Ep. 231 The Real Obstacles to Midlife Exercise—and Coping Skills to Calm Anxiety, Reduce Stress, and Keep You Moving

Why does exercise feel harder in midlife—even when you know it matters?
You’re not failing or falling behind; your body and stress load have genuinely changed.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    Why midlife anxiety, stress, and self-comparison quietly derail exercise
2.    How fatigue and shame create predictable obstacles that aren’t personal failures
3.    Doable coping skills to help you keep moving without pressure or burnout
 Take 15 minutes to reduce anxiety and stress around exercise and learn a calmer way to keep moving—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

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover the real reasons exercise gets derailed in midlife and practical coping skills to overcome them.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:08

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: 0:32

Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we started looking at exercise and midlife through two very different lenses. The good life mindset and the abundant life mindset. The good life mindset tells you to push harder, be disciplined, earn your rest, and measure yourself by performance and results. The Abundant life mindset says something very different. It says, your body deserves support, not pressure. Change is a process, not a test. And movement is meant to protect your health and your nervous system, not punish your body. today. We're taking the next step because even when you understand the science, even when the abundant life approach makes sense, there are still very real obstacles that get in the way. In this episode, you'll discover the most common obstacles that quietly sabotage exercise in midlife. Why these obstacles aren't personal failures, but predictable stress responses, and how an abundant life mindset helps you move through them with compassion instead of self-judgment. So you can start moving. Keep moving. Today's episode is a bit longer than my normal episode, but be patient. Everything that I talk about in today's episode can be applied to many areas of midlife, not just exercise. So the few extra minutes will be worth your time. Before we dive in, let's briefly revisit Monday's Inner Challenge. If you haven't listened to that episode, I invite you to take the 10 minutes. It's worth it. Monday's Inner Challenge invited you to identify two small ways you might begin approaching exercise differently. Not by doing more, but by shifting how you think about movement effort or what counts interestingly, that challenge really wasn't about action. It was about awareness, and that awareness is what sets up today's conversation because the obstacles we're talking about today often show up after you've already tried to change. Obstacle number one. You probably know what it is, the Inner critic and the comparison to your younger self. One of the biggest obstacles I see in midlife is the Inner critic, especially the version that keeps comparing you to who you used to be. It sounds like this. I used to be able to do so much more. This doesn't really count if I can't do it the way I used to. Why bother? What makes this so painful in midlife is that you're not comparing yourself to other people. You're comparing yourself to yourself and this is where some fascinating science helps explain why this comparison feels so intense. Research on subjective age shows that most adults actually feel 10 years younger than they are. So when your body changes and can't do what it used to, it can feel confusing or even unfair. Not because you're unrealistic, but because your Inner sense of self hasn't aged at the same pace as your body. The Good life mindset quietly ties worth to performance and appearance. When exercise doesn't look impressive, intense, or familiar, it can start to feel pointless. Like there's no place to begin unless you're already in shape. The abundant life mindset invites a different question. What does your body need now? And here's a unique and very practical way to extend that question. What will your body need 10 years from now? Think about it this way. Most people have a retirement account. You save now because you know there'll come a time when you won't be working. You don't wait until retirement to start planning for it. Movement works the same way in midlife. You begin moving now so you can keep moving later. Strength, balance and consistency become deposits you're making into your future body. Here's where a real coping skill comes in. Your Inner critic is often aligned with the part of you that still thinks of yourself as younger. Instead of fighting that part, invite your Inner retirement planner into the conversation. I actually did this with a client in my office. He had been a strong, successful high school athlete and at 60, that version of himself was still very much alive. He would say all the time, but I don't feel 60. And emotionally that was true. Physically, he was about 60 pounds heavier and an on again off again, exerciser mostly because he exercised the way he had in high school and kept getting injured. He'd hurt his shoulder bench pressing too much. He pulled a hamstring during a weekend, three k with no training. What struck me though was this, he was incredibly consistent about contributing to his retirement account, so I asked him, what does your Inner athlete look like without hesitation, he said, fit and ready. Then I asked him a different question, what does your retirement planner look like? He smiled and said, steady and wise, that's when I invited him to try something new, to let the steady wise part of him have a compassionate update conversation with a younger athlete who was unintentionally sabotaging him and clearly needed new information. After some resistance, he finally said. Okay buddy. Let's get real. We're not 18, we're 60, and before you know it, we'll be 70. We need a plan we can stick to without getting hurt. We don't need to dominate, we just need to move. I know you think walking is for sissies, but if we team up now, we can turn this around. What he was really saying was this, you may not have your youth anymore. But you still have time. He stopped, looked up at me and said, quietly, the truth is I miss that body. I want it back, but it's not coming. I asked him to stay with that feeling for about 90 seconds, not to push it away, not to be afraid of it, but to tend and befriend it. And after a few minutes he looked up again and said, aging is hard, but honestly, being young was hard too. I just need to be more honest with myself that I'm aging. It's not my fault. It just happens. That moment mattered, not because it lowered his standards, but because it changed the measuring stick. He stopped