# Dr Jerry Kennard
> Mental health and wellbeing information for men aged 40 and over. Honest, practical and informed — written by a psychologist who's seen enough to know what actuallymatters.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About this site (and me)](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/about.md) - Me My name is Jerry Kennard. I'm a psychologist (retired). I've worked in health settings and in Higher Education, and I've spent more years than I care to count thinking about how people's minds work — particularly men's minds, and particularly what happens when life starts throwing the bigger, ha…
- [Contact Me](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/contact-me.md)
- [Disclaimer](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/disclaimer.md) - Last updated: April 2026 Please read this page before using DrJerryKennard.com. It sets out clearly what this site is, what it isn't, and how the information here should be used. General Information Only The content on DrJerryKennard.com is written for general informational and educational purposes…
- [Podcasts](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/podcasts.md) - I'm gradually rolling out the articles as podcasts. The podcast is entitled The Quiet Midlife, but it echoes the written material. Either use the player below or check out your preferred platform [Podbean, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, Player FM, Podchaser, Boomplay and more]
- [Privacy](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/privacy.md) - Last updated: April 2026 Your privacy matters. This page explains what information is collected when you visit DrJerryKennard.com, how it is used, and what your rights are. It is written in plain English because privacy policies that require a law degree to understand are not much use to anyone. Wh…
- [Resources](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/resources.md) - Last updated: April 2026 If something you've read on this site has prompted you to seek support, or if you're concerned about yourself or someone else, the organisations below can help. All details have been verified, but contact information can change — if something doesn't connect, please try an…
- [Start here](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/start-here.md) - My name is Jerry Kennard. I'm a retired Chartered Psychologist who spent a career working in health settings and higher education, thinking about how people's minds work. This site exists because men in the second half of life are navigating some of the most significant psychological territory of t…
- [Terms](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/terms.md) - Last updated: April 2026 By using DrJerryKennard.com you agree to the terms set out on this page. Please read them before using the site. They are written in plain English because that is how everything else on this site is written. Who Runs This Site? DrJerryKennard.com is operated by Jerry Kennar…
- [The Midlife Man's Emotional Check-up](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-midlife-mans-emotional-check-up.md)
- [Why Subscribe?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-subscribe.md) - I'm not a fan of newsletters. Many are an extension of a sales pitch, or clickbait dressed up as content, or deliberately built to make unsubscribing a small ordeal. This site isn't affiliated with any commercial organisation, treatment provider or subscription service, and the newsletter isn't a d…

## Posts
- [Caring for Your Parents: Congratulations on Role Reversal](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/caring-for-your-parents-congratulations-on-role-reversal.md) - It typically starts with a phone call: "Dad's had another fall." And somewhere in the weeks that follow, the relationship quietly changes shape. The son becomes the parent. It's the job you never applied for, but it's yours.
- [Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/hair-today-gone-tomorrow.md) - When I was a boy, my hair was thick and luxuriant. I thought nothing of it. Then one day a hairdresser said that he could see signs that I was on the road to hair loss. Whether that was insight or a good guess, I'll never know. But he was right.
- [Problem-Solving Therapy: Because Sitting There Looking Worried Hasn't Worked](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/problem-solving-therapy-because-sitting-there-looking-worried-hasnt-worked.md) - Most men in genuine difficulty are not short of concern. They have concern in abundance. What they're short of is a structure for turning that concern into something that works. Problem-Solving Therapy exists to supply exactly that.
- [Rumination: Why Your Brain Is Like a Dog With a Stick](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/rumination-why-your-brain-is-like-a-dog-with-a-stick.md) - It doesn't matter that the stick has been fetched forty times already. Your dog will find it, present it, and want to do it all again. Your brain, at three in the morning, is doing the same thing with the conversation you had with your boss. The difference? The dog has more fun.
- [Burnout: or how to know you're running on fumes](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/burnout-or-how-to-know-youre-running-on-fumes.md) - You're sitting in the car with the engine switched off. You're not on the phone or listening to music, or even wondering whether you remembered to buy milk. You're just sitting there. You probably don't know why. But that tiny stretch of time in the car is where this article begins.
- [Jealousy, Insecurity and the Male Ego at 40+](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/jealousy-insecurity-and-the-male-ego-at-40.md) - Jealousy is often assumed to be a teenage affliction that everyone grows out of. That, or evidence of a rather pathetic character flaw in the adult who still has it. Neither of these is quite right. Jealousy in midlife men is common, and interesting psychologically - as we're about to explore.
