Ep. 96 Daily Boosts to Decrease Election Stress & Anxiety and Increase Midlife Calm Now

Want your election anxiety to decrease? Try carving a 🎃 pumpkin or sorting your socks. 
In this episode, we follow up on Monday’s Inner Challenge, where we discussed how to manage election anxiety. Today, MJ introduces the Daily Boost, a simple but powerful strategy to lower your stress and boost your mood during these intense times.

 In this episode you'll learn:

1. Why doom scrolling feeds your anxiety and how to stop.

2. The science behind the Daily Boost and why small, intentional actions can make a big impact.

3. Practical examples of daily boosts you can do, like carving a pumpkin, cleaning a junk drawer, or walking around Target.

 Ready to feel less anxious and more in control? Start practicing a daily boost today. Track your progress, get a friend involved, and remember – it’s all about making small, manageable steps toward a calmer mind. 

Check out Ep.62 Mental Wellness: Coping Skills for Managing the Anxiety of TikTok Addiction!

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

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M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

Want your election anxiety to decrease? Try carving a pumpkin or sorting your socks. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Today is Thursday, where I follow up on my Inner Challenge from Monday's episode, where we talked about ways to cope with the election anxiety. I ended the episode on Monday by promising to be your campaign manager to help you decrease your anxiety by creating a daily boost that will increase your calm as our nation goes to the polls. Vote for who you want, but in today's episode, I'm going to share with you my simple and effective strategy to combat anxiety called the Daily Boost. I've taught this to hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more people over the years. Trust me, a daily boost will help you empower your mind and your body to move to a better place than stressing about the outcome of the election. I'm not saying the election isn't important because it is, but my vote goes to mental wellness. It's not as hard as you might think to care about the country and cultivate mental wellness. If you haven't listened to Monday's episode, I strongly encourage you to check it out. In that episode, I encouraged you to go retro and limit yourself to 30 to 60 minutes of news per day. I also said be intentional about what and how you consume your news and for the next few weeks, just for three weeks, commit to creating calm not anxiety. Avoid doom scrolling through the news platforms that feed you content based on algorithms. What I hope you got from Monday's episode was a deeper understanding that these algorithms are part of what are making you anxious. They keep feeding you more similar content, making it really impossible for you to get a fuller picture of what's going on. Try to be really careful about how much news you're watching and where you're watching it. I hope you hear me encouraging you to really be intentional with your mental health these next three weeks. Because let's face it, no matter how much news you consume at this point, the outcome of the election is not going to be influenced by you checking news sources 12 times a day. But we know that your mental health will be influenced. And that's what I am here for. I want you to feel less anxious. I want you to feel healthier in this stressful time. If you are intentional and you limit how much time you spend consuming news in these next three weeks, you are going to have enough time to do the coping skill that I mentioned at the end of Monday's episode, a daily boost. I signed up to be your personal campaign manager for better mental wellness during this stressful time. So with the extra time that you gain by being intentional and managing how much news you consume, whether it's 15 minutes or a couple hours, I want to invite you to use that time to do what I call a daily boost. I'm campaigning that you move from soothing and avoiding to boosting. Yep. You deserve a boost. A daily boost. You might be asking, MJ, what the heck is a daily boost and how'd you come up with this concept? The idea comes straight from Mother Nature, literally. Many years ago when I was pregnant with my first child, I had all the typical anxieties that a new mom has right before they're getting ready to deliver. To keep myself calm, I tried to do something each and every day that I felt was a small boost to all the uncertainty and anxiety that I felt while waiting for my child to arrive. A daily boost is not