Ep. 222 A Surprising Coping Skill to Ease Holiday Anxiety, Stress, and Midlife Lonelines

Have the holidays ever made your loneliness feel heavier? 

You’re not alone—midlife anxiety and stress often peak the week before Christmas.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     Why loneliness intensifies during the holidays, especially in midlife

2.     How understanding the biology of loneliness softens your judgement helping you reduce loneliness. 

3.     A gentle coping skill that helps you feel more connected. 

🎧 Take 6 minutes to bring more calm and connection to your week—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

this episode, you'll discover the surprising science-backed way to treat your holiday loneliness. 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. If you are feeling lonely this Christmas, nothing is wrong with you. You're not failing at the holidays. You're human and your nervous system is asking for something softer. In this episode, you'll discover why holiday loneliness hits so intensely, the neuroscience of why Childhood Comfort sooth it, and a simple, gentle way to respond to loneliness with kindness instead of judgment. Let's begin with the truth. Feeling lonely is not a character flaw. It's not a sign you're doing life wrong. It's actually a biological alarm system, like hunger or thirst. Your brain is signaling. I need connection. I need comfort. During the holidays, this alarm often gets louder. Routine shift expectations rise, memory and nostalgia. Surface loss feels sharper, and your brain compares your real life to the imaginary highlight reels you think everyone else is living. It Is really important to understand that loneliness is real pain. Neuroscience shows that when you feel lonely, it lights up the same regions as physical pain, which is why you may feel heavy, tired, low energy, or unmotivated, and here's a misunderstood truth. You can feel lonely even when you're with people. You might be sitting at a family gathering in a busy room, participating in holiday events, and still feel unseen, disconnected, or out of sync. That's one of the most common forms of loneliness. Lonely in a crowd, and nothing is wrong with you if that's what you're experiencing. I have many clients who don't feel seen by their family, and that's often who we spend holidays with. Nothing is wrong with you if that's what you're experiencing. Your nervous system is simply saying, I don't feel emotionally safe, connected, or seen. Here I'm sorry because it's really painful. And if you can see this pain just like you would a broken arm, then you can hopefully lean into the coping skill that I wanna share with you today. I want you just to take a few seconds right now and do a small float back to your childhood. Just let your mind wander to when you were younger, and I want you to remember what were the toys you loved? What did you play with for hours? What did you reach for when you needed comfort or imagination or escape? Or maybe think about a toy you always wanted but never got. Last year I was working with a midlife woman who really didn't like the holidays. She often felt lonely and alone. I had her do this float back, and what surfaced was that she had really wanted a Barbie as a child. Her mom didn't think it was an appropriate toy for a young girl. So year after year, there was no Barbie under the tree. So last year as an adult, the week of Christmas, she went to the store and bought herself, not one, but two Barbies. And as she headed to the checkout lane, she saw a coloring book. Not one of those adult coloring books. A simple one with puppies and kittens. She grabbed that and a set of crayons later, she told me it was really one of the first times that she had gone through the holidays with an activity that helped soothe her pain, not because of the toys, but because she had finally given herself something that her younger self had always needed. This is why childhood comforts work activities like coloring, baking cookies, decorating a gingerbread house, building legos, pressing leaves, listening to music you loved as a kid. All activate your brain's memory and safety networks. They shift you out of pain circuitry where loneliness lives and into soothing, grounding, reward-based pathways. I'm not kidding you. You actually have the agency to help your brain move from pain to reward. Whether you're home alone or surrounded by people, but feeling unseen, you don't have to force anything. You don't have to override yourself. You can simply respond to your loneliness with comfort, kindness, and a small little gift. Isn't this better than pressure and judgment? Remember. You don't have to fix your loneliness. You just have to tend to it, and that's enough. So what's your Inner Challenge This week, I want you to be your own Santa Pick one childhood comfort and give yourself 10 or 15 minutes with it today and tomorrow and the next day, and the next day. Color, bake something simple. Play with clay. Look through an old book. Listen to a song from when you were little. Don't make it productive. Don't make it perfect. Just make it kind. In this episode, you discovered why the holidays amplify loneliness, why it can show up even in a crowded room, and how connecting with childhood comfort. Can soothe your nervous system and bring you back to yourself. And on Thursday. I hope you'll join me for a two minute holiday episode. Two minutes to ground your day in peace and calm. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife calm.