- [Downsizing: the joy of having nowhere to put anything](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/downsizing-the-joy-of-having-nowhere-to-put-anything.md) - As I write this, I am in the middle of moving from a large detached house into a bungalow roughly a third of its size. This is about gains and losses.
- [Why Your Patience Has Left The Building](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-your-patience-has-left-the-building.md) - Do you recognise that low-grade fury that arrives sometime around the mid-forties? It focuses on a word, a font, or the way the self-checkout machine now offers unsolicited opinions about your shopping. Let's work out what's going on.
- [The Case for Reading Fiction](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-case-for-reading-fiction.md) - Men read less fiction than women, by a wide and consistent margin, and most men who don't read novels have a perfectly reasonable-sounding excuse for it.But there is a body of research on what fiction does to the brain.
- [I Blame The Parents](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/i-blame-the-parents.md) - The Wall Street Journal ran a piece recently asking whether therapists are partly responsible for the rise in adult children cutting off their parents. It's a good question, badly put — and the badly-put version is worth untangling.
- [What Chronic Stress Does to the Male Body Over Time](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-chronic-stress-does-to-the-male-body-over-time.md) - Stress is one of those words that has been used so casually, for so long, that it has almost stopped meaning anything. A traffic jam is stressful. A difficult meeting is stressful. So, apparently, is losing your job, your health, or your marriage. So, what does it mean?
- [Mindfulness for Men Over 40](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/mindfulness-for-men-over-40.md) - Mindfulness has an image problem. Scented candles, a woman's voice telling you to notice your breath, and an app subscription that costs more than a round at the pub. Strip all of that away, however, and there is a piece of genuinely well-evidenced psychological technology underneath it.
- [Redundancy: It's Not the Money That Breaks Most Men](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/redundancy-its-not-the-money-that-breaks-most-men.md) - Redundancy is discussed almost entirely in financial terms. This is understandable, but the money is rarely what actually does the damage. The real damage is considerably less visible, less discussed, and worth more understanding.
- [Alcohol: Your Best Mate — or Your Biggest Problem?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/alcohol-your-best-mate-or-your-biggest-problem.md) - Alcohol often has a complicated relationship in men's lives. It gives, and it takes, and it's one they are least likely to examine honestly.
- [Anger as a Secondary Emotion](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/anger-as-a-secondary-emotion.md) - Anger is the emotion men are most comfortable expressing and least likely to examine. This is unfortunate because in a significant proportion of cases, the anger is not the point. It is the thing sitting on top of the point — so what's going on?
- [My Tech, My Rules](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/my-tech-my-rules.md) - Older men and technology: they resist it, misunderstand it, and eventually capitulate to it with the enthusiasm of someone accepting a parking ticket. Or do They? This narrative is wrong. The more interesting story is considerably more nuanced — and considerably more deliberate.
- [From Payday To Pensions](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/from-payday-to-pensions.md) - During the middle years, the relationship between money and identity undergoes a shift that the financial planning industry covers in considerable detail, yet the psychological dimension is hardly touched on.
- [Do Men Bother With Self-Awareness?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/do-men-bother-with-self-awareness.md) - Self-awareness is the psychological equivalent of flossing — universally recommended, rarely practised with any consistency, and the subject of guilt whenever the question is raised directly. Do men engage with it, and does patchiness matter as much as the self-help industry insists it does?
- [Why Success Feels Empty at 42](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-success-feels-empty-at-42.md) - At some point in the middle years, a significant number of men achieve something they wanted and discover, with considerable inconvenience, that it doesn't feel the way they expected.
- [How to Build Resilience Aged 40+](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/how-to-build-resilience-aged-40.md) - Resilience is one of the most overused words in the self-improvement industry. It appears on posters, in corporate training programmes, and in the titles of books written by people who have confused having a difficult morning with surviving genuine adversity.
- [So You're Going to Be a Granddad](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/so-youre-going-to-be-a-granddad.md) - Becoming a grandfather is one of the more significant events in a man's later life. It is also, it must be said, one of the more bewildering — arriving with a set of emotional responses that nobody quite prepared you for and a title that makes you sound considerably older than you feel.
- [Divorce After 40: How It Affects Men](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/divorce-after-40-how-it-affects-men.md) - Divorce after 40 is, for most of the men who go through it, one of the most significant psychological events of their adult lives. It produces loss, grief, disruption to identity and risk to physical and mental health. It is also survivable and manageable.
