Ep. 269 The Missing Coping Skill Your Nervous System Needs to Feel Alive Again and Decrease Anxiety & Stress in Midlife

 What if feeling emotionally alive again has less to do with doing more self-care—and more to do with what your nervous system actually needs?
There is a gentle, practical way to help your nervous system move beyond survival mode and reconnect to calm, connection, joy, and emotional presence again.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Why your nervous system changes through repeated experiences of stress, anxiety, urgency, and emotional overload
2. How small moments of connection, awe, laughter, beauty, and presence help reopen pathways to emotional vitality in midlife
3. Practical coping skills that help your nervous system feel safer, calmer, and more emotionally alive over time

 Take 12 minutes to better understand what your nervous system truly needs to feel more connected, present, and alive again—you’re worth it.

Learn more about the Inner Challenge Masterclass:
mailto:mj@mjmurrayvachon.com?subject=Inner%20Challenge%20Masterclass

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

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 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how small moments can help retrain your nervous system for more calm, joy, and emotional aliveness. 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. On Monday, your inner challenge was to notice your glimmers, those small moments where you felt even slightly more alive, connected, calm, happy, or present. And what you may have realized is this: you haven't lost your capacity for joy. It may simply have gotten buried underneath stress, anxiety, and chronic responsibility. In this episode, you'll discover why glimmers are actually powerful nervous system experiences and not just positive thinking, how anxiety and chronic stress narrow your emotional world and disconnect you from joy, and practical ways to begin reopening your nervous system to connection, beauty, calm, laughter, and emotional vitality. One of the most important things I want you to understand is this: you do not have to manufacture glimmers from scratch. Many of them already exist inside your history, your memories, your interests, your relationships, your senses, and your everyday life. And most of the time, these are free. Often the work is not adding more, It's reconnecting to what mattered before stress took over so much space inside you. Think about moments in your life that naturally brought you happiness, curiosity, calm, meaning, or emotional presence. Maybe coffee with a friend Gardening, nature, playing games, writing poetry, painting, sports, music, visiting an elderly relative, cooking, laughing around a table, being near water, throwing a ball, watching your children play, reading on a quiet morning. These moments matter more than you might realize, not because they solve your life, but because they help your nervous system remember that you were never meant to live on high alert all the time. Your nervous system changes through repeated experiences, not isolated moments. Think about it this way. Your nervous system slowly learned to live on high alert through repeated experiences of stress, pressure, worry, urgency, and responsibility. Over time, your body adapted to that state, and the good news is this: the nervous system can also begin changing through repeated moments of connection, laughter, awe, calm, appreciation, beauty, safety, and emotional presence. Not once, repeatedly. And I'm not suggesting you avoid the real stress of life. There are real worries, real responsibilities, and real pain and suffering. But if your nervous system only experiences stress, urgency, fear, pressure, and responsibility, eventually that begins feeling like your entire life. Glimmers help create balance, and over time, repeated moments of connection, joy, awe, beauty, playfulness, and emotional presence begin helping your nervous system remember there is more to life than survival. Let me give you an example. I regularly spend time with my great nephews and niece, because I love them But second, because time with them is full of glimmer moments. The other day, I played horse with my eight-year-old nephew. I probably hadn't done that basketball game in decades. At first, I was throwing a lot of air balls, and my nephew never once made fun of me. He just kept laughing, chasing the ball, and throwing it back to me. And after a while, my shot slowly started coming back. Not perfectly, but enough. And I could feel something happening inside of me. The simple thrill of making the basket, being with this adorable child, laughing, playing, being completely in the moment. For a while, I wasn't thinking about responsibilities, schedules, stress, or the future. I was just there, present. And afterward, I remember thinking, "Wow, I forgot this part of myself was still there." It reminded me joy often lives inside experiences we stopped making room for. That's important because in midlife, you can spend years looking outward for relief while losing touch with what helps you feel alive internally. And I'm not