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.
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.
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW
In this episode, you'll discover how to transform your shopping anxiety into holiday peace and calm. 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. Welcome to the podcast. It's the most wonderful time of the year, or is it? In this season of shopping, do you find yourself anxious and full of dread? Maybe you're on a tight budget, or you hate all the decisions about what to buy people, or the overconsumption at this time of year makes you feel guilty and Grinch like. In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the science behind shopping anxiety and how to outsmart it. I'm going to give you Some simple strategies to stick to your budget so you transform your inner Grinch into Santa Claus. I know people think baseball is America's pastime, but let's be honest, it's shopping. Remember what President Bush summoned Americans to do after 9 11? Yep, go shopping. And here we are, in December, which is basically the Super Bowl of shopping. If you love shopping, feel free to listen to episode 81. But if shopping makes you anxious and fills you with dread, Stay tuned. Interestingly, the science of shopping is actually fairly helpful in bringing calm to this holiday season. Maybe your anxiety around shopping is triggered by the crowds, the noise, and all the stimulation, in the stores. Your brain is on sensory overload and shifts into fight or flight, triggering stress hormones like cortisol, upping your anxiety. What's the solution? Use grounding and breath work and try to plan your trips to the stores when they're not crowded and you're not tired, try to streamline your visit by having a list in hand. Trust yourself and have time limits that set you up for success. Better to have two short trips than one marathon that wears you out. Maybe you've given up on stores and do most of your shopping online, which of course triggers decision fatigue as the black hole of the internet sucks you in. The science of decision fatigue is quite interesting. The prefrontal cortex, the CEO of your brain, actually becomes overworked from having to make too many choices, leading to less willpower and impaired decision making. Something we really don't want in a season where many decisions have to be made. The other day I wanted to buy my family new Christmas stockings. 90 minutes later, I was blurry eyed, frustrated, and walked away from the computer deciding that my three decade old stockings can last one more year. I really didn't need a neuroscientist to tell me that those intense and rapid dopamine hits were going to leave me irritated. If you suffer from this, lean into the science and follow the 20 20 20 rule. Every 20 minutes you're on the computer, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Want to increase your online productivity decrease crabbiness? Get up every 30 minutes and walk around. This gives your body and brain a rest. Lean into the science. Maybe the challenge for you when it comes to shopping is it pushes your perfectionism button. You so want to find the perfect gift for that perfect someone. Or sometimes you wanna find that perfect gift for that judgy relative. Ask yourself, is your drive for perfection because you want that person to delight in what you're giving them, or is the driver for your perfectionism that you wanna impress or avoid a judgment by that person. Do you see the difference? Those times that you are a Christmas angel and you really want to do something very special for someone you love, go ahead, have fun. But notice if your drive for perfectionism is because you don't want to be judged or you want to show off to other people. This is shopping that is more driven by fear and judgment than by joy and love. I encourage you to befriend your fear and your judgment. Ground yourself and sit with it. Just allow your mind to hold these thoughts that you're having of wanting to impress or wanting to not be judged. And then ask yourself, is this really the truth? Is it the whole truth? Is it nothing but the truth? I've actually done this many times with clients in my office and the best Response I've ever heard from such a contemplation was one of my clients who said, I should be giving this person a piece of coal. What am I thinking? Perhaps like many, your anxiety around shopping may be your budget or lack of budget this holiday season. If you have a limited budget, as you go into the season of spending, this is activating your brain survival mechanism. It's triggering anxiety as it perceives financial insecurity as a threat to your basic needs. That may sound a little dramatic. But just think about it. What happens inside of you every time you spend money you don't have? Your body is actually sending a warning and that warning is anxiety. Let's face the truth about the holidays. They are a part time job that you pay for. Actually, when it comes to the holidays and budget, let's begin there. If you accept that the holidays are a part time job that you pay for, you will automatically make a mindset shift. Let me break this up into two parts. First, all