Ep. 115 Overcome Fear and Anxiety & FINALLY Achieve Your New Years Resolutions With This Surprising Coping Skill In Midlife

What if the real reason you struggle with New Year’s resolutions isn’t a lack of willpower? 

In this episode you’ll discover:

1. Why fear of failure-not willpower- sabotages your goal and how to break free this New  Year

2. Practical tools to sit with discomfort, rewire your brain, and turn fear into possibility.

3. A way to visualize your success through “mental movies,” a powerful technique to build confidence and clarity and decrease your anxiety.

 Listen now to learn how befriending your anxiety can unlock the energy and focus you need to crush your goals this 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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M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover how to face your anxiety about failure and set yourself up for success with your goals for the new year 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. I'm dedicating the month of January to making progress on your top new year's resolutions. I'm starting with the biggest obstacle in even setting a goal. Your anxiety about failure. If you set a goal, you must be able to face failure head on. You might like the idea of change, but when you think about losing weight, exercising more or getting control of your phone, three of the top New Year's resolutions, your anxiety spikes. Your thoughts race to, oh, I can never make these kinds of changes. And before you know it, you're binging on Netflix, doom scrolling, or eating ice cream. These are the exact things that you wish you could resolve to change. In your mind, you might think you're the culprit. But the reason you failed in the past, or didn't even set a goal, isn't because of you. It's because your anxiety has been setting you up to fail. Before you try to lose weight or even lift the first dumbbell, I want you to face the anxiety that sends you untrue messages and sidetracks you from moving ahead with your goals. This New Year's, you resolve to face anxiety head on. Doing so could give you more mental and physical energy to make real and lasting changes. In this episode, I'll define anxiety, help you understand the cycle of anxiety so you can identify triggers, a practical way to intervene. Instead of avoiding anxiety, you can learn to befriend it. Helping you rewire your brain and regain mental clarity and energy. This will set the stage for lifestyle changes that can help you feel healthy and more productive in this new year. Anxiety is a natural response to stress or perceived danger. Your body is wired to protect you. In order to manage anxiety, you need a practical way to assess if it's real. For example, imagine walking into your house and smelling gas. Your body's alert system is engaged. You feel afraid. Your heart races, maybe your palms even get sweaty, and your mind wonders, did someone leave the burner on? Is my house going to blow up? You check and you find, yes, someone left the burner on. Your anxiety goes down because there was a real threat and you responded to it. You automatically take a few breaths and calm your nervous system. Good job, body and mind. What a team. Threat aborted. This type of anxiety is real. And you want to have the skills to face it head on. But the kind of anxiety that causes problems is when you feel a perceived threat, but are actually safe. For instance, Your boss emails you asking for a meeting or you want to set a goal of losing weight this year. In these situations, your body responds in the same way as if you smelled gas. Danger! Danger! your palms get sweaty, you feel afraid, maybe even panicked, and your thoughts begin to spin stories of terror. If my boss wants to see me, I bet I'm getting fired or I could never lose weight. I'm such a failure. Neither of these scenarios is true, but your anxiety perceives them as threats, which kicks off the cycle of anxiety. What is the cycle of anxiety? The cycle of anxiety begins with a trigger that causes fear, worry, and often judgment. This leads to avoidance as a coping mechanism. Avoidance provides temporary relief but reinforces your brain's fear response, actually making you more anxious, not less. This is a key insight. You avoid to not feel anxious. But the avoidance actually tells your brain, this thought, this situation is so bad I can't even stay with it for more than a few seconds. Over time, this habit of avoiding anxiety strengthens anxiety, making it harder to break the cycle. Noticing the pattern, I feel afraid, thus I avoid the cycle. is the first step to facing your anxiety. Let's say, this new year, you want to lose weight. Just the thought of it causes your anxiety to spike. Your mind, in a nanosecond, recalls all the times that you failed. You're flooded with emotion. And you immediately move from the possibility of losing weight to the certainty of failure. To escape these thoughts Yes, you turn to your phone, scrolling. Yes, the phone, the great distractor. I get it. You've tried many times to lose weight, and those failures loom so large in your psyche that today, even the thought of trying again makes you feel threatened by the fear of failure. Or maybe you want to start exercising, but as you look online at possible routines, your anxiety flares. What if I can't stick with it? What if I injure myself? And of course the intense judgment. Why didn't I start exercising years ago? These thoughts cause your fear to grow, leaving you feel so uncomfortable. Of course, avoidance steps in. Be gentle with your avoidance. Up until now, it's the best that you've been able to do. But with a little bit of information, and effort, What does better look like? It means intervening in the cycle of anxiety to break it. You do this by first noticing when you feel anxious. Could be your ruminating thoughts. It could be the tension in your body. It could be your armpits sweating. You also do this by noticing Anxiety's unhelpful little buddy, avoidance. In