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. 225 6 Minutes to a More Abundant New Year: Transform Resolutions to Ease Midlife Anxiety & Stress
Does the pressure to “get it right” in 2026 already have your anxiety rising?
If you’re in midlife, January often brings more stress than calm—and it’s time for a different way forward.
1. Learn why typical resolutions often fail and fuel anxiety, especially in midlife
2. Understand the difference between the “good life” and the “abundant life”—and why it matters now
3. Discover how to root your goals, resolutions and coping skills in compassion and calm, not pressure and performance
If you’re ready to approach the new year with less stress and more self-trust, this episode is your starting point.
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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 gentler and more successful way to approach New Year's resolutions.
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 and welcome to a new year. If today feels heavy, hopeful, or a little chaotic, that's okay. After all, January stirs up a lot of pressure, expectation, and that quiet question. Will this year be any different? I've thought deeply about how I wanted to begin this year with you. I even stepped away from podcasting for a week to listen to what might truly help you step into 2026 with more calm and on a walk. I arrived at the answer. real calm comes from a gentle pivot away from the values where we chase the good life and instead turn inward and cultivate the abundant life. This idea isn't new for me. I I came up with the good life versus abundant life model 25 years ago. When I was feeling so much pressure and stress, trying to juggle parenting home and work. On another walk. I had this insight that I was getting swept up in the culture of competition, achievement, and instant gratification. I needed a way out of keeping up with the Joneses trap and I needed to root my life in love, connection, compassion, and calm. A few weeks ago, I came back to that same insight and I realized something beautiful, something powerful, that midlife is the natural moment when this shift begins for most people. When you begin to feel that you can pull away from all that chasing, proving, and performing and lean into something deeper, more real, more satisfying, maybe more you. For so long, most of us have lived the good life, checking boxes, chasing achievements, measuring our worth, feeling we aren't enough. Signing up for programs, hoping that the next one would finally fix something. The good life is the voice that says, try harder, do more, fix yourself. But midlife invites you to a different path. If you listen, you may hear this whisper inside of you that says. There's more for you, and it isn't out there. It's actually inside of you. This is the beginning of the abundant life, a life rooted in self-worth, love, relationship, patience, collaboration, and compassion towards yourself and others. A life that has had enough experience by now that you know that struggling and suffering is inevitable and that you can begin to look at it as an unexpected teacher. And how does this apply to you as you enter this new year where you're encouraged to make resolutions to better yourself? Well, here's a surprising truth. Most resolutions fail, not because you lack discipline, but because they're built on the pressure connected to the good life. Instead of building them on abundant life values that encourage you to look inward and really figure out what you need and how you need to do something in your own way. So this January, I want to invite you to be brave to lean into growth, but do so on your own terms, because if you're listening to this podcast, growth has to be one of your personal values. So I wanna offer you a different way forward, gentler, simpler, and rooted in real growth. All month long, we're gonna explore the most common midlife resolutions through a new lens, eating and weight from worthiness, not shame, sleep, a return to your first learned coping skill. Using your money with clarity instead of comparison and fear and exercise. Built on a compassionate relationship with your body, not punishment. These are not resolutions. They're not pressure. They are actually returning to what has always lived inside of you. A quiet wisdom that knows how to care for you in a sustainable, abundant way. You can do this. It's your time. You can do this gently. And I hope to be a guide that helps you stay close to yourself as you do by the end of January. You won't just understand the abundant life. You'll feel it more in your daily routines, as well as your nervous system and your energy as they begin to calm down. Most of us begin the new year afraid of failing again because actually the good life teaches you to be competitive, comparative, and it's rooted and never enough. But this year. We are going to do it differently. We're building on intentions rooted in compassion, connection, and the real science and wisdom that comes with age. If you haven't listened to Monday's festive and fun way of reviewing the abundance of the last year, I invite you to do so. It's five minutes that will fill your heart and mind with love and gratitude. Thanks for listening, and I can't wait to be back on Monday as we begin our journey into a gentler, more abundant year at creating midlife calm.