Ep.114 The 6 Minute Year End Review: That Will Change Your Life & Decrease Midlife Stress & Anxiety

Have you ever stopped to celebrate what you’ve done right this year to decrease anxiety and increase calm?

 In this episode, a six- minute reflection will help you :

1.Discover how reflecting on small, intentional changes can significantly decrease your stress levels and increase your mental clarity.

2. Evaluate your coping strategies by their effectiveness, time investment, and impact on  your well-being.

3.     Gain practical insights for setting achievable and meaningful goals for the New Year based on what truly works for you.

Press play now to uncover the tools you already have and prepare for a calmer, more intentional New Year.

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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 Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll reflect on the coping skills you used this year to decrease anxiety and increase your 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. In this episode, we'll be focusing on the coping skills and strategies that helped you decrease stress. We're going to uncover valuable insights about what works for you, as well as explore how to build on those successes in this upcoming new year. I love the week between Christmas and New Year's. It just seems like everything slows down. I hope it's that way for you. I hope it's a chance for you to catch your breath, enjoy some slower days, and spend some quality time with your loved ones. Whether you're doing puzzles, watching movies, or just recovering from the holiday rush, I hope this moment finds you well. In this special In Between space, I invite you to join me for a six minute year end review. Yep, six minutes. Together, we'll take a thoughtful look at what worked for you this year. Grab a piece of paper and a pen, or your computer, or talk into your phone, and let's reflect on what you did right this year. Step one, I want you to identify the coping skills that helped you decrease your anxiety and increase your calm this year. I'm going to give you 90 seconds to write down what were the three coping skills or strategies that you use to decrease your stress. Let me give you a little warning. Often, when we begin to ask ourselves what we did better, our brain still remains our brain and it's helpful to remind ourselves that the brain loves the negative. If you begin this 90 second reflection with what you didn't do, allow yourself to be patient and move your mind to what you did do well this year. Remember the goal in this podcast is to decrease anxiety and increase calm. We're looking for progress, not perfection. So maybe you said no more often. Maybe you meditated for two or three months this year, or you started to take a walk for 30 minutes at lunch. It doesn't matter if you stuck with the habit the entire year, what's important is that you stop, give yourself 90 seconds, and reflect on, what did I do that helped me feel better? let's move to step two. We're going to get a little math y. I call this add or subtract. I want you to look at the three coping skills you just wrote down and ask yourself this question. Did this skill involve me adding something to my life or subtracting something from my life? For example, Adding, take a walk every day, practice mindful breathing when you filled up your water bottle, or maybe you were really anxious and instead of eating a cookie, you grounded your feet, put your hands over your heart and breathed through the anxiety. Those are all examples of coping skills that ask us to do something. A coping skill that asks us to subtract might be saying no to a board position, coaching a team, or taking an extra project on at work. You would say no because you know adding that would increase your stress. Maybe subtracting is, I'm not going to have a second cup of coffee in the morning, subtracting it actually decreases your stress. Take about 60 seconds and just note, is this a coping skill that asks you to add or subtract Step 3. We're going to focus on time and impact. Continuing with my math theme, I want you to think about how much daily time did this coping skill require? Again, we're not looking for perfection. If you did a coping skill that you thought, wow, I did that for two weeks, it was really helpful. Look at how much time did that coping skill take on the day or the days that you did it. Now let's look at impact. Look at that coping skill and in your own way, quantify how helpful it was to you. You can use ABCD, you can use 1 to 5, whatever you want to use look at impact. Step 4. What did you like about that coping skill? And here's the million dollar question. Did you like the process of doing it? Or did you like the results? Or did you like both? Take a minute and answer that question. I recently walked a client of mine through this process and here's her summary. Coping skill number one was she stopped drinking caffeine after lunch. That habit cost her no extra time and she loved the results because she slept better. And she was able to do it about 90 percent of her days. That is a great coping skill. Coping skill number two. was that she would get up from her computer every hour and walk around. When she reflected on this habit, she realized a couple very interesting things. This coping skill, she did 50 percent of the time It took about six minutes at the most each day that she did it. But what was interesting is as she went through this process and she reflected on it, she realized that not only was her anxiety less, but her compulsiveness about pushing, pushing, pushing herself at work had also decreased dramatically. Took her six minutes a day when she did it, really brought her much more benefit than she had realized. Her last coping skill was that for two months before she left work, she did a breathing meditation. in order to separate work from home. As she moved through this reflection, what she realized was doing the breathing meditation in the office would often get sabotaged because she was still at work and she would start it and then people would come in and interrupt her. She saw the benefit. It took three minutes. She typically did it three times a week, but she was only able to keep it up for two months. So she naturally leaned into a solution. She said, geez, I just need to do this in my car, not in my office. And right there, she began to think about something she could do in the new years to decrease her anxiety and increase her calm. This is a reminder that these small intentional changes can actually add up to big improvements when it comes to helping you manage your stress and anxiety. In this episode, you reflected on the coping skills and strategies that you've used this year to decrease your stress and increase your calm. With a little bit of reflection, a little bit of time, you can listen to yourself and lean into what works for you. Next week, I'm going to start a month long series on New Year's resolutions, and this reflection is actually the foundation that I encourage people to use in order to choose resolutions that will be highly effective and doable. Research tells us that using coping skills that are easy and small to implement as well as those that we enjoy are the best resolutions that we can carry on into the new year. Don't worry if you've done resolutions before and you haven't been able to carry them. I see resolutions. as just an intention to try to do a little bit better. It's fine if they only last for six or eight weeks, because when people are mindful, then they can look back and say, Oh, why am I not doing this? And make the adjustment, just as my client did when she went through this process. If you want less stress, let's build from what you're doing right as we head into the new years. That's the spirit I'm going to bring into the new year and I'm excited to help you create more Midlife Calm.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW (2) 11:47

Thanks for listening

Built-in Microphone 11:48

I'll be back on Monday.