you've trained others to expect them. The good news is that means you can also train people to expect something different.
This doesn't mean abandoning your family or becoming selfish. It means being intentional about which requests align with your values and capacity, and which ones you've been saying yes to out of habit or guilt. But here's where many women hit their biggest roadblock: even when they're ready to be more intentional about their choices, they realize they've lost touch with what they actually want in the first place.
The Lost Art of Knowing What You Want
Perhaps the most heartbreaking challenge many midlife women face is the realization that we've become strangers to ourselves. After decades of focusing on others' needs and preferences, the question "What do you want?" can feel impossible to answer.
This isn't a character flaw, it's a natural result of spending years in reactive mode, responding to everyone else's agenda instead of creating your own. You might find yourself defaulting to what's practical, what others need, or what you think you should want, rather than tuning into your actual desires.
Reconnecting with your wants and needs is a skill that requires practice. It starts with small moments of checking in with yourself: How am I feeling right now? What would feel good? What am I curious about? What energizes me versus what drains me? Once you begin to rediscover these inner signals, you can start to chart a different course forward.
The Path Forward Isn't What You Think
The solution to prioritizing our needs isn't about finding more hours in the day or becoming immune to guilt. It's about shifting your relationship with yourself and your right to take up space in your own life.
This shift often begins with recognizing that taking care of yourself isn't selfish it's necessary. When you're running on empty, everyone around you suffers. When you're energized and fulfilled, you have more to offer the people and causes you care about.
It also means getting comfortable with disappointing others sometimes. This might be the hardest part for women who've built their identity around being reliable and accommodating. But disappointment isn't damage it's information. It tells people that you're a whole person with limits and needs, not an endless resource.
Small Steps, Big Changes
Start where you are. Maybe it's saying no to one request this week that you would normally say yes to out of obligation. Maybe it's spending fifteen minutes doing something that brings you joy instead of checking another task off your list. Maybe it's having an honest conversation with family members about how responsibilities could be shared differently.
The goal isn't to become someone entirely different overnight. It's to slowly reclaim your right to be a priority in your own life. To remember that your needs matter not because of what you do for others, but because you're inherently valuable.
Your midlife isn't about becoming smaller to accommodate everyone else's needs. It's about becoming more fully yourself and giving others the gift of seeing what that looks like. The women who manage to prioritize themselves don't do it because they have fewer responsibilities or less guilt. They do it because they've decided that their own well-being is worth the discomfort of disappointing others sometimes.
You've spent decades being everything to everyone else. Maybe it's time to be something to yourself.
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~Judy Davis is a motivational speaker, published author and Veteran Caregiver who shares candid stories, transformative mindset shifts, and practical strategies to help midlife women navigate the unexpected twists of life.