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. 289 How Watching A T-Ball Game Can Decrease Anxiety & Stress
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What if the secret to feeling calmer is remembering that you're still learning?
If you've been frustrated with yourself for not handling life perfectly, you're not alone.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- How accepting that you're still learning—just like those kids on the T-ball field—can help you stop fighting life and find more joy, flexibility, and calm.
🎧 Take 2 minutes to remember that you don't have to play the game perfectly—you just have to keep learning how to play.
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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.
Welcome to Creating Calm in the Wild. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, and this is your reminder that calm isn't always found when life settles down. It's actually something you can create right in the middle of the wild. Yesterday on the podcast, we talked about moving from fighting life to dancing with it. Well, I just found one of the most unlikely places to see that in action, a Little League T-ball game. Yes, folks, I am standing in the parking lot on this perfect summer day with birds chirping, having just watched my darling five-year-old niece, Alia, play in her first game. And I have to tell you, I learned more about life in that one hour than I expected. Let's start with her coach. I'm gonna call him Saint Dominic for short. For an hour, he accepted every child exactly where they were. He gently reminded one player to not hold the bat upside down, not once, not twice, but three times. When three children wanted to play pitcher, he let them all share the position. One little boy hit the ball then ran straight to second base, and then toward home. Instead of correcting him, everyone laughed, and his mom ran the bases with him. As I watched, I kept waiting for the frustrated parents, the disappointed coaches, the children upset because they weren't playing perfectly, but they never appeared. They were all no-shows for this event. Everyone seemed completely in sync about one thing. These kids were learning, and isn't that the point? What struck me was that nobody expected perfection. The kids were learning. The coaches knew they were learning. The parents knew they were learning. And because everyone accepted that, there was so much joy. Maybe that's what we forget as adults. We're still learning, too. We're learning how to care for aging parents. We're learning how to navigate changing relationships. We're learning how to live in a world that often feels uncertain and overwhelming. So if you're out in the wild today, fighting with life or fighting with yourself, remember those kids on the T-ball field. Just keep taking the next step. Feel free to turn that upside-down bat the right way. You don't have to play the game perfectly. You just have to keep learning how to play. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join me Monday on the full-length episode of Creating Midlife Calm.