Ep.131 5 Simple Words That Will Transform Stress, Anxiety & Chaos Into Calm, To Make Better Midlife Decisions

Feeling  overwhelmed by anxiety?
Discover  five powerful words that can help you move from chaos to calm and help you  make better decisions in your daily life.
In this episode, you’ll discover
1. How to recognize and shift from mental chaos or rigidity to a state of calm flow.
2. Discover actionable steps to re-regulate your body and observe your mind for           better  emotional control and decision making.
3. Hear real-life examples of how the FACES framework transforms anxious reactions into  actions aligned with your desires and values.
Press play now to learn how to regain clarity, avoid regrets, and stay aligned with your values using the FACES model.

Check out this awesome one pager that summarizes this episode:
https://mjmurrayvachon.com/podcast-1/

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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 discover five words that will help you shift from feeling overwhelmed to feeling mentally clear so you can make great decisions in life, avoid regrets and maximize opportunities. 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 here to follow up on Monday's episode where I shared a simple tool to help you stop your anxiety from spiraling out of control. How'd you do with Monday's Inner Challenge? I discussed, Noticing, naming, and taming your anxiety to prevent it from taking over. I also introduced to you Dr. Siegel's image of mental wellness, highlighting how observing your mind can be a powerful tool for managing your anxiety. In today's episode, I'm going to build on those skills by introducing FACES. Flexibility, Adaptive, Coherence, Energized, and Stable. Five key words that can help you shift from feeling overwhelmed to feeling mentally clear. These words can guide you to make decisions aligned with your values, helping you to avoid regrets and helping you step into opportunities that come your way and not let anxiety block you. How'd you do on noticing naming and taming your anxiety? Perhaps you left a meeting feeling anxious, but managed to ground yourself as you were walking back to your office, taking calming breaths. Or maybe you experienced a near miss while driving, anxious reaction at the next stoplight, and took a moment to breathe. These are examples of how you are capable of bringing calm to your body, anytime, anywhere. One of my clients shared an insightful experience yesterday. She told me, I often forget to do this in the moment, but when the anxiety lingers, I still find this practice helpful. Even if it's not immediate, this technique can still make a difference. Don't overthink it, just start. What makes this simple technique so effective is that it begins with your body. We're often taught to think our way out of anxiety by bypassing our body altogether, which actually makes your anxiety hang around. What I like to say is train your body to re regulate when it's in a heightened state and then tend to your mind. What does it mean to tend to your mind? This brings us to an important distinction between the brain and the mind. Your brain is the physical organ that runs all the systems in your body. It can be seen and studied. When you do breath work, your brain is actually re regulating your central nervous system. It's an incredible machine. Your mind, however, is unseen. It's your unique subjective experience of the world. It organizes and creates the story of your life events, which is why it doesn't work when someone tells you you shouldn't feel anxious. Anxiety requires a personal process to work through. You can't outsource it. Even medication can't do the whole process of moving your mind to a clearer place. This is where Dr. Siegel's image of mental wellness can be incredibly helpful. In Monday's episode, I introduced Siegel's image of the river of wellness. I asked you to imagine your mind as a calm flowing river, navigating life's waves with confidence. On either side of this river are two banks. One is labeled chaos, the other rigidity. When your mind is on the bank of chaos, you feel overwhelmed, your thoughts spiral, your emotions become unpredictable, and you may experience panic attacks, constant worry, or an inability to focus. The bank of rigidity, you lean into over controlling tendencies, avoidance, perfectionism, or excessive reassurance. Seeking. This might mean sticking to strict routines or procrastinating out of fear of failure. How do you move off these banks and back into the river of calm? Dr. Siegel provides the acronym FACES, Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. These five words can guide you from fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response back to alignment with your values and desires. FACES offers a helpful way to understand the optimal state of mind that you aim for in daily life. F Flexible means being open to changing plans or perspectives, like adjusting how you respond when traffic delays your commute. A. Adaptive involves managing discomfort, such as finding a quiet space to focus when work gets chaotic. C. Coherent. It's about making sense of your emotions, like recognizing that your irritation during a conversation might stem from feeling unheard. E, energized, means feeling alive and engaged, such as fully immersing yourself in an enjoyable hobby or task. S, stability, provides the grounding to stay calm even when life throws you unexpected challenges, like handling a last minute schedule change with Composure. By cultivating FACES, you build the capacity to stay calm, present, and connected in the flow of everyday life. I've shared these words with Thousands of people, and the feedback is unanimous. They work. When you feel out of control, start by re regulating your body. Then observe which bank your mind is on, and use these words to guide yourself back into the flow of calm. Here's an example. One of my clients has an incredibly overextended life, two jobs, kids, and elderly parents. Her constant stress often puts her on the bank of rigidity, where she finds herself yelling at her kids to keep moving. She realized this behavior was not coherent with her values. On less stressful days, she's calmer and kinder and her kids respond better. She decided to adapt her thinking, shifting from I'm bad if I'm late, to sometimes, due to my life's demands, I will be late and that's okay. She became softer with herself. By accepting her reality, she reduced her stress, became calmer, And ironically, was less likely to be late. wasn't that her mind was a zen ocean full of placid water, but it was that she found herself calmer and much kinder, not only to her children. but to herself. Another example involves clients who work in high pressure jobs with unrealistic demands. Post pandemic, this seems to be a lot more common. These clients often bounce between the bank of chaos, I have so much to do, I don't know where to start, and the bank of rigidity, I must work 14 hour days. When they focus on faces, they often gravitate towards these three words, coherence, Energized, and Stable. They begin by acknowledging the reality. There's more work than can be done in a week. They work on improving their sleep, which helps them feel more stable and energized. And they build the muscle of accepting that they're never going to be completely on top of their workload. This shift helps them adapt their thoughts to the truth of the situation, which often makes their internal dialogue with themselves much gentler, much kinder. Can you see what I'm talking about? When you calm your body and observe your mind using this model, you gain a concrete way to address your anxiety. Trying to change external circumstances often wastes energy, but stepping into your own agency, calming your body, observing your mind, and working with your thoughts can lead to a healthier perspective. I encourage you to check out the one pager attached in the show notes for a beautiful visual representation of this model. I also discussed this model in depth in episode one of this podcast. It's a powerful tool to align your thoughts with your values and decrease your anxiety. In this episode, I've encouraged you to use the superpower of your body to re regulate your nervous system and the superpower of your mind to observe your thought. By applying Siegel's image of mental wellness and the FACES acronym, you can make internal and external changes to feel calmer and happier. Don't let anxiety hold you back from being the person you want to be. Step into your agency and try this model. Sit with a friend, a spouse, even a therapist, and discuss it so you can gain insight and clarity. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with another episode of Creating Midlife Calm.