Creating Midlife Calm: Coping Skills for Stress & Anxiety in Family, Work & Relationships

Ep. 145 Tried & Tested Transformative Coping Skills for Midlife Anxiety & How They REALLY Work

• MJ Murray Vachon LCSW • Season 4 • Episode 145

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Are you secretly scared to feel your feelings—especially in the middle of setting boundaries?
Setting boundaries is essential, especially if you want to get your wants & needs to be heard. 
In this episode, you’ll discover:

  1. How a guest pushes back on MJ's 5 science-backed coping skills--making them even more usable.  
  2. Real talk on emotional stamina—why feeling your feelings actually builds  strength.
  3. A relatable metaphor (hello, emotional rollercoaster!) to help you move through discomfort with clarity and intention.

 Listen now and start building coping skills that actually work for midlife anxiety—no perfection required.




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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.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

In this episode, you'll discover how to really feel good when setting boundaries. 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 we're doing----something a little different, and to be honest, it's gonna take a bit of bravery on my part. This is the very first episode of a new Thursday mini format I'm calling it, but MJ, Really? after decades of clinical experience, I wanted to put my recommendations that I'm giving you week in and week out on the podcast to test, but I needed someone that I knew wouldn't be afraid to push back and offer better suggestions, and who would be better then my daughter, Abby. She's had a lifetime of experience pushing back on my, oh, so helpful suggestions. My hope is that this segment helps you see these tools in action and maybe even take them to a whole new level in your own life. So Let me begin by welcoming Abby to the podcast.

Abby Murray Vachon:

Thank you for the welcome. Proud to be a push backer of a mom. But she is the best.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Well, you can love me, but you can push back because I've seen it for years and years and, and I really mean it seriously because it's so easy to sit behind a microphone and give coping skills. I love this idea of every so often having you jump on to listen to the episode as you did, and then talk about one or two of the things I said that you found difficult or not as easy to do as I. Sit and gracefully say them. On Monday we looked at boundaries and how to set them when your anxiety makes setting them feel impossible. if you haven't listened to it, just jump back it's about 10 minutes long. And I talked about five coping skills. My favorite, which is name tame and aim, whatever is the emotion that you're feeling at the time, that science-based coping skill that asks you to find the emotion, the sensation on your body and just breathe through it for 90 seconds. Coping skill number two is befriend your anxiety. It's giving you some kind of information, Coping skill number three is once you've befriended it and you've figured out the information it's giving you, write it down and get it out of your head and on a piece of paper or on your computer. The next coping skill is a little cheesy, but it works. Create a script and rehearse it so you actually get it in your body. And if you understand what I'm talking about, you're replacing your anxiety with a sense of empowerment that you know what you're asking for. And then coping skill number five is once you ask for what you want, setting a boundary is sometimes. Asking for something. Sometimes it's actually saying you don't wanna do something, you let go. All you can do is ask. And then you have to let the power to be, make the decision that they have. Sometimes that power to be is a boss or a spouse or a child. Sometimes it's you. That's a summary of Monday's episode. Abby, what do you think would be helpful to focus on?

Abby Murray Vachon:

When I think about the boundaries in my own life that I'd like to set, I think the most challenging part is, having to actually feel the thing what, whatever it is around the boundary. I'd say my pushback, is you have to feel whatever that feeling is. We're moving really fast. Time is of the essence. Time is money, as people say, and I just think it might be hard for people to feel that feeling. Especially when there's our phones and everything else that we can get distracted by.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Part of what's helpful is to be told that you really do need to feel the feeling. I think for most of my life I didn't know that was important and for most of the clients I work with, and so I'm saying to you. It's really part of the process. If you want to have more of life your way, which is basically what boundaries are about, how can I have what I want? If you want it more of your way, is it helpful to be told, it really does start with noticing and naming and taming that feeling.

Abby Murray Vachon:

What if, even if you're not conscious of it, you're scared to feel that feeling.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

That's a great question. What I like people to think about is that feeling is already in you. You might be afraid of it, but it is not afraid of you. It is a healthy, normal reaction that you are having when you think about setting a boundary. Even if you're afraid to feel it, there is no emotion that is afraid to be felt within you. Do you see the nuance?

