Ep. 98 How Changing One Thought Can Decrease Your Anxiety & Increase Your Coping Skills Creating Midlife Calm!

Are you often overwhelmed by the thought, “This should not be happening”? You’re not alone. This mindset can fuel anxiety and a sense of being out of control, leaving you feeling miserable.

By the end of this episode, you’ll gain a new perspective on your thoughts and learn practical strategies to cultivate calm amidst life’s challenges.

 In this episode you'll discover:

   1. How the thought “this should not be happening” can contribute to feelings of anxiety and unhappiness.

   2. Two philosophies—Stoicism and Buddhism—that offer a fresh perspective on accepting reality and reducing suffering.

   3. Practical strategies to cultivate calm in challenging situations and improve your mindset.

 Tune in to learn how shifting your perspective can empower you to create a more peaceful existence.

Check out Fan Favorite Ep. 63 Mental Wellness & Love Beyond Travis, Taylor & Valentine’s Day. 

Join me on Monday for more insights on *Creating Midlife Calm*!

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

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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This should not be happening. Or should it? 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 and I am following up on Monday's episode where I shared two coping skills to decrease your anxiety when you feel out of control. At the end of that episode, I promise to focus today on a common thought that often fuels these feelings: this should not be happening. By the end of this episode, you'll have a new perspective on this thought. One that can help shift your mindset, reduce anxiety, and equally important, increase your sense of empowerment. This shift will make it so much easier for you to create calm in your life. I encourage you to pay attention over the next week and notice how often you think this should not be happening. Perhaps there's other ways that you express it, such as what is going on here or how can this be? Or I do everything right. And this is how I'm treated. maybe you're a life coach in disguise, holding strong opinions about how others should be living their lives. Whatever is your method, I invite you to spend the next 10 minutes considering how this mindset, this one thought, this should not be the way it is. This should not be happening. sets you up for two reactions. One is feeling out of control, and two is feeling really unhappy. This way of thinking is deeply embedded in our culture. Things should be this way. You should do that. We are the USA, United Shoulds of America. Don't get me wrong. I believe in norms. I think customs are very important. That's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about is rigid thinking, thoughts that lack flexibility and adaptability and coherence. Allowing us to adapt and preventing us from feeling happier and calmer. Let me share two philosophies that I believe can free you from the limiting thought: this should not be happening. The first comes from Stoicism. Suffering is the difference between expectations and reality. I invite you to examine your expectations. do they make you happy, grateful, and joyful? Or do they leave you feeling miserable, anxious angry, and judgmental. As the holiday season approaches, think about your expectations for family gatherings. I grew up with many siblings, and my older sister was like a live in camp counselor, always organizing holiday activities. One year, I wanted to recreate this childhood pie making memory that I had with my two teenage kids. Neither of them had any interest in baking. By sheer force of my personality, I convinced them to make pies with me at 4 p. m. the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. You can guess what happened. Neither of them showed up. I was miserable. In fact, I was so miserable, I didn't make pies for a couple years after that. Wow! I couldn't accept that these wonderful teenagers simply didn't want to make pies. I hope you can see how ridiculous my thinking was. I suffered because I refused to accept that my kids weren't interested in baking. I created my own suffering. The second philosophy comes from Buddhism. In Buddhism, life is seen as a continual cycle of suffering and following a spiritual path can lead you out of the suffering into enlightenment. What? Life is a continual cycle of suffering? That sounds dreary, pessimistic, hopeless, kind of terrible. But if you think about it, it kinda sounds true. Aren't we surrounded by suffering every day? Doesn't your heart break every time there's another school shooting? Aren't you saddened when your kid gets cut from a team? Or perhaps you resonate with one of my clients this past week who sat in my office lamenting how far away his children lived geographically. And boy, we're all suffering in this political environment. Hey, if you're feeling election anxiety, check out episode 97 on doing a daily boost to ward it off. When you accept that life is full of suffering, birth is painful, death is painful, and there's a lot of pain in between, it starts to make sense. You might say, hey MJ, then is it worth living? Of course! Life isn't only suffering. There's sunflowers, toddlers, Christmas, Taylor Swift, lattes, and continual joyful moments. But suffering is part of life. If we integrate the Stoic and the Buddhist philosophies, we can cultivate a mindset that accepts suffering as part of reality and commit to cultivating peace, whether it's sunny or stormy. What I'm encouraging you to do is broaden your mindset. Challenge yourself to deal with those out of control moments that make you so unhappy with calm. Calm is something we cultivate within, not something that comes from the outside. The Stoics and the Buddhists have known this all along. Sometimes age old wisdom is just that: timeless. Easy to say, but not so easy to do. So I want to invite you to try to put this into practice. Start small. The next time your car breaks down, instead of swearing and getting angry, accept the reality that all cars eventually fail. This is your moment to practice handling it with calm. What's the point of getting upset over something that eventually is going to happen? Or challenge yourself when one of your child's grades aren't stellar. Say nothing. Stay calm. They're your child's grades, not yours. I bet within a week, your child will say something to you like, Hey, you never said anything to me about my grades. Then you can calmly respond. Oh, how did you feel about them? Now that's dealing with reality. What would have happened if I had accepted my kids initial response when I invited them to make the pies? After all, it isn't their responsibility to help me reenact a childhood memory. I knew they didn't want to do it, but I refused to accept reality, and as a result, I suffered. Now, let's revisit an example from Monday's episode. Walking into work to learn that you might lose your job. This is a horrible situation. Trust me, I am not trying to say this is not terrible. But we all know that none of our jobs are guaranteed forever. It's natural to feel sad and afraid. That's part of being human. However, you wouldn't hesitate to quit your job if you wanted to move on. So it's not surprising that your company might also want to make some changes. In today's episode, my point is, we often feel out of control because we expect people, organizations, countries, political parties, and everyday situations to conform to our desires. But when we shift our perspective and realize that others are also expecting us to act a certain way so they don't feel out of control or unhappy, it becomes clear how unrealistic and unmanageable, these expectations truly are. In fact, it actually is kind of funny that we would ever have such expectations. If you find yourself resisting this idea, I encourage you to embrace the spirit of this message. I am not saying that we all shouldn't work to end suffering in the world. Obviously, we should do that. But rather, I'm inviting you to consider that you may unintentionally be creating suffering in your own mind by refusing to accept what is, and then reacting in ways that cultivate calm, peace, and connection with those who matter most to you. Life is hard. What I'm suggesting is you just not make it any harder. Pay attention how often your reaction, is It shouldn't be this way, takes up time, pollutes the space around you, and keeps you from moving forward with a calmer, more productive mindset. Don't buy into the false thought: this should not be happening and if everything outside of you went the way you wanted, then you could have calm. When you accept what is, you don't use your energy having emotional outbursts, negative thinking, blaming, or even avoiding. What you then do is accept whatever has happened and use your energy to come up with strategies, solutions to move through whatever the situation is in a healthier way. Take this on as a challenge. Think of it like a game. I'm going to see no matter what happens to me, if I can move through it in a calmer, more peaceful and productive way. You can do this. Thanks for listening. I'll be back on Monday with another episode of Creating Midlife Calm.