Ep. 234 When Midlife Feels Like Chaos: Anxiety, Stress, and Coping Skills That Bring You Back to Calm

Why does midlife anxiety and stress spike the moment you feel out of control?
If overwhelm has been pulling you into fear, spiraling thoughts, or exhaustion, you’re not alone—and nothing is wrong with you.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     Why overwhelm in midlife is a nervous-system response—not a personal failure

2.     What anxiety and stress are doing to your brain and body when you feel out of control

3.     How understanding overwhelm becomes the first coping skill that helps you reconnect with calm

🎧 Take 11 minutes to understand your stress response and begin easing anxiety in midlife—you’re worth it.

Have you tried journaling, deep breathing, podcasts, therapy—even medication—and still feel anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed in midlife?

I’m creating a new program to help you experience real midlife calm, and instead of guessing what you need, I want to hear directly from you.

👉 Take this short, anonymous 2-minute survey:
https://forms.gle/zU92vegG8ruAXEGZ7

Thank you!

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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: 0:41

In this episode, you'll discover how understanding overwhelm helps you move from feeling out of control to feeling calm. 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. This is our first episode after spending January, focusing on using the abundant Life mindset as you move into the new year and work with your resolutions. 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, lean into your midlife wisdom. Your body deserves support, not pressure. It understands that change happens through understanding, patience, and wisdom, not force. So today, let's start with something familiar. You open an envelope, a bill you weren't expecting. Post holidays. Who doesn't have that experience? You feel your chest tighten, your thoughts start to race. How am I gonna handle this? What if this gets worse? Or you're at work and a colleague criticizes your contribution and suddenly your mind spins, your armpits get sweaty, and all you want to do is get the heck out of there. Flee that spinning feeling. That sense of being outta control. In these moments, life, your mind, your body feels like chaos. And when it comes to stress and anxiety. Working with your mental state and nervous system, not against them, is what actually brings calm to those super uncomfortable moments. This is where chaos challenges abundance through fear and depletion. It sounds so easy. Have an abundant mindset, but when your mind spins, you need a deeper understanding of what's happening in your body in order to bring your mind to calm. In this episode you'll discover why feeling out of control pushes your mind into chaos. What's happening in your brain and body when overwhelm takes over, and how understanding this response helps you regain clarity without trying to fix everything, which often can make things worse. Let me begin by reintroducing you to an image that I shared way back in episode one because it really does help you make sense of this experience. Dr. Daniel Siegel describes mental wellness as being a river where your mind is peaceful, calm, and alert. But on either side of that river are two banks. One is rigidity or something happens and you try to impose control. The other is chaos where you feel overwhelmed, scattered, and out of control. Today we're focusing on chaos. And here's something important. When you're out doing life, stuff happens, you react. I want you to remember this. Reactions are a starting place, not the ending place. Feeling outta control doesn't mean you're broken or something's wrong with you. It's actually the opposite. It means your system is reacting to pressure exactly the way it's designed to. I actually just lived through this before ending work. On Monday, I received an email from an insurance provider that covers many of my clients. It informed me that as of January 30th, I would no longer be a provider. Literally my mind went blank. Then it began spinning catastrophes. My heart sank, and I thought, will this end my career? How I'm gonna help my clients through this? I sat there for a few minutes completely on the Bank of Chaos. One small email. 20 seconds to read. Boom. Now let's talk about why chaos feels the way it does when something feels threatening financially. Emotionally or relationally, your brain's alarm system. The amygdala activates stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol rise. Your nervous system shifts into survival mode at the same time. Your prefrontal cortex, the part that I call this CEO of your brain, it's responsible for planning perspective and emotional regulation goes partially offline. That's why your thoughts spiral. You catastrophize, you can't prioritize. You feel mentally noisy or frozen. Your attention narrows and your mind gets stuck on what could go wrong. This isn't weakness, it's biology. Before I talk about how to get yourself from that bank of chaos back into the river of calm, I just want to put rigidity, another survival response into context. Something unexpected may happen, and instead of responding with chaos, you respond with the rigidity. Instead of feeling flooded, your system tightens and tries to control. I'm gonna come back to that in a future episode, but today let's stay with chaos, overwhelm, and that feeling out of control. one of my client's doctors recommended additional blood work. Her response overwhelm, spinning compulsive, Googling, which only wound her up further and convinced her she had a fatal illness. She came to my office and she said I was already on the Bank of Chaos and the Googling was like a self-administered earthquake. Yep. When you feel outta control, it's very human to think more information will calm me down, And sometimes it does but it's rarely the right place to start. So what to do? Begin by using your superpower. Notice what's happening to your body and mind in real time. Sigel tells us to move off the bank and back into the river. you Need To be more flexible, adaptive, or coherent, and when you are, you will become more energized and stable. I always recommend to start with coherence. Coherence is bringing your body and mind into alignment with the truth. Remember, when you're flooded, when you're catastrophizing, you're not speaking from a place of truth, you're speaking from a place of fear. Always start with the body because the mind will follow. Remember this when you are overwhelmed or feeling out of control, your body needs you to tend and befriend it so you can calm it down so you can then think more clearly. Where reason can be assessed. Noticing and naming is the start. Of cultivating calm. When you realize, oh, my nervous system is flooded, you stop judging yourself and start working with your body. No different than when your bladder is full. You're not fixing. You're actually reorienting yourself to what your body needs. You're noticing your reaction and you're using your hard earned wisdom to move toward reflection. And a calmer body. Let's be honest, midlife chaos often shows up in very specific ways. You spiral about finances, holiday bills, payments for college, and an economy that feels unpredictable and suddenly. Everything feels urgent. You worry about health, yours, your parents, your kids. You feel like life is coming at you faster than you can respond. If you accept this, I'm not saying you like it, but you accept this is your life stage. You're going to have periods of feeling out of control, not because you're doing anything wrong, but because you have chronic responsibilities, plus uncertainty, and all of that depletes your capacity. One of my clients said to me, I had time off a month ago, and between my kids being sick and running my parents to the doctors I already feel drained. That's why understanding overwhelm is so essential. If you feel flooded, what I want to do is give you a flood plan. Let's start with this week's Inner Challenge. It is intentionally simple as you move through the day. Pause and notice when your brain moved to the Bank of chaos. No judgment. You don't control your reactions. But you can work with them through noticing and naming that shift alone helps you lean away from judgment and toward understanding and patience. That's midlife wisdom. It's free. Why not use it? If you are in chaos, just notice where do you feel it in your body? Is your chest tight? Your jaw clenched, your mind racing. Your stomach upset, just name it quietly. This is overwhelm. This is chaos. You don't need to fix it yet. This is what an abundant mindset looks like in real life, not pushing through chaos, not being critical, but understanding it and responding with wisdom. In this episode, you learn that feeling outta control isn't a personal flaw. It's your nervous systems response to whatever just happened. You learned why Chaos pulls your mind into fear and depletion, and you learn that understanding what's happening inside of you is the first step back toward calm. Siegels River shows you where you are and the nervous system science explains why you got there. On Thursday, we're going to build on this by exploring coping skills that calm your nervous system when you feel outta control. Practical ways to reconnect with calm from the inside out. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife calm.