Creating Midlife Calm: Coping Skills for Stress & Anxiety in Family, Work & Relationships
Coping Skills for Midlife Stress and Anxiety in Family, Work & Relationships
Forget the midlife crisis—how about creating midlife calm? The anxiety and stress of this life stage can drain your energy, fuel overthinking, and make it hard to enjoy what should be the best years of your life. This podcast offers practical coping skills to help you reduce anxiety, manage stress, and rediscover a calmer, more confident version of yourself.
In Creating Midlife Calm, you’ll discover how to:
Be happier, more present, and more effective at home and work.
Transform stress and anxiety into powerful tools that boost your clarity, energy, and confidence.
Cultivate calm and joy through practical, affordable coping skills that help you handle life’s daily challenges.
Join MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, a seasoned therapist with over 50,000 hours of clinical experience and 32 years teaching mental wellness, as she guides you to reclaim your inner calm. Learn to stay grounded in the present, navigate midlife transitions with clarity, and build emotional resilience using proven coping tools.
Every Monday, MJ dives into real stories and science-backed insights to help you shift from anxious to centered—ending each episode with an “Inner Challenge” you can practice right away. Then, on Thursdays, she shares a brief follow-up episode that connects, deepens, or expands the week’s topic, helping you apply these skills in real life.
Let’s evolve from crisis to calm—and make midlife your most balanced and fulfilling chapter yet. 🎧 Start with listener favorite Ep. 138 to feel the difference calm can make.
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.
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW (2)
In this episode, you'll discover the surprising skill of moderation and how it will help you achieve your New Year's resolutions.
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW
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 and Happy New Year. It's Thursday and I'm following up on Monday's Inner Challenge, where we explored how anxiety can hinder you from being successful in meeting the goals that you have for yourself this year. Your inner challenge on Monday was to use the mental movie, an incredible coping skill that can help you face your fear and imagine yourself being successful. If you want to make a New Year's Resolution, but don't want to fail these two episodes will be incredibly helpful. Episode 119 will help you understand the cycle of anxiety and how to intervene, so it doesn't sabotage your progress towards the goal that you set for yourself this year. In today's episode, we're going to build on the goal that you've chosen and look at moderation, a tool that I think is incredibly important for you to succeed. What is moderation? Moderation is about balance and sustainable actions that are flexible. Adaptive and coherent. They make sense for your life today. When you practice moderation, you're going to feel more stable and more energized and that's going to help you achieve your goal. A number of years ago, I had a client who scheduled a session with me for the first week of January. She came in with a long list of New Year's goals, lose weight, journal more, reorganize her closets, and learn a new word every day. I listened, and I asked her which of these worthy goals was most important to her and which did she feel she could successfully achieve. She said losing weight and organizing her closets were her two most important goals. But she really didn't think she could keep any of them because in her life she had never been successful with a New Year's goal past February. And that's what brought her to my office. I asked her to consider choosing just one goal and focusing her energy on it until March 1st. This is a perfect example of moderation. Your life is demanding and you're juggling a lot. I'm a big fan of one New Year's resolution that you feel you have the time, energy, and desire to pursue. Don't pick something you think you should do. Pick something you want to do as well as something you believe you can do. She chose to reorganize her closets. Next I asked her how long she wanted to work on this goal. That blew her mind. Don't I have to do it all year if it's a New Year's resolution? She asked me. Nope. Moderation, baby. You can do it as long as you want. It's your goal. Choose a time period in which you believe you can be successful. She decided to work on it in January and February. The weather was bad, she needed a new place to put all her Christmas gifts, and she could watch movies while she's organizing Voila! This is a doable New Year's resolution, clearly defined and paired with something she found enjoyable. Here are some other examples of moderation: dry January, going to bed two nights a week on time, walking on the weekends. or having a date night once a month. Research shows you'll be more successful if you can focus on one thing at a time set short term goals, four to eight weeks, rather than a 52 week goal. At this point, you might be thinking of your one friend or family member, who set an extreme goal and was