Ep. 177 The 3 Midlife Anxiety Coping Skills That Backfire & Make Your Anxiety & Stress WORSE, and What To Do Instead

Why do the most common anxiety fixes leave you feeling even worse?
Because they offer quick relief—but actually reinforce the anxiety cycle, especially in midlife.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. The neuroscience behind why 3 common coping skills you're using actually increase anxiety instead of easing it.
2. How these coping habits form early in life and silently shape midlife behavior.
3. What happens in your brain and body when you rely on these short-term fixes—and why they backfire.

 Pop in your earbuds and learn how to stop the habits that hijack your calm and start building real emotional resilience.

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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

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:01

In this episode, you'll discover why you can do better than snacking, scrolling, or spilling when it comes to calming your anxiety.

Built-in Microphone: 0:09

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.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:34

Welcome to the podcast. When anxiety strikes, most of us grab what feels like comfort food, your phone, or a good rant. But what if I told you those things don't just not work. They actually make your anxiety worse. In today's episode, we'll look at the three most common ways people try to calm anxiety that actually backfire. Yep. You know what they are. Something happens and you feel anxious, so you reach for the chips, your phone, or you start endlessly talking about what's making you anxious. At first, these feel like they work, and actually they kind of do, but their rebound effects are a real problem. Today I'm gonna share with you the science behind why these so-called solutions offer quick relief, but then backfire turning your anxiety into regret, irritation, or exhaustion. I will end today's podcast with your Inner Challenge, a simple tool to help you shift outta these unhelpful habits starting today. If you're like most of my clients, the second you feel anxious, you become a firefighter. Rushing to squash the discomfort, fearing the worst. Let's be honest, very few of us had parents who taught us how to name tame and aim when it came to our emotions. So of course, when anxiety strikes, you go straight to what I call snack, scroll and spill. You snack to soothe. You scroll to distract and you spill every anxious thought to anyone nearby or you spiral in your own head. These habits often feel good in the moment. They offer distraction, stimulation or a sense of connection, but over time, and I don't mean days, I mean minutes, they increase your anxiety, drain your energy, and interfere with real emotional regulation. What I've learned from my thousands of clients is that each of these is a serious attempt to feel better, but most are carryovers from childhood. It's like carrying around an old toolkit. These tools may have worked once or at least distracted you, but now they're rusty and you're in midlife. You deserve an upgrade. Let's start by looking at why these coping skills feel like they work and why they actually leave you feeling worse. Let's start with the most common go-to for anxiety eating. Most children learn early on that food can help soothe big feelings. And there are two interesting reasons why food can feel calming, eating signals your body to shift from fight or flight to rest and digest mode. That's why food can feel like instant relief. But the calm is short-lived, and it often distracts you from what you really need emotionally. Years ago, I worked with a woman who weighed almost 300 pounds when she was eight, her parents went through a terrible divorce. There was constant fighting a move and a huge lifestyle change. She began to eat as a way to cope. She jokingly said to me, my real mom was mint chocolate chip ice cream, and my dad was Mr. Nacho. That leads to the second reason people turn to food. Sugar, carbs and fat activate dopamine in your brain. Dopamine, gives you a temporary reward hit, which soothes anxiety. Momentarily, but here's the trap. Once that dopamine fades, your brain experiences a rebound effect. Your blood sugar spikes and crashes. Digestion slows under stress, and you often feel regret or shame, especially if you weren't hungry. and then there's cortisol. The stress hormone when you are stressed, your cortisol goes up and it increases cravings for high fat. High sugar foods, but indulging doesn't lower your cortisol. It just masks it. And let's face it, no one reaches for apples when they're stressed. The foods we grab when anxious often increase brain fog and make us lethargic, which isn't the mindset you need when you're trying to care for yourself emotionally. If you find yourself reaching for food to calm anxiety, think about how this habit started. My hunch, it was the best tool you had as a kid, but now that you're in midlife. I want you to consider an update. One of the best parts of really understanding this habit is that almost every client I have ever worked with when they've given up using food as a coping skill Not only feel better, but they actually lose a little bit of weight. While food may be an old coping companion, the phone is the newest and possibly the loudest