the short term, avoidance gives you relief. But if you want to set a goal for the new year, whether it's to exercise, lose weight, meditate, or outsmart your smartphone, you'll need to befriend your anxiety. What? Yes. You'll need to sit with those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. I can't lose weight. I can't possibly exercise. I can't manage my phone better. And build up a tolerance for the very thing that scares you and makes you feel like a failure. The only way I know to face your anxiety is to face your anxiety. Let yourself imagine the unimaginable. I want to lose weight, exercise, or achieve whatever goal it is. Ground your feet, put your hands where the discomfort is on your body, And run a mental movie of you attempting this goal. Trust me, this will make you feel uncomfortable, but you are sitting with your discomfort instead of distracting or avoiding it. And that means you are headed in a healthier direction. I did this recently with a client who's working on her fear of exercise. I asked her to sit with the fear in her mind for as long as she could. She closed her eyes, And two seconds later she said, I can't do this. Further words, she once again grounded her feet, closed her eyes, took a breath, and sat with her fear for about 20 seconds. She then opened her eyes and said, This is really uncomfortable. I said, I know, but you're doing it. Once again, she closed her eyes. And for the next 60 seconds, I could see her breathing move from rapid to much calmer. She opened her eyes and she said, I can kind of see myself walking down the block. I said, that's great. Can you do it again? Once again, grounded her feet, closed her eyes. And this time she stayed with her fear for about 90 seconds. She opened her eyes and she said, I can see myself walking down the sidewalk where nobody would notice me. Nobody would judge me. That's what I need. I said, that's great. What I want you to do is I want you to see yourself walking down the sidewalk and I want you to practice not judging yourself. She went back to creating this mental movie in her mind of her walking down the sidewalk and trying really hard to not be judgy. Nothing shuts us down as much as judgment, our own judgment, as well as that of others. After about 90 seconds, she opened her eyes and she said to me, Wow, I think I can do this. And I don't I have to ask myself to walk a mile. She looked at me and she said, I don't feel as afraid. Mental movies work best if you allow yourself to do them in sets of three, adding more details and more clarity each set. I asked her to run this mental movie three times a day and encouraged her to try it in the shower where the warm water often relaxes us and opens our minds up to possibility. She laughed and she said, so by the next time I see you, I will have walked 54 blocks in my mind, and I said, you got it. If you can't imagine it, you can't do it. At our next session, she had walked outside twice and practiced daily in her mind, both the most she had ever done in her life. She faced her fear by not giving into avoidance or distraction, But by sitting with the discomfort of anxiety, anxiety is uncomfortable. That's why the coping skill of avoidance is so attractive. In most cases, avoidance isn't the healthy alternative. What is facing our anxiety and holding it, befriending it and learning that we can build the muscle of sitting with discomfort. Like many people I work with, you might've heard the two biggest myths of anxiety. The first is, think positive, which, if you think about it, is just another form of avoidance. Like my client, you'll move through your fear and your mind will shift to what is possible. If you're able to sit with the negative and give it time to open up to what is possible for you, this way you slowly grow into the positive from the inside out. The second myth, which is a real favorite, is that you wouldn't feel anxious if things outside of you were different. You would be able to exercise in a gym if gyms weren't so expensive. You would be able to lose weight if you didn't have to travel for work. Again, this is another form of avoidance, finding blame out there, instead of stepping into the challenge and the reality I don't have money to spend on exercise, what are some free options? I do have to travel. But how can I eat healthier on the road? Don't give away your agency to these types of thoughts. They're avoidance wearing t shirts of blame. Trust me, there's no one I have ever worked with that's made progress who hasn't said to me, I can't do this. My response is never, Oh, yes you can, because that would just be colluding with their avoidance. Instead, what I ask them to do is sit with their fear, befriend it. Just like I explained earlier, I've done this 10, 000 times with clients and probably 100, 000 times with myself. What happens when you sit with your anxiety and your fear of failure? For is you begin to build the muscle of uncertainty. You train your brain to shift from the habit of avoidance to a new neural pathway of possibility. You also give your body a chance to move from the heightened state of anxiety to a more relaxed state, which almost magically opens up new thoughts. Maybe I can do this. How can I do this in a way that works for me? Not the person on Instagram, not my best friend, but me. In this episode, we've explored how anxiety influences New Year's resolutions and how the cycle of avoidance can hinder progress. By understanding the nature of anxiety and recognizing its patterns. You can stop it from sabotaging your goals. Remember, facing anxiety isn't eliminating it, it's about befriending it, giving it clarity and energy so you can make meaningful changes. So, I encourage you to take on this week's Inner Challenge. Run a mental movie of one of your goals for this year, face your fear, and imagine yourself being able to do it. Thanks for listening to Creating Midlife Calm and I'll be back on Thursday to share the most important tool you'll need once you've set your goal.