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 (2)
In this episode, you will learn proven strategies to help you deal with obstacles that get in the way of successfully losing weight. 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 Thursday and I'm following up on Monday's episode where I shared five hacks to help you lose weight. Your inner challenge was to reflect and start implementing those hacks to set yourself up for success. To recap, visualize your success daily, choose an attainable goal, decide what one or two favorite foods you won't give up and how to include them in your food plan, accept that present suffering of giving up certain foods is worth achieving your future goals, and remember that exercise is not the key to weight loss. It's what you put in your mouth. If you're listening today, you're probably on a weight loss journey or you're thinking about starting one. In this episode, I'll share some of the common obstacles my clients have faced when trying to lose weight and the strategies and coping skills we've come up with to help overcome them. Remember, weight loss is a gradual process. Just like it took time to gain weight, it does take time to lose it. Challenges will come up, but preparation and planning can really make the difference as you stay with this goal to lose weight this year. So let's look at some common obstacles. Obstacle number one, forgetting you're on a weight loss journey. Of course you forget you're on a weight loss journey. This is just another version of not really noticing you're putting on weight. Let's admit it. All of us in this culture are drowning in a sea of food, so don't be so hard on yourself if you mindlessly popped a brownie bite into your mouth. Have you ever seen a group photo from the 1950s? Very few people are overweight. Did they have more willpower than you? I think not. The environment they lived in didn't supersize everything and offer delicious food at every turn. Your losing weight has less to do with willpower than want power. If you want to lose weight, you have to create ways to remind yourself because our economy depends on you overeating. So you have to figure out how to outsmart the economy. Sounds hard, but once you get in the rhythm, it really isn't. Here's tip number one to help you remember that you are trying to lose weight. Weigh yourself. You might be saying, I hate to weigh myself. Yeah, you and everyone else, myself included. But the only way to remember that you're on a weight loss journey, is to befriend the scale. Research shows that weekly weigh ins help you stay aware and motivated. Here are two other simple ways to remind yourself that you want to lose weight. Plan out what you will eat for breakfast. Keep it very simple and in line with the food plan that you've chosen, but don't let yourself skip it. You know there's a lot of science out there that shows the value of a healthy breakfast. what I have learned from the majority of my clients who coffeed their way until lunch is making, often forcing, themselves to eat breakfast was a mental game changer. Years ago I worked with a woman in midlife who over three years lost 220 pounds. When people said to her, how did you lose all that weight? She said, I started every day with a banana. And that reminded me that I was changing my eating habits. The other coping skill to help you remember you are losing weight is to bring someone on the journey with you. Programs such as Weight Watchers and Noom are an example of this. I have worked with couples who've lost weight together and most of my clients share their weight loss journey with a trusted friend or professional. At first, this is hard because the hardest part of losing weight is that you know you're going to fail. Yes, I don't mean fail in the long run, but no one can eat perfectly every day. And that's the beauty of having a confident, someone who can help you strategize and work through what got in the way of you staying on the path to losing weight, that particular day, that particular vacation, that particular meal. if you begin to really integrate and accept that losing weight is really a learning process, then every brownie bite is becomes a catalyst for good change, not shame and regret. Obstacle number two in your weight loss journey, not having enough time or money. How often have you said, I don't have enough time to lose weight. This is probably the most common reason people give me who are struggling with weight loss. Yet, the average person spends four to five hours a day on their phone outside of work. What if you used just one of those hours to plan meals and prep food? At first, food prep is such a hassle. One client told me she just hated it the first few weeks, but by week six it had become part of her routine. And by week eight, it was second nature. I encourage people to integrate their phone, into food prep and cooking. Choose a podcast or music that you only listen to when you're doing these tasks of losing weight. Thus, you're pairing something you don't like with something you do like, and the pain is so much less. As for money, here is one of my favorite stories from the couch. I was working with a woman who gained a lot of weight after her mother died. She had healed significantly from the grief and desperately wanted to lose the weight. Her husband, who tracked the family finances, said, switching over to all those healthy foods, the produce, going organic would cost too much. One week, she brought him into her appointment because they were having a lot of fights around this issue. I suggested that they run their own in home experiment. For three months, they track their food bills as they currently eat, And then as a family, changed for three months to the way she would like to eat so she could lose weight. The husband loved this idea. He was a man who loved data and spreadsheets, and this was right up his alley. Plus, he was quite certain that this would prove his point. six months later, the husband came into my office, with the spreadsheets and he said Their food costs had gone down 27 percent and he had lost 30 pounds. You might ask how could anyone's food cost go down 27 percent because they had significantly decreased how often they ate out and when they went out to eat they made healthier choices less alcohol Less appetizers and fewer desserts. As you can imagine, he was overjoyed with the results, but his wife was miffed because in the same time period, he had lost more weight than her. Which leads me to obstacle number three, navigating menopause. Menopause is a beast. It can really feel like an unfair hurdle in your weight loss journey.
The hormonal changes in menopause
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slow your metabolism, increase your fat storage, and lead to muscle loss. It's so frustrating, but it's not impossible to overcome. First, talk to your doctor and understand how menopause is affecting your body and get resources to help. It's really exciting right now because there seems to be a wave of education, podcasts, and books if you're in midlife, you can really become educated. With a little bit of education, one thing you will come to know is how you eat in midlife is incredibly important. Consider using an app like YUKA, Y U K A. It's this handy little app that you can take into the grocery store or into your cupboards and scan the barcodes of any food item and it will give you a ranking from 0 to 100 of how healthy that food item is and lots of information about the particulars of each item. You might be surprised, like I was, that the meatballs I bought at Costco had a really bad rating. But the app recommended that I shift to Mama Mancini's, and those were rated as good. Super easy change, and it lets you lean into what your body needs in menopause, and that's healthier food. Another menopausal hack is to do regular strength training. There are programs galore on the internet or you can follow my lead after 14 years of avoiding this I finally got my butt down to our local Y and I joined the body pump class. I'm not gonna lie, I don't really like the hour, but I'm choosing to suffer in the present so I can have the success of feeling better long term. And I know, as someone who has osteopenia, that I really have to take care of this part of my wellness. Lastly, with menopause comes lots of sleep issues. Nothing like poor sleep gets in the way of losing weight. It is really imperative that you keep trying to figure out what can help you get better. at least seven hours of sleep a night. Work with your doctor. If you are not getting enough sleep due to menopause, I feel your pain. I literally slept like a baby my whole life until menopause and then I slept like a parent with a baby. Check out episode 93 where I share five sleep hacks, but if those don't work Go to your doctor, rule out sleep apnea, consider HRT and other medication, come up with a good exercise plan, neurofeedback, a helpful tool in menopause that many people don't even know about. But guess what? Losing weight and eating healthy will most likely improve your sleep. So don't let menopause be an obstacle. Let it be a guide for updating your wellness habits so you feel better. Obstacle number four, using food as emotional comfort if you use food to soothe and protect yourself. Losing weight can be uniquely tricky. the clients I have worked with who lost weight didn't come to me for weight loss. They came to me to heal from trauma and loss. As they learned new coping skills, they naturally began to want to create a new relationship with food. They wanted food to give them energy and fuel for the day. Not To soothe, protect, and Numb. If this is your story, I invite you to work with a therapist on the underlying trauma or loss because you may see that working with these issues will lead you in a natural way to wanting to create a new relationship with. Also, if you find your anxiety increasing during your weight loss journey and your thoughts becoming more rigid, such as thinking of food as good or bad, or not being able to let go of the number on the scale, or being overly critical of yourself when you have a lapse and mindlessly eat chips, I encourage you to consider working with a therapist. This type of anxiety that often surfaces when someone tries to lose weight may be in the OCD family. And with a competent professional, you can gain tools loss healthy. In this episode, I shared common obstacles and strategies to help your weight loss journey be successful. Weight loss isn't easy, but neither is weight gain. What do you want? No judgment. If this is the time in your life you want to lose weight, go for it and expect obstacles. In today's episode, I shared with you four common obstacles: forgetting your goal to lose weight, feeling short on time or money, navigating menopause, and using food as emotional comfort. By preparing for these challenges and addressing them with compassion and curiosity, you can create a plan that works for you. Take a moment to reflect on the obstacles standing in your way and which strategies from today's episode resonate the most with you. Thanks for listening. And I'll be back on Monday, creating more midlife calm.