bully in your life. You feel anxious and grab your phone, scrolling social media, refreshing email or binging on short videos. Before you know it, this bully is pushing you into places you're never meant to go. At first it feels like a break, but neurologically it's anything but restful. Your phone activates your sympathetic nervous system, keeping you stuck in fight or flight. And just to be clear, when your sympathetic system is triggered, you are not getting comfort or sympathy. You're revving up your internal alarm system, the blue light, the unpredictability of the scroll and the social comparison all intensify your stress. What seems like a coping mechanism is often just a distraction loop that pulls you further from self-awareness and emotional regulation. Phones also give you a dopamine hit, especially when you check for new messages or likes. It feels good at first, like a brief escape from anxiety, but soon that anxious energy turns into irritation or mental exhaustion. You haven't calmed down. You've traded one form of distress for another. I actually experienced this recently. I was working in Ireland for a month and my computer crashed with no way to fix it until I got back to the United States. Who knew that Apple has not set up one store in the land of leprechauns. On a scale of one to 10, my anxiety was a 12. Nope, it was actually a 25. I turned to my phone and went into full on scroll of palooza After an hour, I wasn't anxious anymore, but I was incredibly irritable. If you wanna know more about the science of the phone, check out my episode 121 That that helps you understand how the phone is actually changing. Not just our moods, but our brain. I could feel my irritability, and I did my family a favor, and I went to bed. The next morning I still felt anxious, but I had a clearer mind. I was able to problem solve how to get through my next two work weeks without a laptop. I'm still not home, and I'm crossing my fingers that my computer can be fixed. Let's move to the last coping habit. That seems helpful, but often isn't. Now, don't get me wrong, talking to someone about your anxiety can be helpful, but not when it turns into rumination. You know what rumination is where you talk it over and over and over, or you might just be thinking it. Over and over and over in your mind. This used to be one of my favorite coping skills. If I just explained what I'm feeling one more time, I'll finally feel better, but instead. You strengthen the anxiety loop in the brain by repeating fear-based thoughts. Your brain is a pattern machine. The more you repeat a story, especially a negative one, the more deeply it gets encoded. That's called neuroplastic reinforcement. So while connection and support are essential, unfiltered, venting, without any shift in perspective can keep anxiety alive and even help it to grow. Years ago, I was consulting at an agency while I was waiting in the lobby to meet with A-C-E-O-I overheard a woman in the break room anxiously venting about her job. No support, no direction. Listening to her, made me kind of Glad I was there as a consultant. Later that day, I had lunch alone at a nearby restaurant and wouldn't you know it, I heard the same woman using almost the exact same words, venting again. It was as if she was reading from a script, but thanks to neuroplasticity, she kind of was one of the first things my clients learn. It's more isn't always better when it comes to talking. My husband has a great rule. We call it the rule of one. Talk it out one time until you start repeating yourself. Then take a break. If I hadn't understood the brain's love of looping patterns, my computer crash in Ireland could have ruined the whole trip, but I refused to overtalk it. No Apple store, no fix. All I could do was learn to work from my phone and keep moving forward. In today's episode, we looked at the three most common go-tos for calming anxiety and how they work in the short run, but increase your anxiety in the long run. Snacking offers quick dopamine, but leads to regret and fog. Scrolling over stimulates your nervous system and turns anxiety into agitation. Spilling Reinforces anxious stories and traps you in rumination. They don't resolve the root of anxiety. In fact, they keep you disconnected from your body, distracted from your deeper needs and values, and dependent on temporary relief. Your feelings aren't facts, but they do give you important information that you need to be aware of as you care for yourself, others, and make important decisions as you move through your day. And here's the good news, knowing what not to do. Is a powerful place to start. This week's Inner Challenge. I want you to notice when you're about to snack, scroll, or spill in response to anxiety and pause. That's it. Just notice these habits happen so quickly that learning something new starts by simply becoming aware. You don't have to fix the feeling, you just have to interrupt the pattern, and you learn to do that by noticing. Pausing, I will be back on Thursday to introduce you to two, surprisingly effective no cost hacks that help decrease anxiety and build calm, not just from the inside out, but calm that stays with you and doesn't have. Any negative side effects. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm, and I would love it if you followed the podcast on your favorite platform.