losing 25 pounds, It's not training for a marathon, it's not learning a second language, or solving world hunger. It's whatever a woman who is nine months pregnant can do, day in and day out, until the baby is born. Or, in this case, until the election is over. Doesn't that make sense? Without doing a daily boost, you might rely on some of your favorite anxiety coping skills that work in the moment, but actually cause you to feel pretty shitty when it's all done. You know what I mean. The coping skill of soothing your anxiety by eating, drinking, smoking. That works in the short term because when we digest food, it numbs our feelings. in the short term, it works great, but usually it disrupts our sleep, we can feel bad about what we ate or how much we smoked, how much we drank, causes brain fog. It just isn't a good solution for anxiety. Maybe you're not a soother. Maybe what you prefer to do when you are really anxious is employ the less healthy coping skill avoidance. Your mind is racing, your stomach aches, so you go to Dr. Netflix or you visit Nurse Pinterest just to get your mind off your worries. The problem with Dr. Netflix and Nurse Pinterest is it burns a lot of time and it really causes our dopamine system to work too hard. By the end of a rather long period of watching and binging Netflix or checking out whatever is the newest fashion on Pinterest, you can feel really irritated. Our brain isn't meant to get that many quick hits of dopamine. So after we get off the devices, we can feel aggravated, irritated. When you're really stressed, whether about an election, or having a baby, or some other big change in your life, you don't really have the energy for huge changes. What often happens when there's temporary stress. is instead d of people doing something very intentionally to manage it, they just think, Oh, it'll be over in a couple, weeks and they soothe and avoid. And then at the end of three weeks, they really feel like crap. So daily boosts are short term positive actions that move your body, Your mind and your heart to a better place. Why do these work? It's all science. When you accomplish something that is positive, no matter how small, you get a hit of dopamine, one of your feel good neurochemicals. Dopamine actually fights stress. Let me share with you some examples of daily boosts that my clients have done over the years that have worked really effectively for them in short periods of stress. Clean out that junk drawer in the kitchen. Go for a 15 minute walk. Read a favorite chapter in your book. Send a card or letter to a loved one. Pair up the socks in the laundry. You know, that box that you have that grows and grows. Walk around Target with no intention of buying anything. Don't even take your wallet in. Create a playlist of a time in your life that everything seemed a little gentler, a little smoother, a little simpler. Brush your dog. Organize the shoes in your closet. Look through old photo albums that really warm your heart. Call an old friend, watch part of a feel good show, visit the zoo, and better yet, take someone who'd love to go to the zoo with you. Make a meal for someone who's going through a hard time. It doesn't need to be a five course meal. Just make a pot of spaghetti and a salad and drop it off. Eat a good breakfast. Yeah, that really helps your body get fueled and ready for the day. Bake a cake from scratch. Carve a pumpkin. Yes, it's October. It's not just election season. It's Halloween. Boo. Take those Amazon returns back to Kohl's or Whole Foods. Not only will you get a hit of dopamine, but you're actually making money off of your anxiety. Do you see the pattern here? Daily boosts are doing, they're boosting, adding to your day, not subtracting. Don't focus in these next three weeks on taking things away, like sugar, your phone, or alcohol. You might be thinking, wait, if I get a hit of dopamine from a daily boost, how is that different than if I get a hit of dopamine from scrolling on the phone? Great question. When you're scrolling on the phone, especially social media or news feeds, the rapid delivery of the new information triggers quick bursts of dopamine and it encourages you to keep scrolling. That's why it's so easy to get addicted to your phone. this creates a loop of immediate gratification. In contrast, if you're looking at a photo album or you're taking a walk, it's a slower, more deliberate experience. The dopamine response is more measured as it takes time to absorb and appreciate each image, fostering a sense of calm and satisfaction rather than a fast paced, compulsive behavior that often is what scrolling on your phone.

