Ep. 235 The Fastest Way Out of Overwhelm: Midlife Anxiety, Stress, and Coping Skills Made Simple

What do you do when overwhelm hits and your mind spirals into worst-case thinking?
If stress and anxiety in midlife leave you feeling flooded and out of control, you’re not broken—you’re human.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     How to calm anxiety and stress in midlife by regulating your body before working with your thoughts

2.     Why noticing and naming overwhelm is the foundation of effective coping skills

3.     How to create a simple, personalized flood plan that helps you move from overwhelm to calm in real time

🎧 Take 11 minutes to learn coping skills that turn midlife anxiety and stress into calm—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

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:41

In this episode, you'll discover simple science backed ways to calm overwhelm in real time. 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.

1:13

Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we talked about why feeling out of control fuels stress and anxiety and midlife. We explored how overwhelm isn't a personal failure. It's a nervous system response, today, we're staying connected to that understanding and we're moving into what actually helps you when overwhelm hits. In this episode, you'll discover why noticing and naming overwhelm is the first step toward calm. How calming or taming your body brings your thinking brain back online, and how to create a simple personalized flood plan you can use when overwhelm hits, no rain boots needed. Let's do a quick check-in with Monday's Inner Challenge. Your Inner Challenge was about noticing and naming, becoming aware of when your mind goes to the bank of chaos without judging yourself. If you caught it even once that matters. And if you didn't, that's okay too. This is a new skill and we seldom get a new skill, right when we just begin to learn it. The ability to notice what's going on in your mind matters. Why? Because you can't regulate what you don't notice. Today's episode assumes that you're starting to notice a bit more, and now we're going to add some tools that you can use right away. The coping skills I'm gonna share with you today. Your nervous system learns over time. Repetition doesn't mean failure. It actually means that you're teaching your body to respond to stress and calm differently. Instead of letting your mind run amuck, you're going to be gently leading your mind to a better, healthier place, and it will take a bit of practice. But this practice will allow you to feel safer inside. Which leads to more safety on the outside. So let's begin with coping skill number one. You've heard me say it before, but today we're gonna apply it to whenever you have a reaction that makes you feel overwhelmed, that makes you feel out of control, that causes your mind and your body to feel flooded. Notice and name and tame your body First, let's start here. When you feel overwhelmed, the most important thing for you to remember is start with your body. Most people start with their thoughts, but overwhelm activates your central nervous system, specifically your vagus nerve, which is the communication highway between your brain and your body. When your vagus nerve sense threat, your system shifts into survival mode. Your heart rate increases, your breath shortens your thinking brain goes partially offline. So after you notice a name, you wanna move to emotional regulation or what I call tame. What does that look like? You begin to slow your breath. You lengthen your exhales, you move your mental awareness to your feet, and you begin to ground yourself. You place your hand on your chest gently. Perhaps you drop your shoulders or soften your jaw. This is not about calming down perfectly. It's about creating just enough safety that your whole system begins to soften, which then will lead you to coping skill Number two, once your body settles even a little, then you can work on your thoughts. It is about creating just enough safety for your system to soften. If you begin to intentionally practice this, you'll be surprised, maybe even shocked that this does not take a long time. I am not recommending that you go online and look for a body scan and practice that for 30 minutes. Again, I'm not against it, but what we're trying to do is set you up to create a flood plan in real time in the moment that can help you calm down and move to coping. Skill number two, that once you've settled your body even a little, then you can work on your thoughts. A good clue that overwhelm is still running. Your thinking show is that your thoughts will sound extreme. You'll find yourself just naturally painting The worst case scenario, aren't we all master artists? When we're overwhelmed, we can create novellas of the worst case scenario that we could sell to Hollywood producers. But here is a simple question to interrupt that spiral. If someone gave you a million dollars to come up with another possible outcome, then the worst case scenario. What would it be? This question isn't about positivity, it's about reopening options. Let me share with you a personal example. On Monday after I got the email from my insurance provider, my first thought was my career is over. I did about 40 seconds of breath work, nothing fancy. Then I said out loud, because I was home alone for a million dollars, what's another ending? And my mind immediately answered. I still have other insurance providers. That's coherence where my inside and my outside match calming the body, brought my prefrontal cortex back online. The question helped my mind shift from catastrophe to a bit more clarity. I also laughed. I have actually used this question a hundred times and it always makes me laugh, and that is really good for creating calm. But what should you do if your breathing isn't enough? Because life is a little bit more complex than it sounds on a podcast. Let's talk a little bit about what you should do if you've tried breath work. If you tried my funny question and nothing really works, you still feel flooded, and overwhelmed and out of control if your body is still so activated that your thinking won't land in a better place, that is your cue to stop working in your head and move overwhelms doors, tension in your body and movement helps release it you don't need to go to the gym and do a Zumba class. All you have to do is stand up, walk around, swing your arms, change rooms, look out the window. Movement tells your nervous system, I'm not trapped, and here's a powerful but often overlooked tool. Humming. Yes. Humming actually stimulates your vagus nerve and helps reregulate your nervous system. It's a simple and surprisingly effective coping skill. And not to mention it doesn't cost a cent, and you always have it in your back pocket. I have a client who is very susceptible to overwhelm. She's a highly sensitive person, and when she feels it rising, she walks into her bathroom humming, born in the USA, and then she applies a cold compress gently to her face. Why does this work? Because cold exposure and vocal vibration both activate calming pathways in your central nervous system. That is siegel's flexibility and adaptability in action. You're not giving up, you are working with your biology. That's the abundant life mindset. Using wisdom to create calm. Now let's put it all together and create your own personal flood plan. This should not take more than two or three minutes. I am not kidding you. No policies, no annual renewals. Once you figure it out for yourself, you can use again and again and again. Is take out a Word doc, write it on a computer or your notes on your phone, and just write down. Notice a name. I'm on the Bank of chaos. Tame, and just write what you want to do. Maybe slow breathing, maybe long exhale, maybe grounding your feet on the floor. Number three, reframe. Put the question for a million dollars, what's another possible outcome? And number four, walk stretch hum. Splash a cold water. Now your plan might look different than the one that I just shared with you, but that's exactly the point. This is not about doing it right. It's about having a path back to yourself when your system floods. Here's a flood plan. A client to mine created this week in my office. She wrote this, say out loud. I'm flooded. Two. Ground my feet. Look at a clock and breathe for one full minute. Three. Stand up. Give myself a hug for, you're gonna love her question. You're gonna get a big ice cream cone. If you can come up with two other endings to this catastrophe, five. If I don't feel better, hum. Happy birthday. So I invite you to create your own flood plan. Put it in your phone or on your computer, on your refrigerator, wherever works for you. Just have it close at hand so you can rely on it when you need it. What I've learned from my clients is after they have two or three reps of this, they automatically begin to use it when they feel flooded. In this episode, you discovered that overwhelm is a nervous system response, not a personal flaw. Calming your body is the fastest way. To help your mind and a simple, personalized flood plan that can help you recover faster when overwhelm sets in. I want you to look at this through the abundant life mindset, understanding and giving your body the support it needs so you can respond with compassion and agency and bring yourself back. To calm and clarity. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.