- [Why Men Withdraw](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-men-withdraw.md) - The male withdrawal is one of the most reliable and least understood phenomena in relationship psychology. The man disappears into himself, or the garage, or he has a sustained interest in the middle distance.
- [Shame in Men](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/shame-in-men.md) - Let's begin with a distinction that matters more than it might appear. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am something bad. The difference is between an action and an identity. Guilt is about behaviour. Shame is about self — total, corrosive, and considerably harder to shift because the…
- [Rocket — but not the Saturn V kind](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/rocket-but-not-the-saturn-v.md) - Picture the scene. You're in a modest little restaurant that used to serve things properly. Enormous pies. Chips with everything. Puddings dense enough to alter the Earth's rotation. The kind of place where the menu was laminated, the waiter and the cooks were all called Dave, and nothing was descr…
- [How to Have Difficult Conversations — for Men Who'd Rather Be Anywhere Else](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/how-to-have-difficult-conversations-for-men-whod-rather-be-anywhere-else.md) - Most men would rather dismantle an engine, file a tax return, or watch a documentary about the migratory patterns of Arctic terns than initiate a difficult conversation. This is understandable. It is also considerably more expensive over time than the conversation would have been.
- [The Great British Paunch: A Meditation on Middle-Aged Spread](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-great-british-paunch-a-meditation-on-middle-aged-spread.md) - At some point in the middle years, most British men acquire a paunch. This is not news. What is news — or at least, what most men have been successfully avoiding knowing — is what it really is, where it really comes from, and what, if anything, can realistically be done about it.
- [Career Change After 40: The Fear, the Research and the Reasonable Case for Jumping](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/career-change-after-40.md) - Changing career after 40 is either the most sensible thing a man can do with the second half of his working life, or a moderately terrifying leap into the unknown dressed up as liberation. In most cases, it is both of these things simultaneously.
- [Man and Dog](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/man-and-dog.md) - The relationship between men and dogs is one of the oldest in human history. It is also, it turns out, one of the most psychologically significant — and one of the least likely to be recognised as such by the men most benefiting from it.
- [Why Your Kids Need You to Act Your Age](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/act-your-age.md) - Are you the cool dad? The one who's more mate than parent, who insists on being down with whatever the current generation is down with? This version is more common than it used to be, considerably less useful than it appears, and occasionally mortifying for everyone involved.
- [When the Children Leave: The Empty Nest and What It Stirs Up](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-empty-nest.md) - The empty nest is one of the most significant transitions in family life and one of the least prepared for. Most parents spend eighteen years getting their children ready to leave. Almost none of them spend equivalent time getting themselves ready for what happens when they do.
- [Alexithymia: When You Can't Name What You're Feeling](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/cant-name-what-youre-feeling.md) - There is a word for the experience of having feelings you cannot identify, describe or make sense of. Most men who have it have never heard the word. Many would find it uncomfortably accurate.
- [Is Everything Irritating At 50?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/is-everything-irritating-at-50.md) - By the age of 50, a significant proportion of men discover that the world has become substantially more annoying than it used to be. This is not imaginary, not inevitable, and considerably more interesting psychologically than it first appears.
- [Men And Lubrication](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/men-and-alcohol.md) - Alcohol has been the social lubricant of human civilisation for approximately ten thousand years. It has also been responsible for considerable human misery. These two facts exist simultaneously and require acknowledgement in roughly equal measure.
- [When the brain filters give up](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/when-the-brain-filter-give-up.md) - Uncle Derek. The one who says the thing that everyone else was thinking but had the collective sense not to say out loud. He is simultaneously the most entertaining and most mortifying person at the table. There is a reason for this, and it is considerably more interesting than simple rudeness.
- [Brains, Blokes, and Boredom](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/brains-blokes-and-boredom.md) - The brain does not retire when you do. It continues operating on the same fundamental principle it always has: use it or watch it quietly deteriorate while you're watching daytime television. The choice, within certain limits, is yours.
- [Why Men Who Fix Things Are Onto Something](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/men-who-fix-things.md) - The man in the garage with his hands in an engine, the one rebuilding a wall on a Saturday afternoon, the one who spent three hours fixing something. They are, it turns out, doing something rather important.
- [Staying Relevant](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/staying-relevant.md) - Relevance is not something that happens to you. It is something you maintain — or don't — through a series of choices that most men don't realise they're making until the moment they notice they've stopped being made.
- [The Curse of Late-Onset Illnesses in Men](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/late-onset-illnesses-in-men.md) - Men have a well-documented tendency to arrive at serious illness later than necessary, sicker than they need to be, and more surprised than the evidence warrants. This article is about why that happens and what it costs.