blaming himself for aging and that freed him to update the plan. Your Inner critic often steals the truth from you, and without the truth, you can't move forward wisely. This isn't about giving up. It's about compassionately letting go of comparison and wishful thinking, and stepping into the kind of supportive movement your body actually needs as you age. For most of us, this won't look heroic. It looks like consistency over intensity. It looks like letting today's movement serve the body you'll need in the years ahead. And that brings us directly to the next obstacle. Because even when you stop comparing yourself to your younger body, you may feel stuck at the starting line. And that's where obstacle two shows up. Fatigue, stress load, and nervous system overwhelm. Let's be honest, another major obstacle I see in midlife is simple exhaustion. So many people tell me, I want to exercise. But I'm too tired, and this is not laziness. It's stress between work demands, caregiving, sleep disruption, hormonal changes and emotional load. Many midlife bodies are already running on empty. There's only so much capacity to go around. The Good Life mindset says, push through. The abundant life mindset says. Listen, when exercise is framed as just another demand, your mind and body resist. But when movement is framed as regulation as a way to settle stress instead of add to it, the relationship with exercise begins to change. This connects directly to Monday's episode where we talk about exercise, not as punishment, but as one of the most reliable ways to reduce anxiety and support your nervous system if it's done in a way that your body can tolerate. I wanna say something personal here. I used to sleep like a baby, and then menopause hit. I jokingly would say I needed a mother to sleep. Train me again. And if you're sleeping poorly, exercise will feel much harder. That's not a character flaw, it's physiology. That's why I often tell clients sleep and exercise are two sides of the same coin. Some movement can help improve sleep. And better sleep makes movement feel more doable If sleep is truly off the rails, I usually start there. Check out episode 93 with five. Sleep hacks that can really help you sleep better. But here's the key reframe. If you are exhausted, you don't need more pressure, you need the right dose of movement. One of my clients started with a simple plan. She walked for 20 minutes At lunch, she bought four pound weights and followed a four minute YouTube strength video. That was it. She did those two things five times a week. At first, she thought, this isn't enough, but she was surprised by how much it helped her energy and sleep improved. Her stress levels came down and exercise stopped feeling like something she had to force. That's the abundant life approach, not heroic, not perfect. Just supportive enough for your mind and body to say, just do it. Which leads me to obstacle number three, restarting and the resistance to beginning again. This may be the obstacle I hear most often. I've let my body go. Starting again, feels impossible. Doing so little doesn't feel worth it. This obstacle often comes after long periods of stress and fatigue. People pause to survive, then shame steps in the pause turns into a story about failure, and that story makes restarting feel overwhelming. There's also another layer here that doesn't get talked about enough resistance to learning new things, especially when it comes to strength. Many midlife people don't want to be beginners. They don't want to learn new movements, new rules, or put themselves in a position where they feel awkward, exposed, or incompetent. That resistance is in stubbornness, it's vulnerability. The good life mindset says you should already know how to do this. The Abundant Life mindset says, learning just enough to support your body is wisdom. Strength isn't about mastery, it's about preservation time for a true confession. I'm an avid swimmer. About seven years ago, I was diagnosed with osteopenia and my doctor told me I needed to lift weights. I looked at him and I said, there's a lot of resistance in swimming. Isn't that enough? He shook his head and I said, I have no interest in living weights. He jokingly said, then move back to farm life. That may be the only way in the modern era for people to build up the resistance they need as they age. Well, that wasn't gonna happen, and at the time I had kids at home, my mother was sick, I was working full time and not to be overlooked. We had a cat who threw up three times a day. Weight training was not happening. Fast forward to January, 2025. My kids were grown, my mother had passed, and suddenly the only excuse left was the cat. That Christmas. My kids gave me a gift certificate to a gym so a trainer could teach me how to lift weight safely. Here's an honest update. A year later. I go once a week I go with a trainer because I'm not great at remembering how to do this correctly. Left to my own devices, I will hurt myself. My consistency has been spotty. In the spring, I sprained my foot just standing up after an intake with a new client. 11 weeks outta the gym, I went back and started again. In the fall, I got a respiratory infection. Another four weeks out I went back. Start it again. This is far from perfect. I have been incredibly inconsistent, but here's the truth that matters. I can feel the difference when I lift my suitcase into the overhead bin on the plane. When I walk upstairs, when I carry groceries, I feel stronger. Do I love it? Heck no. Do I do it beautifully? No way, but it is making me stronger, and I know in 10 years that will matter. That's the abundant life shift. Not flawless execution, not intensity, just returning again and again to what your body actually needs. these obstacles tend to stack on top of each other. The Inner critic adds pressure. Pressure wears you down When you're worn down, you avoid an avoidance. Quietly turns into shame before you know it. Exercise feels impossible, not because you failed, but because your mind feels overloaded and is trying to protect you the abundant life mindset breaks the cycle, not with force, but with compassion and steadiness. It says to the Inner critic, take a rest. I got this. In today's episode, you discovered why the biggest obstacles to exercise and midlife aren't about motivation or discipline, but about stress, comparison, fatigue, and shame. You learned how the Good Life mindset keeps these obstacles in place and how the abundant life mindset helps you move through them with compassion, clarity, realism, and purpose. You don't need to push harder. You don't need to prove anything. You need an approach that works with your midlife body, not against it. I think I'll go out for a walk. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with creating midlife calm.