Ep. 180 – How to Match the Right Coping Skill to Stress vs. Anxiety in Midlife So You Feel Better Now

Are you using the wrong coping skill for what you’re actually feeling?
Stress and anxiety may look similar on the outside—but they need very different responses to truly feel better.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. How to tell whether you’re feeling stress or anxiety in real-time
2. Why using the WRONG coping skill won't work for stress / anxiety
3. A simple guide to matching the right coping skill to each emotion—so you stop spinning and start feeling calm

🎧 Tune in to learn how to move from avoidance to awareness and feel more grounded in midlife.

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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

In this episode, you'll discover how to feel more calm by following one simple truth. 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. -In this month of August, I can feel the temperature rise, and I don't mean the one outside. August is a month of transitions. Maybe you're sending a child to college. Maybe school routines mean earlier mornings, more homework or renewed pressure at work. You feel stressed or is it anxious? While most of us use these words interchangeably, it can be incredibly helpful to know the difference. This episode is a follow-up to Mondays episode 180 1. In today's episode, you'll discover how stress and anxiety differ in your mind and body, why? Knowing the difference can help you cope more effectively. And most importantly, I'm going to give you a simple guide, a one-liner to help you match the right coping skill to each, so you can stop spinning and start feeling calm today. But first, let's check in on Monday's Inner Challenge. How did you do? I invited you to pause and notice when you felt overwhelmed and ask yourself, am I feeling stress or am I feeling anxiety? A listener friend texted me and said. Oh my God. I've been working on my anxiety for years and never knew there was a difference. This is so helpful. That's the power of noticing. It's also the power of continuing to learn. Knowing the difference doesn't just give you insight, it helps you pick the coping skill that actually works. But there's one thing that can get in the way of noticing. I talked about it in episode 1 79. When you feel overwhelmed, it can feel natural to reach for quick fixes like snacking, scrolling, or spilling your thoughts onto the nearest person. These are understandable habits. They give you a sense of relief in the moment, but they also keep you from pausing long enough to ask what's really going on inside of me? Is this stress or is this anxiety? If you want to feel calmer, you have to move from avoidance to awareness. This tiny shift of checking in rather than checking out is the beginning of every effective coping skill because you can't change what you don't name. As I said on Monday, stress is your body's response to a real or immediate demand. Something is happening now, a deadline, a sick family member or a messy house, anxiety is in your mind's response to a future or imagined threat. It sounds like, what if I can't fix this? What if they're mad at me? What if I fail? Here's another way to look at it with stress. Your body says this matters. Act now with anxiety, your mind says this might happen. Worry. Now, understanding the difference really matters, especially in midlife when you're juggling so much because if you confuse the two, you often reach for the wrong coping skill, and that can make things worse. It's like adding salt instead of sugar. To a cookie recipe. Let me give you an example. I live in a town with five institutions of higher learning. A few years ago, a midlife client of mine was sending her first child off to college, where she also works a month before her child was to leave, she came to therapy feeling overwhelmed. If you've ever sent a child off to college, you know how she felt. It's a big deal. She mentioned casually that she had asked her friend the registrar, if her son could get an early registration time for classes. Her friend said, sure, and my client felt calmer. In session. I asked her to do a minute of breath work. Then I said, let's consider the pros and cons of asking for that early registration spot. She paused and said, well, it probably isn't fair, but at least everyone gets to register. Here's the thing. When you helicopter, you're not doing it for your child. You're doing it to manage your own anxiety. You want your child to have the best, you want to protect them from disappointment, but when you try to control outcomes, you're often assuming two things. One, the future won't work out. And two, that your child, and maybe even you can't handle it if it doesn't. Treating anxiety like stress led her to take action. That while well-intentioned actually removed a growth opportunity from her child and from herself. It may sound small, but trust me it isn't. Here's the key takeaway when you're anxious, but treat it like stress. You might overreact or over control instead of calming down when you're stressed, but treat it like anxiety. You might retreat or ruminate instead of taking action. So here's my helpful one-liner. Stress calls for action anxiety calls for calm. So let's talk about how to pick the right coping skill for each. If you're feeling stressed, your body needs to move or act. Stress is physical. It often needs a physical response. I use Notre Dame football as an example. When the players run out of the tunnel, they're hyped, they're stressed. They jump around and move their bodies to release energy and prepare to perform. If you are stressed, reach for action-based skills. Make a list, do one thing. Then the next, this action, which therapists call task completion, gives you a sense of progress and reduces stress. Number two, move. Go for a brisk walk stretch, let your body let go of some of the physical feeling of stress. Number three. Do what I call a little time blocking focus for 20 to 30 minutes on one thing. Number four, ask for help. Midlife stress often comes from invisible labor, share the load. And number five, break things down. So often people avoid doing because they are asking themselves to clean the whole house instead of just do the dishes. Let me share one of my own experiences with stress. My son and his wonderful wife, had an outdoor wedding a number of years ago over Memorial Day weekend. Of course, weddings bring both stress and anxiety. About a week before I found myself obsessively checking the weather. It was eating up my time and energy. I caught myself. I made a list of last minute tasks. I made sure to exercise every day, and I only checked the weather. Once a day, I couldn't eliminate the stress, but I could regulate it, and that made all the difference. If it's anxiety, your mind needs to slow, soften, and move to the present anxiety lives in your mind and hypes up your central nervous system. It feeds off worst case scenarios, imagining the future, and filling the past with regrets. When I was anxious about the wedding weather, I didn't picture a sunny day. I pictured storms like the one I saw on Instagram with a tent being blown up all over the place. That's what anxiety does. So here's your plan. Name it. Say I feel anxious. Tame it by doing breath work. I like to place my hand on the part of my body that's holding the tension. My heart, stomach, jaw, sometimes it's my whole head. Then breathe. Try box breathing. Or a long exhale. There's no perfect method of breath work, just the one that works for you. If you'd like my MP three of guided breathing, email me. I'll happily send it to you. And lastly, aim. Once calm, ask yourself, what do I want to do next? That's how you move forward. Name, tame and aim. when I checked the forecast closer to the wedding, it did look like rain. I sat in my chair. I grounded my feet, and I breathed. At first, my mind went full catastrophe, imagining a tornado ripping through the wedding. I kept breathing. Eventually I laughed. I reminded myself that's unlikely, and even if it rains, we'll move inside. The bride might be disappointed. But the wedding will go on. In that moment, I had to let my anxiety peak and pass, and when it did, I aimed my mind toward reality and a dose of self-compassion. What is self-compassion? Not torturing yourself with worst case scenarios. Using breath work to calm your anxiety so your mind stops spinning and moves from the negative to the now. Wanna know how the wedding turned out? It did rain right before the ceremony. Did we move it inside? Nope. Two of my dear friends and I dressed in our wedding best grabbed towels and dried off the chairs. That moment became one of the most special memories of the entire day, and when we're really honest with ourself, when our anxiety creates stories. They seldom have happy endings. But one thing being a therapist has taught me is no matter what life gives you, you can deal with it. And that's what happens when we stop avoiding and start naming, taming and aiming our anxiety. If you don't like breath work, try present moment. Anchoring. What is that? It's basically looking around and using your senses to move your mind to the present. Notice three things. You see the car, the stop sign, the squirrel. Notice three things. You hear the train, the bird, the child. Notice three things you can touch. The flower, your skin, the hot car. You are moving your mind to the present using the power of your senses. Of course, stress and anxiety don't always show up separately. Imagine you're waiting on a medical diagnosis. You feel stress because this matters. You feel anxiety because you're imagining the worst. Here's what to do first. Ground yourself with breath, work or anchoring after that, take one small action. One client of mine was in this situation. She did breath work three times a day and cleaned out one kitchen drawer each day. It was such an act of self-compassion, such kindness that she showed herself in this really hard situation. She couldn't change the waiting, but she could regulate her nervous system and accomplish something small that gave her a little dopamine. A little control and a lot of compassion. In this episode, you discovered how stress and anxiety differ in the body and mind. Knowing the difference helps you stop spinning and choose better coping skills and how to match calming tools to anxiety and action-based tools to stress so you can feel more grounded, clear and calm in midlife. Stress calls for action. Anxiety calls for calm. If you want the free MP three on box breathing, send me an email at mj@mjmurrayvachon.com Thanks for listening. And I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.