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. 297 The Simple Coping Skill That Keeps Anxiety From Stealing Connection With the People You Love in Midlife
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if the people you love don’t need you to fix anything—they simply need your presence?
If you’ve ever found yourself worrying about the future instead of fully experiencing the moment you’re in, you’re not alone.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1. How one simple coping skill helps keep anxiety from quietly stealing connection with the people you love.
2. Why choosing curiosity instead of trying to fix someone creates deeper, more meaningful conversations.
3. How becoming emotionally present can turn ordinary moments into the memories you’ll treasure most.
Take 7 minutes to discover the simple coping skill that helps keep anxiety from stealing connection with the people you love—you’re worth it.
****
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.
In this episode, you'll discover why your greatest gift to the people you love isn't having the right words 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 three decades of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we discovered that stress, anxiety, and overthinking can quietly steal your attention from the people you love. Today, I wanna explore what becomes possible when you intentionally become emotionally present. In this episode, you'll discover why emotional presence begins with choosing where to place your attention, how curiosity creates deeper connection than trying to fix or reassure, and why some of your most treasured memories are created when you're fully present. A few years ago, I had to learn this lesson myself. When my daughter Abby was getting ready to leave for college, I found myself living almost entirely in the future. Would she make friends? Would musical theater be more competitive than either of us imagined? How would she manage college with her ADHD? I was doing what anxiety does best. It was taking me into tomorrow while my daughter was still living today. She was busy buying things for her dorm room, going to graduation parties and working at Build-A-Bear. She was here. I was there. Fortunately, after years of working on my own anxiety, I recognized what was happening. I settled myself, not because my worries disappeared, they didn't, But they became quiet enough that I could choose where I wanted to place my attention. One afternoon, Abby was putting pictures into frames for her dorm room. I started to ask if she'd begun packing, but instead, I took a deep breath, sat down beside her, and watched her carefully place a prom picture of her and her friends into a frame. After a while, I asked, What's it like for you to be leaving the life you've always known for something completely new?" She didn't answer right away, but then tears filled her eyes. She looked at me and said, "I am so excited, and I am terrified." Holding her prom picture, she said, "Mom, these are the best friends I've ever had. What if I don't make new ones?" She picked up a picture of her favorite theater teacher. "What if my professors don't believe in me the way my high school teachers believed in me?" Then she quietly said, "Why didn't you tell me childhood would go by so quickly? I would have cherished it more." I Smiled to myself and thought, "Only a theater major would say that." Everything inside me wanted to reassure her. I wanted to say, "Of course you'll make friends. You'll get really good parts. Everything will work out." Instead, I literally grounded my feet and quietly reminded myself, Don't fix Even after thousands of therapy sessions, I still have to choose presence over fixing. So I simply said, "Yes, this is hard." Nothing more, nothing less. She kept talking. After sharing her fears, something beautiful happened. She began talking about her hopes. "Mom, even though I'm really scared, I'm also excited. I've waited my whole life to study musical theater. I get to take dance and voice lessons three times a week. I might even learn guitar." As I listened, something inside of me changed and opened up. I realized she was holding the whole picture, the fears, the hopes, the dreams. My job wasn't to balance them. My job was simply to stay with her while she discovered them herself. She wasn't asking me to fix anything. She just wanted someone to stay with her while she sorted through all the emotions of leaving one chapter of life and beginning another. That night, I went to bed less anxious and deeply content. A few days later, I asked her, "Is there anything you'd like to do before you leave for college?" I expected her to say ice cream, shopping, or her favorite restaurant. Instead, she surprised me. "I'd like to go back to my favorite places from when I was growing up." So we jumped in the car. We went to the hospital where she was born, our first house, her elementary school, the theater where she performed. We even drove by the house where the mean girl lived. We went to the mall and visited Build-A-Bear, her first job, and at every stop, we took a picture. Then we stood there remembering. Sometimes we laughed. Sometimes we got quiet. Sometimes we cried and hugged. It became one of the most meaningful days we've ever shared. Later, as I reflected on that day, I realized something. If I had stayed trapped in my anxiety about the future, I might have completely missed one of the most meaningful memories we ever created. Not because I wasn't there physically, but because my attention would've been somewhere else. That's what emotional presence has been teaching me. It isn't pretending anxiety doesn't exist. It isn't eliminating uncertainty. It's choosing where to place your attention once your anxiety settles enough that you can choose. Sometimes that means resisting the urge to fix. Sometimes it means asking one more curious question. Sometimes it simply means staying. But it always begins by noticing when your attention has quietly drifted from here to there. Looking back, I doubt Abby remembers much of what I said that evening, but I hope she remembers how it felt to be heard. Maybe that's one of the greatest gifts we can give the people we love. Not perfect advice, but our full attention I hope you'll join me tomorrow for my mini episode, Creating Calm in the Wild, Where I'll share a personal story about finding calm in the midst of one of life's most challenging moments. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm.