Ep. 97 2 Coping Skills To Decrease Your Stress & Anxiety When You Feel Out of Control So You Can Think Clearly In Midlife

Feel like you’re losing control? Learn the secret to managing out-of-control moments and think more clearly.

 In this episode, you'll learn:

1. How to identify when you’re feeling out of control before emotions take over.

2. Effective strategies to tame anxiety and create mental clarity.

3. The secret to controlling how you respond when life feels chaotic – and why micromanaging doesn’t work.

 Learn to notice and name your out-of-control moments, then tame them with simple techniques that will allow you to think clearly and avoid saying or doing things you’ll regret. Start practicing today and feel more grounded when life throws you off balance.

Check out Ep.30 Mental Wellness Defined: Reducing Anxiety and Embracing Calm in Midlife

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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

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MJ Insights AI 0:00

the secret to managing being out of control is learning to control being out of control.

Built-in Microphone 0:05

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness.

MJ Insights AI 0:30

Welcome to the podcast. Today, we're going to dive into the complex relationship between anxiety and control. It's natural for you to feel anxious, stressed, and worried when you sense a lack of control. In fact, a key mental health skill is recognizing these moments and having a healthy strategy to move through them. In this episode, I'll help you learn how to notice and name when you're feeling out of control early on so you can avoid saying or doing things that you regret. I'm also going to share strategies to help you shift from feeling out of control to feeling calm, creating the mental clarity needed to handle these situations in ways that benefit you and others. And probably most importantly, in ways that doesn't cause you to regret your actions, your words, or your behaviors. As always, I'll end with an Inner Challenge, something you can start today to help ease your anxiety.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 1:26