successful. You know, the person who lost a hundred pounds in six months or the family member who never run and then ended up running a marathon. Let's celebrate them. But then you must ask yourself, does being extreme sound like a fun way for you to meet your goal? If your answer is yes, then this podcast is not about you because we're talking about moderation. But to be honest, I have worked with very few people who could pull off extreme change and stick with it forever. I am a big fan of slow and steady wins the race and the fuel for that race is moderation. Choose your goal and decide how long would you like to work on it? Notice I said like not should. Should you exercise every week? Probably, but how many weeks in a row would you like to exercise? Trust the number that pops into your head. Once I was working with a client on weight loss. She wanted to lose 50 pounds. But then I asked her, how much weight do you think you can realistically lose? And instantly she said six pounds. Then she immediately followed it up with, but why bother? I asked her to sit with that logic and she laughed. In her heart, she felt she had a fighting chance to lose six pounds, but nothing more. I encouraged her to choose moderation over nothing. Never in her life had she considered moderation. She was an all or nothing kind of gal. But after really thinking about it, she said she would try. She researched a food plan she thought she could do in moderation, and after losing six pounds in two months, she felt incredibly successful. Much to her surprise, and to be honest, mine, at the end of the two months, she did not sign up to lose another six pounds. Instead, she said, for one month, I'm going to try to not gain weight. This is what happens when you choose moderation. You begin to listen to yourself in a deeper, more honest, and more doable way. The difficulty with goals is that by the time you're in midlife, you've listened to everyone else on how to do everything except yourself. Moderation is not just about getting it done. It's about figuring out how to get it done in a way that works for you, that makes you happy, and that you can sustain. After a month of not gaining weight, she decided to focus on losing another six pounds. Moderation helped her find her own way, and she let go of the one and done mentality. She kept at it, lost 40 pounds, and opted to not lose another 10 pounds because it would mean buying a new set of clothes and she didn't want to spend her money that way. That's moderation. Flexible, adaptive, and coherent. Bringing her energy, stability, not to mention success. Science smiles on moderation. Small, consistent actions build momentum over time, helping you develop sustainable habits better mental and physical health and a greater sense of accomplishment. What moderation also does is help you avoid the guilt and frustration that often comes with extreme goals which often ask for perfection. But who can be perfect day in and day out? And who would want to be? This leads to the unintended benefits of moderation. Moderation is a mindset that encourages self reflection, kindness, self compassion, and curiosity. reflection will help you course correct, becoming more flexible and adaptive in order to make changes, when necessary so you can continue to be successful. Self compassion and kindness help you set moderate and doable goals for yourself that are realistic, specific, and time limited. It's a wonderful act of kindness when your goals set yourself up for success not failure. Good for you. No, great for you. When you choose moderation, you are acknowledging that you're working on this goal as you do other valuable things and that means at times you won't go to bed on time two nights a week Or sometimes there'll be a weekend you may only walk once, but because you're choosing moderation, when you don't follow through on your goal, instead of yelling at yourself or giving up, you can become curious. And ask, what got in the way of you meeting your goal this week? Understanding what got in the way can lead you to recommitting and using that information towards making changes that can help you be more successful. Speaking of mindset, one of the pitfalls of moderation to look out for is that you can interpret your goal as you not trying hard enough or you settling for less, which can hinder your ability to follow through on what you want. Remember, moderation is about sustainability, not complacency. In this episode, I encourage you to follow up on facing your fear about setting a goal for New Year's with the tool of moderation. As you begin to work on this goal, I invite you to use moderation so you set up small, specific, time limited goals tailored to what you believe will help you be successful. In the coming weeks, we'll dive deeper into how moderation can help you set realistic goals for weight loss, phone use, and exercise. New year, new you. No, not really. New Year, a slow and steady you that faces your anxiety about setting a goal and creates a plan of change that allows moderation, self reflection, kindness, self compassion, and curiosity to be your guides and success will be your outcome. Thanks for listening. I'll be back on Monday with Creating Midlife Calm.