talking about escaping reality or pretending life isn't difficult. These are difficult times. We are living in a world saturated with anxiety, outrage, fear, uncertainty, division, and war. Your nervous system absorbs far more than you realize. Constant headlines, constant stimulation, constant emotional activation. Fear spreads unless you create boundaries around it. That's one of the reasons glimmers matter so much. They're antidotes to chronic nervous system activation. Love, beauty, wonder, connection, awe, presence, laughter, and yes, air balls. Those experiences help communicate safety to the nervous system. Not perfect safety, not denial, but moments of enough safety for your body to soften instead of constantly brace. And because your nervous system changes through repeated experiences, not isolated moments, these small glimmers matter far more than most people realize. Many of the most powerful glimmers are surprisingly small. One of my favorite examples is talking to strangers. Yes, I know this sounds like one of those progressive commercials where Dr. Rick is trying to stop people from becoming their parents. But research consistently shows that brief moments of social connection improve emotional well-being and help you feel more connected and less isolated. Talking to your barista, the cashier at Costco, the man changing your oil, someone sitting next to you in the hot tub at the gym, the person in the elevator. Small moments, but they interrupt the isolation that anxiety quietly creates. The other day, I was standing in the grocery comparing yogurt labels with an app on my phone. A younger woman standing next to me asked what the app was. So I showed her how it worked, and then she started scanning products herself. As she became so genuinely excited and delighted by it, I found myself smiling too. It was such a small interaction, less than two minutes, but I walked away feeling more connected, lighter, and oddly uplifted. That's what I mean by glimmers. When you're anxious or overwhelmed, you begin walking through life emotionally sealed off, head down, mind racing, trying to get through the day. You probably don't even realize you're doing this. But connection regulates the nervous system. And while the world may feel emotionally at war sometimes, you're not at war with the people standing next to you buying groceries, walking in the gym, or sitting at the coffee shop. So connect, even briefly. It may feel awkward at first, but your nervous system was built for moments of human connection. Let me end by talking a little bit about another place where glimmers often get buried, and that's inside your own relationship with your body. Many people move through life criticizing their body almost constantly. The culture teaches you that your body is never quite enough. Too old, too tired, too big, too wrinkled, too something. But what happens even briefly when you stop evaluating your body and begin appreciating it? Just appreciating what it quietly does for you every single day. Take your hands. Right now, your mind creates a thought and your hands follow it. That's actually extraordinary. You type, cook, drive, hold the people you love, open doors, write notes, carry groceries, create things, and most days you never stop long enough to feel awed about it. Or consider your hearing. Take a moment and just listen. The birds outside, children playing, the hum of the refrigerator, rain, music. your senses anchor you in the present moment, and your nervous system heals in the present. Not in catastrophic future thinking or ruminations of regret about the past The same is true for your other senses. Touch, taste, smell, sight. These small sensory moments help bring your mind and body back into connection with the present moment instead of remaining trapped in chronic stress activation. And because your nervous system changes through repeated experiences, not isolated moments, these small acts of noticing begin helping your body feel safer, calmer, and more emotionally open over time. And this is important. These practices are not trivial. They help retrain your nervous system, not instantly, not dramatically, but gradually. And honestly, that's how most real healing happens, not through intensity, but through repetition. Repeated moments of noticing, connecting, softening, breathing, feeling, being present. So if you've been feeling emotionally flat, disconnected, exhausted, or stuck in survival mode, don't assume something is wrong with you. Your nervous system may simply need more repeated experiences of connection, beauty, presence, awe, and emotional safety and if you're realizing through these episodes that understanding yourself is important, but practicing these skills consistently in daily life is much harder, that's exactly the kind of work we go deeper into inside my Inner Challenge Masterclass and coaching program, where we practice learning how to work with the nervous system in sustainable, everyday ways. If you're interested, send me an email at mj@mjmurrayvachon.com. I'll place the information in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more Creating Midlife Calm.