- [When You've Lost The Plot](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/when-youve-lost-the-plot.md) - Overwhelm isn’t a character flaw. It’s not some moral failing, like leaving the toilet seat up or thinking cargo shorts are a good idea. It’s simply what happens when you keep stacking demands higher and higher until the whole thing starts to wobble like a badly built shed in a gale.
- [Becoming a Dad When You Should Know Better](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/becoming-a-dad-when-you-should-know-better.md) - Having a child in your 40s or 50s is increasingly common, frequently unplanned, and almost entirely unlike the experience of becoming a father at 25 — in ways that are sometimes better, sometimes harder, and occasionally both simultaneously.
- [Loud Music, Bad Taste — And Loving It at 57](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/loud-music-bad-taste-and-loving-it-at-57.md) - Middle-aged men are expected to make peace with Radio 2 and accept that the music of their youth has been appropriately filed under nostalgia. Some of us have declined this invitation.
- [Don't Be Embarrassed By Your Hobbies: Here's Why](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/embarrassed-by-your-hobbies.md) - There's a point during adult life when most men quietly abandon things they enjoyed because the enjoyment no longer seemed sufficiently justifiable. This is a mistake with consequences that go considerably beyond the unused guitar in the spare room.
- [I got to 55, then Bam - Epilepsy!](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/its-called-epilepsy.md) - A diagnosis of epilepsy in midlife or later arrives without warning, removes things you didn't know you valued until they were gone, and requires a period of adjustment that nobody fully prepares you for. This article is an honest account of what that involves — and what tends to come after.
- [The Shorts Question: Why Middle-Aged Men Have Stopped Caring What You Think](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/we-dont-care-what-you-think.md) - After the age of 12, most British men have abandoned their shorts. Along the way, a significant number choose to revisit them. This is not a fashion story. It is, however, a psychological one.
- [How Men Manage Worry (and better alternatives)](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/how-men-manage-worry.md) - Men are not, contrary to the stereotype, immune to worry. They are, however, remarkably creative in their methods of not dealing with it — methods that tend to work briefly, poorly, and at increasing cost.
- [15 Years Retired Yet Still Dreaming About Work](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/15-years-retired-yet-still-dreaming-about-work.md) - If you retired over a decade ago and still find yourself back at the office every time you close your eyes, you are not going mad. You are, however, more interesting to psychologists than you might like to be.
- [The Case for Birdwatching — Seriously!](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/the-case-for-birdwatching-seriously.md) - Birdwatching has an image problem. It is associated, in the popular imagination, with a specific type of person standing in a field in waterproof clothing, writing something in a notebook, apparently content. This article is an argument that the 'apparent content' part is not a coincidence.
- [Why Men Ignore Physical Symptoms](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-men-ignore-physical-symptoms.md) - Men have an extraordinary capacity for explaining away symptoms that would send most sensible people to a doctor. The chest pain is probably nothing. The lump has probably always been there. The persistent fatigue is probably just stress.
- [Sex and Intimacy in Long-Term Relationships](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/sex-and-intimacy-in-long-term-relationships.md) - Sex in long-term relationships is the most comprehensively mishandled topic in popular psychology. The shelves groan with books promising to reignite, rekindle and generally re-something your sex life. Most of them are nonsense. Here's why.
- [How to Find Meaning in Work That No Longer Feels Meaningful](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/how-to-find-meaning-in-work-that-no-longer-feels-meaningful.md) - There comes a point in most working lives, a man looks up from whatever he's doing and thinks: is this it? The honest answer, for a significant number of people, is yes. This article is about what to do with that.
- [In Defence of the Garden Shed](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/in-defence-of-the-garden-shed.md) - The shed has been mischaracterised for decades as a place men go to avoid their responsibilities. The evidence suggests it is, in fact, a place men go to remain capable of meeting them.
- [What Men Think About Death](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-men-think-about-death.md) - Death is the one appointment nobody misses, yet rarely gets discussed. Men, in particular, have developed an impressive range of techniques for not thinking about it — most of which turn out to be thinking about it differently rather than not thinking about it at all.
- [A Night at the Pub — It Should Be Prescribed](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/a-night-at-the-pub-it-should-be-prescribed.md) - There are approximately 4,000 licensed medications available on the NHS. Not one of them is a pint with people you like. This is, on the evidence, an oversight.
