Why the most meaningful birthdays end with 9, as in 29 and 39

The Washington Post:

The year before we age into a new decade — at 29, 39, 49 and so on — we’re more likely to back up and take a hard look at our lives. Year nine, that time leading up to a new chapter, can prompt us to take action, making us more likely to run a marathon, cheat on our partners or even take our own lives, according to research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As one chapter closes and another one opens, research suggests, it’s human nature to start searching for something.

“Years 30, 40, 50, they’re psychologically consequential,” Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles and co-author of the study, told The Washington Post in an interview. “They seem big, they seem looming and they seem more important to us than the others. They make us step back and think about how things have been going up until then and how we want them to go moving forward.”

Read the whole story: The Washington Post