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. 224 Before 2025 Ends: A 8 Minute Festive Way To Banish Midlife Anxiety and Stress—No Coping Skill Needed!
Are you craving a gentler and fun way to close out 2025?
Why not reflect on 2025 with calm, abundance and connection?
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1. A simple and festive five-minute practice to calm midlife anxiety and stress as you bring 2025 to a close.
2. A simple and fun way to identify your Moments of Abundance from 2025
3. A gentle end-of-year practice that helps you reconnect with joy, courage, rest, and the people who steadied you
Take five minutes to feel lighter and more grounded before the year ends—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 a fun and festive five minute way to banish midlife anxiety and stress without using a single coping skill. 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. Whoa. That was a lot. Not just the holidays, the whole year. And now you've reached this beautiful in-between space at the end of the year where you finally get to exhale from the December rush and gently turn toward what's next. But today we're not doing a heavy reflection. we're going to do something simple and honestly, something really fun. We're going to scroll, yes, scroll with a C. What I want you to do is right now or later, find your comfiest corner, your couch, your bed, your favorite chair. Grab a warm drink and your best fuzzy, comfy blanket. And your loyal bestie. Your phone. Today you are gonna make your phone work for you instead of against you. Because the pictures on your phone hold a more honest version of your year than your anxious brain ever will left to its own. Your Inner critic will always replay the struggle, the stress, the resolutions not followed through on the moments you think you should have handled better, but your phone quietly captured joy, love, courage, connection, and growth, even if you forgot some of those moments. I'm gonna guide you through a short practice to uncover five moments of abundance. Those moments when you felt connected, whole, loving and compassionate, filled with warmth and beauty. This is your Inner Challenge for the week, and you can do it right now while you listen, or later when you have time. So go ahead, grab your phone and open your photos and just start scrolling through the year. No pressure, no overthinking. Just notice. The first thing I want you to look for is the first picture that represents an experience of joy that you had in this year. I'm gonna do this along with you. So I'm opening my photos and I'm just scrolling to the first picture that I see that fills me with joy. Oh my gosh. It was when I got to go to a football game with my 8-year-old nephew, Ty. He had just turned eight and his goal for the year was to make it through a whole game. And we did. And when I'm 90, I am gonna remember that little boy filled with joy doing every cheer, dancing with the jumbotron, and at the end of the night saying he had more fun than the Notre Dame player who scored four touchdowns. Now I invite you to do the same with your photos. Trust your own reaction, and when you feel that sense of joy, I want you to take it in, And stay with it for a while. You can turn off the phone and then come back to the next prompt. But really celebrate that moment of joy that you had this past year. Next, I want you to scroll through your photos and I want you to find a moment of courage. Okay, I'm doing mine. Scroll. Scroll. Oh, wow. I didn't expect this. It's a picture of my daughter who spent seven months. In 2025, unemployed and looking for a job that is a scary place to be. Her fortitude and her courage blew me away. Of course, your photo won't be the same as mine, so look for a photo. That really represents courage to you. Maybe it's ringing the bell after chemo, dropping your child off at college, look for that moment of courage. Take it in and just stay with it. Next I want you to look for a moment of connection. So here I am scrolling. Oh, it's my grandson Neil holding his ukulele. It isn't that he's playing the ukulele beautifully. It's his love of it. That is such an experience of connection. So do the same with your photos. Scroll through and look for a photo that really represents a moment of connection that you had in this past year. Next, I want you to look for a moment of rest or peace. Oh my gosh, my eyes quickly went to July. A beautiful picture of our month in Ireland. I'm gonna be honest, I forgot that we went to Ireland for a month in July. That's how crazy 2025 has been. Find your own moment of rest. Peace. Maybe it's a sunset from a balcony. The cover of a book you loved. A picture of a bird, whatever is your own simple moment. Find it and let yourself anchor yourself in that moment. Take it in. Really acknowledge it. And lastly, I want you to look for a moment of growth. I'm gonna scroll, oh, a picture of my friend and swimming partner, Lynn, who just a year ago was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer after surgery and chemo. 10 months later, we're back in the pool and she is kicking my butt. Watching her move through what is truly torturous treatment into recovery is really been an experience of growth for me. Not all moments of growth are so dramatic. Trust yours. Scroll through your photos. And look for something that helps you connect to growth. When you find it, honor it. Be proud of yourself. Remember it. Now as you sit with your phone, in your hand, close your eyes and remember all five of these moments of abundance, our years are filled with so much busyness that it's so easy to forget these small, simple, and powerful moments that we've experienced. Breathe them in, abide in them. These pictures are your evidence that even in a year that felt heavy, busy, or complicated, you're still growing. You're still loving, you are still showing up and finding pockets of joy. These aren't just memories, they're truths about who you are on a deep level. So this little reflection is your Inner Challenge, but more honestly, it's your Inner reward For a year well lived. I hope these pictures remind you of your strength. I hope they soften you. I hope they get you in touch with the courageous part of you. Let them be a truth telling mirror in a way that your anxious mind can't really argue with. If you've just been listening but didn't have time to look at your photos, I really encourage you to do so. I invite you to send this to a friend or a family member who you think would really appreciate this soft, reflective way to bring 2025 to a close. Thank you for spending these few minutes with me. I hope this has been a lovely way to begin closing 2025 and the transition into 2026. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back with a mini episode on Thursday to invite you to build on these moments in the new year in a way that sidesteps the crazy energy that traditional New Year's resolutions invite. Because after all, what we're trying to do is create midlife calm.