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Life is full of these periods of heightened anxiety. Perhaps you feel really anxious waiting to see if you get a promotion or if your worried that your kid isn't going to get into the college of their dreams. Or maybe you're waiting about a medical diagnosis. These daily boosts work anytime when you have short term temporary stress that you want to try to combat day in and day out. What you're basically doing is saying, Hey, I'm going to be intentional. I'm going to move forward and upward instead of allowing your mind to spin and catastrophize. Perhaps you're saying, MJ, this sounds doable, but I always have a tough time starting things like this. Guess what? You are not alone. We all have brains that resist starting tasks. That's just the way the brain is, but there's an easy hack to get your brain moving. And trust me, I have done this hack with thousands of people and they are so encouraged by how it really helps them be intentional and get more things done. Here's the hack. Let's say you have a junk drawer like many of us do, in your kitchen and you think, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clean that junk drawer. Before you know it, you're sitting on the couch and you're flipping through a book or you're scrolling through your phone. This is what I want you to do. Your daily boost is I'm going to clean the junk drawer. I want you to run a movie in your head. of you cleaning the junk drawer. Just 20 seconds. Then I want you to run that same movie again and add more details to it. Then I want you to run it a third time. I run the movie the first time and I feel the resistance. I run it again and I think, Oh, I actually could watch Ted Lasso while I'm cleaning the junk drawer. And I run it again and in my mind, I'm like, The idea comes to me, Oh, I could have a cup of coffee, watch Ted Lasso and clean the junk drawer. In my body, I have moved from resistance to an openness and actually a little bit of excitement. Get this done. What's really interesting about daily boosts, because they're small little things that we commit to doing, usually in 15 to 30 minutes, is when you run the movie, You begin to understand that the resistance you have at the beginning, Oh, it's going to take so long to clean this junk drawer. Is your mind actually overestimating how difficult and hard, some things are. Now, again, if you're going to go around and walk through Target, you might not have any resistance to it. But these kinds of little things that you can immediately do in your house that you often put off can be helpful daily boosts. But use this hack of running a movie three times. Think about it. How many times if you're really relaxing on the couch and someone marches into your living room and says, let's get going. Do you get up and get going? Why would we think our brain would be any different than our entire body? When you have resistance, run this hack in your head. It is so incredibly helpful. Be kind to your brain. Let it warm up by running the movie and you'll see how much easier it is to start and finish your daily boost. If you get interrupted, Just run the movie again. Yes, the whole point of this is I want you to see that you have the power to move your mind from being anxious and worried to focus, happy, calm, and dare I say, proud. Remember, a daily boost is something a nine month pregnant woman could do. It's cleaning one drawer, not every drawer. It's touching up paint in the living room, not painting the whole house. Keep it small and manageable because you have a lot of other things you have to do every day. In order to actually integrate the daily boost, into your life for the next few weeks, you're going to need to build it around all the other things that you do every day. You know you. Are you a list maker who loves the idea of creating lists of daily boosts and then putting them on your calendar for the next three weeks? Or does that kind of planning make you feel trapped and go, ugh, I do not want to have to do that. You like to be more spontaneous. Maybe you're more successful when you do this kind of thing with a buddy. So find a friend or a family member who is also anxious about the election and commit to doing a daily boost. Each day text each other about your successes. You can send a picture of the sorted socks or your fabulous pumpkin that you carved. It doesn't matter your style of how you want to integrate the daily boost into your life, I just recommend that you be you. I also want to say put a few sticky notes around the house that say boost because one of the things that happens when we're anxious is we often forget to do something that helps us decrease anxiety and create calm.

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I encourage you to give this a try and I think you're going to be surprised by a secret result of doing the Daily Boost. What is that? It's called the Replication Effect. When you're intentional and you begin to do something really small that helps lift your mood, what often happens is you'll continue to make better choices the rest of the day. The daily boost will just keep boosting you because you'll have moved your mind from anxious, avoiding, and soothing, to actually being more intentional, more calming, more enjoyable. Also, here at Creating Midlife Calm, I want you to be really happy if you do a daily boost 80 to 85 percent of the time. We're not into being perfect here. If you can do an 80 percent completion rate, That means you'll have done 20 positive actions in this really stressful time to decrease your anxiety and increase your calm. I couldn't close out a week on election anxiety without saying the obvious. The number one thing I would encourage you to do is don't sleep with your phone. I don't even need to tell you why not to have your phone there late at night and early in the morning because all the news is going to be about the election and you're going to end your day and begin your day super stressed out. You can go back to sleeping with your phone and waking up with it in three weeks. But before you make your phone your permanent bedfellow, check out episode 62, where I follow a woman who is breaking her addiction to TikTok. Her results are amazing. Remember, daily boosts aren't forever. Thanks for listening. I have loved being your campaign manager and inviting you to consider to add the daily boost to your wellness platform. Enjoy your patriotic privilege of voting I'll be back on Monday with more Creating Midlife Calm.