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.
Creating Midlife Calm: Coping Skills for Stress & Anxiety in Family, Work & Relationships
Ep. 221 What to Do When Holiday Overload Increases Your Midlife Anxiety and Stress & Easy Coping Skills That Work
Does the holiday season ever feel like a part-time job you’re paying to work?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1. How to recognize when holiday expectations push your midlife brain into overwhelm
2. The three quick and free reset strategies that calm anxiety and stress quickly
3. A simple way to reclaim your capacity without doing more
🎧 Take 7 minutes to move from frazzled to grounded—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.
In this episode, you'll discover three simple resets to help you move from overwhelm to calm this holiday season.
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: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.
M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW:Welcome to the podcast. How you doing? If you're listening to this in the midst of the holidays, you might be at the edge of your capacity. So today I'm not giving you more to do'cause who needs that? At this time of the year, I'm helping you do less with more calm. On Monday, we talked about overwhelm as your brain's alarm system saying you have hit capacity. Today we're moving from awareness to action. What do you actually do when you're overwhelmed? And I bet if you're like most of us at this time of the year, you're experiencing this a lot more than you wish. Before we start a quick check in on Monday's Inner Challenge, did you get a chance to notice whether you were in your thinking brain or your survival brain? Just noticing helps your prefrontal cortex, your thinking brain come back online. And if you didn't, I totally understand. You're probably overwhelmed, but I assure you you're gonna have another chance sometime in the next week. Time is short. So let me share three easy resets that you can use. The moment overwhelm hits reset. Number one, reregulate your body when you feel overwhelmed, your thinking brain goes offline. The fastest way to bring it back. Isn't thinking harder. It's helping your body to reset. Here's two easy ideas. The first, the 90 second reset walk movement lowers your cortisol. Even a 90 second walk can clear your mind. Remember my client I talked about on Monday, who went to the drugstore three times and she still couldn't get her prescription filled. She stepped out of her car, moved her arms, and took that quick 90 second walk, and clarity returned the second body reset I wanna offer you is the physiological sigh. Two short inhales through your nose, and one long exhale through your mouth. You can do it anywhere and it's free this holiday season. Just try it. Two short inhales, one long exhale, one client used this when her husband reminded her about a Christmas brunch she had completely forgotten about. Ugh. She frozen overwhelm, noticed it and did three physiological sighs and felt her thinking brain come back online. Instead of flipping into anger or shutting down, she regulated her body and told her husband she'd forgotten, and together they made a workable plan. Your brain doesn't need perfection. It just needs a quick reset. Reset. Number two, restore your sense of agency or step back into your power. I always say Christmas is like a part-time job. You pay for overwhelm grows when the things happening to you outweigh the things you choose. And this week you have a lot happening to you. Notice a name. This is too much. Then ask, what's one small reset I can do right now? Maybe it's pushing a deadline to January. Maybe it's grilled cheese for dinner. Maybe it's turning on your favorite holiday song while you drive to care for someone. A small choice tells your brain I'm in charge. That shift brings your thinking brain back online. One of my clients was paralyzed because her budget didn't allow her to buy gifts for her friends this year. Normally she'd call her sister and spiral. But this time she took a short walk. Her mind cleared and she decided to give something else entirely time. She invited each friend on a walk at a nearby state park. Thoughtful, meaningful, and no stress. Choice creates safety. Safety creates calm, calm, creates clarity. And my last reset that I offer you in this busy time of the year is to redo your holiday to-do list. This is the reset most of us need right now. Are you still using your holiday to-do list that you created in your early thirties before your kids had all those holiday programs and you were caregiving for aging parents and work demands and everything else that life has added. I encourage you to update your holiday to-do list after all. If the holiday is a part-time job, you pay for, you have the right to rewrite your job description. Ask yourself now that your so close to the holidays. What is necessary? What's enjoyable? What is guilt or habit? What is outdated? What is the great idea that you don't have the time or money for? Do you really need to bake all those cookies? Could you skip the fancy wrapping or maybe decrease it? Can you call in the troops, your spouse and teens to help? One listener told me last year that she skipped sending Christmas cards in December and mailed them for Valentine's Day. Instead, she used a photo taken by the Christmas tree, and she said it was the first time she actually enjoyed the process of sending the cards. This isn't lowering your standards. It's right sizing your holidays, less doing more, being less pressure, more presence. Remember, overwhelm isn't failure. It's your body asking for margin, asking for an update. In this episode, you discovered how to reregulate your body, so your thinking brain comes back online. How one small choice restores your agency and helps you take back your power. How revising your holiday to-do list can give you immediate breathing room. You don't need a perfect holiday to have a meaningful one. You just need enough calm to show up as yourself. And if you can spare five seconds. I hope you'll forward this episode to someone you think would benefit from listening. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.