jobs take time, and it can be really helpful to schedule your new part time job hours. In my first 10 years as a therapist, my clients regressed in the month of December. What most did was tack on this part time job to all their other duties. Doing this will make you dreary and weary, not merry and bright. So take five minutes and schedule in when you will dedicate time to get your shopping done. Here are two hacks. One, it is not against the law to take a half day off to do your shopping. Hack number two. Midlife Woman Alert. You don't need to do the shopping all on your own. In your 20s and your 30s, that might have been fun, but by the time you add a house and kids to the holidays, you need some help. Check out my episode 87 Chore Wars. In that episode, I share with you a practical way to make this part time job a job share. While you are making dedicated time for shopping, I invite you to look at your calendar and reschedule anything that can be rescheduled in December, such as dentist and doctor's appointments, oil changes, et cetera. And to make a soft pledge to yourself that next December you'll try to have it be appointment free. Last year a client of mine who has a monthly lunch with her friend called her up and said, I really can't do lunch unless you want to join me and do online shopping. They did. It was so much fun that they're going to make it an annual event. The point is. You need to figure out how to make time for this part time job unless someone is gifting you a few more hours each day. Now the second part. You are paying for this part time job, so you actually get to set a salary. Of course, this is a reverse salary, which makes it even more important that you set a salary for this holiday season. Some people call it a budget. Remember this our economy depends on you to do your part this time of year, and it is doing everything in its power to get you to spend and spend and spend. Understand your brain is in collusion with the economy. Shopping activates the brain's reward system, releasing dopamine, which creates a temporary feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. If you don't set a reverse salary, this part time job will be very pleasurable in December and a nightmare in January. Start your New Year's resolution today and write down what you can comfortably afford to spend this holiday season. You need to write this down. It can't just be an airy thought that floats through your brain. For example, This year your budget says I can spend 250 on Christmas or 500 or whatever it is for you. Write it down and look at it. Then I would encourage you to use an app to track your spending. I use the app called Gift List. This will help you keep track of your spending and help you remember what you have bought helping you stay on top of your part time job. Don't play hide and seek with what you have spent. Have it in a place that you can easily access it. Remember, Santa is watching. It is hard to not have the money you wished you could have to spend on those you love. We've grown up with the idea that this is the season to give and to have limits can be difficult to really accept and grow into. But ask yourself this question. Would you want your family, your friends, your loved ones, or your work colleagues to spend money on you that they don't have? If your lack of money breaks your heart, let me offer a couple obvious suggestions. Consider the gift of service. I have loved hearing some of my friends and clients suggestions over the years. Babysitting. Reorganizing a sibling's pantry. I would love that. Or walking their neighbor's dog while they're at work. I know these all seem quaint, but they are very special gifts. This leads me to another type of shopping anxiety. The anxiety connecting to the real cost of overconsumption. Personally, I find this anxiety a bit brutal. Because our economy depends on us spending at this time of the year. But the planet needs us to consume resources more wisely. What to do? If your shopping anxiety is rooted in this, follow your conscience this holiday season and give the gift of service. Make a meal, offer to wrap gifts for that busy household. I had a client who walked her nephew's home from school two days a week for a semester. This gave her sister not only an extra 30 minutes at work, but she didn't have to wake her baby up from daycare. Now that is a gift that keeps on giving. In this episode, I've encouraged you to make the holidays brighter by understanding your shopping anxiety so you can create a plan where instead of shopping until you drop, you savor the spree and have it be stress free. I've outlined the causes of shopping anxiety, the science behind them, and some practical hacks. So your brain doesn't hijack you during the holiday season. Inner challenge for the week is to identify one area of shopping stress and commit to a simple strategy to make it more manageable. Maybe that means setting a budget. Shopping during quieter hours or rethinking your gift giving approach. I'll be back on Thursday to follow up on this Inner Challenge and to discuss shopping as a meditative experience. I'm not kidding. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm.