Of course, feeling out of control is something we all experience, though what triggers it is unique to each of us. Feeling out of control is a reaction to a life event that makes you feel unsafe. You might not feel physically safe, but it could also be psychological, financial, relational, or professional safety that makes you feel threatened. Today's episode, I'm going to focus on situations where you feel out of control emotionally or mentally, not physically, because when we are physically threatened, we have to use different protocols to bring ourself to a safe place. Feeling out of control can happen anywhere. Home, work, the grocery, on the roads, and even within ourself. Maybe you work with someone who consistently misses deadlines, and this causes you to miss your deadlines. You've talked to the person, you've tried to work it out, but This is a person who just runs late, or perhaps your child is slacking off at school or always picks on one of their siblings. Maybe you're dealing with someone in your life who treats you poorly, Or Perhaps, feeling out of control because you're waiting on a medical diagnosis for you or a loved one. As humans, we crave control and when we perceive a loss of it, it's only natural to feel fear, anxiety, and worry. I think feeling out of control is really tough. What I want to do today is to help you identify when you are feeling this way and offer strategies so you can move from fear to safety. From chaos to calm. In my clinical work, I have heard so many stories over the years of good people saying or doing things that they later regretted because they just didn't recognize that they were out of control. And then their actions or their behavior didn't reflect what they really felt or meant once they calmed down. Most of the time, when you feel out of control, you're caught off guard. You're in a state of surprise. So if you don't have a plan, you're really vulnerable to do things that you regret. The secret to managing being out of control might surprise you. It's learning to control how you respond to being out of control, but not in the way you might think. Often when people feel out of control, they try to assert more control. Think about the boss who micromanages, the parent who hovers, or the perfectionist who overcorrects. These are sincere attempts to regain control, but they often backfire and send unintended messages. Does the boss really want their employee to think they're incompetent? Does the hovering parent really intend to say to the child, without me, you can't work things out? In reality, these types of responses stem from feeling out of control, but you can do better. It may sound obvious, but accepting that being out of control is part of the human experience is essential. Think about that. If you understand that as life unfolds, the unpredictable is going to happen, you are going to be caught off guard. Then it just makes sense to put a little bit of effort, a little bit of thought into what to do when these moments happen. So let me share with you a process that you can employ anywhere that costs nothing. The first step is that you need to notice when you feel out of control. That may sound obvious, but most of the time when you feel out of control, you're just doing your life, not looking for something to happen that you didn't expect, and whammo, it happens. Your anxiety, which might have been low, all of a sudden becomes high. Let me give you an example. Let's say you arrive at work one day and you learn that there's going to be a major reorganization in your department. In an instant, your job that felt so secure the day before feels threatened. Your body tenses, your stomach feels nauseous, your knees weaken, and you're flooded with anger and fear. You start to imagine the worst. You wonder how will you pay your mortgage? Can your kids still go to private school? You know how this goes. This is just how you react to unexpected events: feeling out of control. Or maybe it's not work. Maybe you and your child are having the dreaded, I want a cell phone conversation. And out of nowhere, your child says, I hate you. You are trying to ruin my life. Notice, what does your body do in that moment? Does it tense up? Do you respond with an equally intense verbal zinger maybe you freeze. Another example is maybe you have a loved one struggling with addiction. This is a long term intense experience of being out of control. You want them so badly to stay clean, to stay sober, but it's their recovery, not yours. And during the day, you do a pretty good job keeping your mind off of it. You keep yourself busy. You're at work, you're doing stuff around the house, but once you get into bed at night, You become overwhelmed with your fear about your loved one's recovery. And you begin to think about, wait, when I talked to them on the phone today, did they sound drunk? Did they sound high? And then you begin to ruminate and ruminate. And before you know it, you're not sleeping. You are overthinking. If this is a problem check out episode 86 on overthinking. There's so many ways that you can feel out of control, but whatever triggers you feeling out of control, the strategy will be the same. I guess that's kind of good news. The first thing you want to do is notice and name. This sounds simple, but think about it. When you're threatened, your body's going to shift into fight, flight, or freeze. In an instant, you're on high alert. you're not going to have access unless you have a plan of what to do in that moment. That plan is being able to recognize when your body is on high alert. Your heart rate may increase, your body's tense, your mind races. Being able to recognize when your body is in this state is key to moving through the anxiety and the stress in a healthy way. Again, the whole goal is to get your mind to a clear place. So you will not do or say anything that you regret. Think of your body's reaction as a warning sign. Danger ahead. Proceed with caution. If you don't realize how vulnerable you are in these moments, you're at risk of saying or doing something you're going to regret. When you're out of control, you can feel unsafe, afraid, and powerless. It's not unusual to turn these vulnerable emotions into anger. Anger makes us feel powerful, but in most cases, anger is not the best reaction to any situation when we feel out of control. Actually, it often worsens the situation. Step one is noticing and naming. I feel out of control. Step two is slowing everything down so you can re regulate your body. This is what helps us move from fight, flight, freeze to a calmer place. Your only job in this moment is to bring your body back to a calmer state. I call it tame. You gotta notice and name it. I feel out of control. And then you have to tame it. How? I think it's really important that you find what works for you. You only need one or two reliable methods in order to calm your body. What you're basically trying to do is get your heart rate and your breathing calmed down. The two simplest ways to do this are breath work and going for a walk. The great news is they're both free. You're not trying to solve the problem what you're trying to do is calm your body down so your mind can have clarity. Then you can begin to work on the problem. Do simple breath work. Put your awareness on your breath, and just follow your breath. For 30 seconds or a minute, go out for a brisk walk or do my favorite technique. Sit in a chair, put your hands on your heart. Ground your feet, and just breathe until you feel your body calm down and relax. I think it's helpful to look at the parallel process of when your body gets physically startled. Let's say you're at home watching TV or doing the dishes and all of a sudden you hear a loud crash. Your body is going to startle. What your body automatically does in that situation is take a couple deep breaths. It's the same process when we find ourselves internally out of control. We need to re regulate, take a few breaths, and then we're going to be in a better place to figure out how to move through whatever's happened that's making us feel out of control. Remember, notice, name it, I'm out of control, tame it, Simple breath work or walk. Let me share an example. A few years ago, a client came to her session just minutes after finding out that her husband was having an affair. Naturally, she was angry, overwhelmed and consumed with fear for her future. She sat on my couch and she felt completely out of control. She was full of anger and catastrophizing. Everything she said was valid. After listening for a while, I said to her, everything you're saying needs to be said, but I'd like you to just take a few seconds and ground yourself and help your body relax and get to a little bit better place. Because she'd been in therapy, she knew what worked for her. I could see her. Move her awareness to her feet, close her eyes, and then she began to tap on her thighs. That's a method that I have taught many of the clients that I've worked with over the years. As she tapped on her thighs, initially, she was tapping out of anger. But after about 30 seconds, her tapping softened and calmed down. And then in another minute or so, she began to cry. That deep, deep sobbing cry. Then she hugged herself and she rocked back and forth. After about a minute or so, she looked up at me, mascara all over her face. And she said, What the fuck does this mean? Now that is mental clarity. Often feeling out of control forces you to face what you assumed or believed is no longer true. That's why being out of control can be so difficult. Humans like things that are predictable. And when something upends that, it is deeply difficult. And it will often require you to do inner work you didn't sign up for. In my client's case, it was significant inner work that she and her husband had to face over the next 18 months. But sometimes we feel out of control in simpler situations, like a child yelling, I hate you, clarity may come from realizing that the child's yelling because he's hungry, tired, or feeling left out at school. When you learn to notice and name your feelings of being out of control, you're going to be able to handle these moments in healthier, more direct ways. This will allow you to have more mental clarity, so you can have better outcomes. In this episode, I've encouraged you to learn how to notice and name when you feel out of control. Start by recognizing how your body reacts, how your mind might spiral into catastrophizing, being angry or blaming, because all of these can lead to actions that you regret. After you notice and name, Move to taming your response by calming your central nervous system, allowing you to think more clearly. Thanks for listening. I'll be back on Thursday with a follow up episode, exploring how challenging the thought, this shouldn't be happening can drastically reduce how often you feel out of control. In the meantime, your inner challenge is to write down how your body and mind respond when you feel out of control. Be specific. When I feel out of control, my body does. When I feel out of control, my mind thinks. This will deepen your understanding and more importantly, will allow you to gain control in that early period when the overwhelm can be at its worst. So notice and name. This is your inner challenge.