- [Getting Off Your Backside When You'd Rather Not](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/getting-off-your-backside-when-youd-rather-not.md) - Behavioural activation is one of the best-evidenced techniques in clinical psychology. It is also, in its basic form, the instruction to do things when you don't feel like doing things. Which sounds, on the face of it, like advice your grandmother could have given you for free.
- [Is Testosterone to Blame for Everything?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/is-testosterone-to-blame-for-everything.md) - Testosterone has become the explanation of choice for an impressive range of male problems — aggression, risk-taking, mid-life misery, and the invention of the leaf blower. The reality is considerably more interesting and considerably less tidy.
- [Why So Many Men Are Lonely](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-so-many-men-are-lonely.md) - Loneliness among men has reached levels that would, if it were a physical disease, prompt a public health emergency. Instead it gets a shrug, a suggestion to join a club, and a change of subject.
- [Why Men Grieve Differently — and How It Shows](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-men-grieve-differently-and-how-it-shows.md) - Grief is one of the few experiences that arrives without asking permission, ignores all previous arrangements, and refuses to behave in the way you've been told it should. Men, in particular, tend to find this inconvenient.
- [What Depression Looks Like in Men](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-depression-looks-like-in-men.md) - Depression in men is under-diagnosed, under-treated and over-fatal. A significant part of the reason is that most men — and many of the people around them — don't recognise it when it's happening.
- [Helping a Friend Through a Rough Patch](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/helping-a-friend.md) - There will come a time when someone you care about is going to be struggling. You'll know something is wrong. You'll want to help. And then you'll have absolutely no idea what to do. This article is for that moment.
- [Purpose After Retirement: Building a Life That Doesn't Need a Job Title](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/purpose-after-retirement.md) - There's a point in the first year of retirement, usually around Tuesday afternoon, it dawns on most men that endless freedom and purposeless emptiness are much harder to tell apart than the brochure suggested.
- [Sleep and Mental Health: What Happens When It Goes Wrong](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/sleep-and-mental-health-what-happens-when-it-goes-wrong.md) - Most men will cheerfully admit to surviving on five hours' sleep as though it's a point of pride. It isn't. It's a slow-motion act of self-sabotage with a remarkably comprehensive list of consequences.
- [Why Male Friendship Is Harder to Maintain After 40](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/why-male-friendship-is-harder-to-maintain-after-40.md) - Men are losing their friends at a rate that would alarm them if they noticed it was happening. Most don't notice until they're trying to think of someone to call and the list is shorter than expected.
- [What Are Cognitive Distortions and Why Do They Matter?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/what-are-cognitive-distortions-and-why-do-they-matter.md) - Your brain is lying to you. Not occasionally, not in unusual circumstances — regularly, systematically, and with considerable conviction. Here's what it's doing and why it matters.
- [Midlife Reappraisal: What's Really Happening at 45](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/midlife-reappraisal.md) - It's not a crisis. It's not a cliché. It's a perfectly normal psychological process that most men are completely unprepared for — which is why it tends to arrive like a lorry through the living room wall.
- [Work, Retirement and the Question of Who You Are Without Either](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/work-retirement.md) - Work is not just what men do. For most men, it is a substantial part of what they are. Which makes whatever happens to it — stress, redundancy, retirement — considerably more than a practical problem.
- [A Practical Man's Guide to Looking After His Mind](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/a-practical-mans-guide-to-looking-after-his-mind.md) - The self-help industry is worth approximately $40 billion globally and contains roughly $30.5 billion worth of noise. This article is an attempt to identify what's left.
- [Your Body and Your Mind Are Not Separate Departments](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/mind-body-connection.md) - For centuries, medicine treated the body and mind as entirely distinct concerns. This turned out to be wrong in almost every direction you care to look.
- [Long-Term Partnerships: What Keeps Them Working](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/long-term-partnerships-what-actually-keeps-them-working.md) - Most men put more research into buying a car than into understanding what makes a relationship last. This is probably not unrelated to the divorce statistics.
- [Getting Older: What's Actually Happening to Your Mind](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/getting-older-whats-actually-happening-to-your-mind.md) - Ageing is inevitable. A lot of what men believe about what it does to their minds, however, turns out to be either wrong or considerably more complicated than they've been led to expect.
- [Emotions & Men: What's Going On?](https://www.drjerrykennard.com/emotions-men-whats-actually-going-on.md) - Understanding Your Mind Let's start with something that shouldn't be controversial but somehow still is: men have emotions. Not watered-down, occasional, minor-inconvenience emotions — the full range. Grief, fear, loneliness, shame, tenderness, love. All of it. The idea that men are less emotional…

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