Abby Murray Vachon:

Yeah, the visual I think of is, you know, there's fly tape where the fly gets stuck on the tape and you've gotta get off the tape. I feel like having to feel that feeling is getting off of the stuck tape. And that is a huge distance. Sorry for the grotesque example.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Well, it's not a grotesque example, and I think it's actually what people believe, but it's not scientifically correct because there is no feeling that starts and never transforms into something else. Part of what I encourage people to do is to create an image in their head that represents that. The notice is, oh my God, that fly inside of me is on the tape and I feel trapped. I feel stuck. That's noticing and naming, but the taming is actually visualizing that 90 seconds. Your mind, where your body is releasing that uncomfortable chemical that creates that feeling. And what we know is it's about 90 seconds. Now we can carry it around with this for five hours because we don't move through it. But if you can be brave enough, courageous enough, the shift is, oh, that feeling isn't a fly, stuck on tape. That feeling is actually a reaction that creates a neurochemical release within me, and I can partner with it to move through it, which is why I talk about potty training your emotions because nobody keeps their bladder full forever. Eventually you can't tolerate it and you go pee. With emotions, what people often do is blame or unclaim instead of tend and befriend. Tending and befriending is that emotion's in me. I can empower myself to ground my feet, notice it, name it, and tame it through 90 seconds of breath work that I can do anywhere, a grocery line in class when I'm walking to my car in bed. Hmm.

Abby Murray Vachon:

That's all helpful. I've got one more pushback. if we think about this feeling as a, a parabola, right? Thrown in a math term, I think the part that's the most scary is the top. And I'm hearing you about the resolve, but what happens if you're scared of that big, very top of the parabola. How do you have the courage and the faith that you'll be able to feel that thing and it will lessen.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Two practical tips. One is what goes up comes down. We're getting mathy and we're getting physics on creating midlife calm today. The physics of emotion is, it will come down how you get yourself to do that because it's such an astute point on your part. At the very top, that's when people. Reach for their phone, smoke a joint, eat potato chips, hit Netflix because there's this belief of I can't do this. And what I like to say is, yes you can. You are not a teacup. You can move through any difficult emotion, and you really empower yourself when you do that without using substances and without using avoidance. The image that I use, and I want everyone to come up with their own image is I put myself in a chair and I put a couple imaginary seat belts on me, and I say to myself in a nice way, just sit and feel it. you can't avoid it. If you had to come up with an image that might help you move from the fly paper to moving through the parabola, what could be an image that you would relate to?

Abby Murray Vachon:

Even though I'm not a lover of math, I really think this image of the parabola is helpful for me because, or even like a rollercoaster, right? at Six Flags, there's something called the dragster that goes straight up and straight down. It's a great visual for me. I just wanna say one other thing too that kind of hit me in this. So much of what you're talking about feels like a stamina that you often can build like in athletics or something of that nature. I guess I just have this like vast disappointment in our culture where I've just been given very few messages that you have to build this and what I'm hearing from you is the more you do this kind of thing, the more you can withstand it.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Yeah. The student becomes the teacher because that is a super insightful, terrific line that you do build emotional stamina, and when your a infant you build it because you co-regulate with your parents. Then you have to learn to do that more and more on your own. And it is a parabola, I often call it a bell curve. It's all math and it's all science. That your body has this chemical reaction. It's all neutral. It's what we do after it that matters. If you move through the parabola. Really understand, there will be a point with significant emotional reactions where you think, I cannot do this. If you expect that you normalize it. Take a breath and think of it like nobody gets off in the middle of a rollercoaster. No matter how bad it is. The only way off is to jump. That is incredibly dangerous. So nobody does it, and I would wanna say the same thing. It's as dangerous to not move through that feeling'cause one, your body doesn't clear it, and the real gold of a feeling is aim. Once you notice name and tame, that aim gives you really important information that's much healthier than at the top of their parabola.

Abby Murray Vachon:

Gosh, that's a great answer.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

We have it on tape.

Abby Murray Vachon:

I know we have it on tape. A daughter

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

saying to a mother, I'm going to copy it and I'm gonna play that a million times.

Abby Murray Vachon:

Oh shit. No, no, that's, that's really fair. I, I really like the visual of the roller coaster.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

In this episode, you were tasked in listening to the podcast and then helping through feet on the ground real life experience. Give my listeners more clarity. What do you think are the takeaways about this episode for our listeners today?

Abby Murray Vachon:

One big takeaway is when you are feeling an emotion, there is going to be a period of time where it feels like too much and that is normal. We need to make that normal. There's nothing you're doing wrong. You shouldn't run away from it. That is normal. Which leads me to the second biggest takeaway is there's a huge payoff from feeling that, which is aim. We're a very results driven culture, right? When I am in that moment, I can't take this anymore. I'm gonna remember this will be worth it because it will give me a clarity I do not have before. I think another takeaway is. The pre-work you do to set a boundary is almost more important than the moment of setting the boundary. So put that time and energy in before to set it in an intentional, thoughtful way so that it's in line with really what you want and really what you're going through.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

I could not have summed it up any better. Thank you so much for being on our pilot episode of this and I hope you come back someday.

Abby Murray Vachon:

I'll think about it. I'll think about it. I like the host.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW:

Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm.