Ep. 192 Why Your Brain Makes Midlife Anxiety Worse—and 3 Coping Skills to Calm Stress

Have you ever acted on anxiety, only to find out later your brain got it wrong?
You’re not alone — your brain’s alarm system can misinform, and knowing how to respond changes everything.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     What your amygdala is and why it can trigger anxiety even when you’re safe

2.     Three science-backed coping skills to calm your amygdala

3.     How to shift from anxious reactions that cause mistakes to confident, clear-headed decisions

🎧 Take 13 minutes to learn how to calm your amygdala and choose your next step with confidence — you’re worth it.

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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

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover what the amygdala is, its role in anxiety and three coping skills to calm it welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Today we're diving into a fascinating and very important piece of scientific information. Your amygdala. Understanding this tiny part of your brain can completely change the way you respond to anxiety. In this episode, you'll discover what the amygdala is, why it plays such a big role in your anxiety, and three science-backed coping skills to help you calm it. Knowing what the amygdala is will help you see that your anxiety isn't a personal flaw. It's actually a built-in brain response that can be understood and managed. This is one of those episodes where a little knowledge goes a long way when you begin to recognize that your anxiety is connected to your amygdala and it has a physical process, then you can step out of blame and use targeted coping skills to calm it. Let's begin with the obvious. What is the amygdala? It is really possible that you have heard lots of podcasters and people on TV mention the amygdala. Your amygdala is a small almond shape structure deep inside your brain. You have two of them, one on each side. Think of them as your brain security system. They're always scanning for threats, deciding whether you should fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. Here's the thing, the amygdala is fast, but it's not always accurate, and that's the one thing I really hope you take away from this episode. It reacts before the logical part of your brain. Your prefrontal cortex has time to weigh in. This is why you can feel sudden anxiety even when you're not in actual danger. This happens more than you think. A few weeks ago, a client came in feeling overwhelmed. She thought a coworker was mad at her. She hadn't finished a project on time, and when the coworker saw her, she seemed cold and distant. My client's mind went straight to guilt and anxiety. She decided to send a quick text apologizing for the delay and promised to finish the work later that day. Interestingly, her coworker sent this text. No problem. I'm leaving early. We have to put our dog down. I'm devastated. We'll work on the project on Monday. My client's amygdala had jumped to the wrong conclusion, interpreting a neutral situation as a threat. The real story was entirely different. If you notice yourself doing this, I wanna encourage you to move from judgment to curiosity. I want you to notice how often this dynamic happens in your life where something happens and your immediate reaction. Is anxiety. In today's episode, I'm gonna teach you how to calm your amygdala so you can check out the truth before you respond. The challenge is that your amygdala's job is to sound the alarm, and sometimes it's a four alarm fire inside of your body. You know your body's stress response, your heart rate speeds up, your breathing gets shallow, your muscles tense, your mind races with what if thoughts in midlife, your amygdala can become overactive. Years of stress caregiving work, pressure and health changes can prime it to react. Too often and too strongly. This is definitely one of those cases. The more you use it, the stronger it gets, but that is not always in your best interest. What's the result of that? Your anxiety can feel like it's running the show. Because of the pace and intensity of daily life, you might be living in a constant state of anxiety and stress. One of my clients experienced this when her teenage daughter started driving herself home from practice. She still found herself rushing outta the office every night as if she had a deadline, even though there was no reason to rush. Her body was stuck in hurry mode because her amygdala had been trained to stay on high alert. Understanding the science of this small but powerful part of your brain can set you on the path to calming your anxiety. Let me share three foundational coping skills that can help you slow your reaction so you are able to reflect and respond in a way that really syncs up to what the situation calls for coping skill number one. This might be shocking, but I want you to remember your feelings are not facts. When I taught this to seventh graders, they were outraged. They were convinced that their feelings were facts, and gave me example after example. When I got them connected about statements connected to their anxiety, they began to see that much of their anxiety had been rooted in things that hadn't happened yet or in regrets in the past. Such as if I don't let my friend wear my new shirt, she won't be my friend. The anxiety setting a boundary and saying, no, we've all been there. It's real, but it's not real. You get what I mean? So let me show you how it works. The moment you question whether a feeling is a fact, you shift activity from your amygdala to your prefrontal cortex. Yes. Another one of those sciency words that float around a lot in the stratosphere, your prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead is the CEO of your brain. It helps you with moral decision making, organizing executive planning, And that's the key to emotional regulation, to let your amygdala do its job by scanning for danger, but slow it down so your prefrontal cortex can do its job by helping you think more clearly about the situation at hand. The emotional intensity of adolescents can follow you into adulthood unless you learn to use science-backed coping skills to keep your amygdala from running the show. Accepting that anxiety is a feeling not a fact, helps you remember. It's your brain security system talking, and it's in your best interest to slow down and do a little detective work before believing what your amygdala's telling you. Which brings us to coping skill Number two, slow down and breathe. Think of what a detective does when he walks into a house. He or she looks around and assesses before acting. You can do the same with your anxiety. When you feel anxious, remind yourself that your anxiety might not be Seeing this situation clearly and slowing down is the only way to get an accurate read of the situation. One way to do that is notice and name. I feel anxious, then breathe deeply and intentionally because anxiety comes on so quickly and can feel uncomfortable. Many of my clients resist this at first, But slow steady breathing directly affects the amygdala's alarm system by stimulating your vagus nerve, which tells your body your safe. Don't make this complicated. Move your attention from your amygdala, which is racing, and often creating a story, often not true to your body and breathe, and you're going to see that you are able to reregulate. Your central nervous system, your amygdala responds strongly to sensory input. shifting your focus to what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. Sends the message. I'm safe now. You can check out episode 189 for a deeper dive into this skill of grounding yourself with your senses. One of my clients, was resigning from her job after being offered a better position with hours more suited to her home life. In preparation, she ran the mental movie, a skill I talk about in episode 186, where you actually rehearse something you're afraid of. As she was rehearsing, telling her boss, she got the idea, oh, I'm gonna bring her a bouquet of flowers to thank her because she had been an incredible mentor. My client told me in session that right before she walked into the door for the meeting with her boss, she grounded her feet. And she smelled the flowers her anxiety was cut in half and she thought, I got this. I love that story because it really is a great example of grounding breath work and using your senses. And that leads us to what do you do after you've calmed yourself Coping? Skill number three is aim. Once you've calmed or tamed your amygdala, your thinking brain comes back online. This is your moment to aim, to choose what to do next. Instead of letting anxiety choose for you. Think of aim as. Rest, assess progress, rest your body and mind. So your nervous system knows you're safe. This should only take 30 seconds to a minute, so I'm not talking about taking a nap. Just do some grounding and some breath work. Assess the situation with your thinking brain. Instead of your anxious brain, you might be asking, well, MJ, how do I know if it's my thinking brain? Because your anxious brain is going to come from a place of fear, and your thinking brain is going to come from a place of clarity and then progress by taking the next step that serves you best, not the one anxiety pushes you toward rest, assess progress. One of my clients had a daughter, a college freshman, who called home overwhelmed because she didn't have weekend plans. If you have college students, perhaps you have had the same scenario. My client debated whether to drive down and take her to lunch. She came to session and she said, I'm not sure if I should trust my instinct on this. I said, why don't you slow down and move through your anxiety before you make the decision? She sat quietly, closed her eyes and breathed. Within a minute or two, her breath slowed. Then she opened her eyes and she said, if I go this weekend, I might have to go every weekend. She decided to stay home and her daughter, like most freshmen, figured it out. I want you to remember, your anxiety isn't a character flaw. It's your amygdala doing its job, but it is not always the most reliable employee, so you are gonna need to supervise it. Next time you feel anxious. Consciously remind yourself that your anxiety needs guidance. For this week's Inner Challenge, I want you to choose one of these coping skills and practice it three times a day, even if you're not in an anxious moment. Training your brain when you're calm makes it easier to use the skill when anxiety strikes. So take on the Inner Challenge, ground your feet, and practice some deep breathing, when you feel your anxiety heightened notice and name. feeling anxious. And then take a couple breaths and allow yourself to connect to your body until it relaxes a bit. You don't have to get it down to a zero. You can have lots of mental clarity at a two or a three, but you are going to know it when you practice it. As fast as your amygdala can be with practice, you can become faster at reregulating your body So you can get to the place of aim, rest, assess, and progress. on Thursday we're gonna talk about the amygdala from another perspective, how can you rewire it so it's not just calmer in the moment, but actually less reactive over time? You will not wanna miss this week's follow-up episode. I'd really appreciate it if you'd follow the podcast. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife Calm.