Ep. 183 How Daily Chores in Midlife Fuel Stress & Anxiety & the Free Coping Skill That Helps

Are daily chores leaving you overwhelmed and anxious in midlife?
There’s a free tool that can feel like a coping skill when life starts to pile up.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. How to use one simple, free tool to break down overwhelming household tasks into calm, manageable steps
2. Why this tool helps reduce decision fatigue and supports your mental clarity without replacing your inner voice
3. How to experiment with this approach even if you’re skeptical or tech-shy — no expertise needed

🎧 Pop in your earbuds and learn how to turn everyday chaos into calm—starting with just one chore.

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About the Host:
MJ Murray Vachon LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 48,000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching her Mental Wellness curriculum, Inner Challenge. Four years ago she overcame her fear of technology to create a podcast that integrated her vast clinical experience and practical wisdom of cultivating mental wellness using the latest information from neuroscience. MJ was Social Worker of the Year in 2011 for Region 2/IN.

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

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover one simple coping skill that can stop the daily overwhelm of everyday chores.

Built-in Microphone: 0:07

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.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:31

Welcome to the podcast. As you head into the end of summer, can you feel your anxiety rising? This time of year often brings the crush of daily chores that you could more easily ignore in June and July. From meal prep to inbox clutter, it all comes rushing back. Today I wanna introduce you to a surprisingly helpful coping skill. Using artificial intelligence, specifically chat, GPT, to ease the mental weight of everyday tasks. In this episode, you'll discover what AI really is in simple human terms. You won't need to be a tech geek to get something out of this episode. You'll also learn how it can help reduce mental clutter so you feel more productive and calm. And lastly, we'll end with an Inner Challenge designed to help you regain momentum and calm. Whether you have used AI for work or never tried it. Today's episode will help you understand how to use this tool that's free and can be incredibly helpful when used wisely. So let's begin at the beginning. What is AI really, we hear a lot about ai. It's either gonna change the world for the better or end the world tomorrow. AI can feel futuristic and intimidating, but the kind I'm talking about chat, GPT is actually built to do something familiar, make sense of language and information in a way that makes your life easier. What chat GPT does is it predicts the next word or phrase in a sentence based on patterns. It has learned from a massive amount of text that part mirrors something our own minds do. Like when we finish someone's sentence, anticipate a reply or read between the lines in a conversation. But chat GPT does something more. It also organizes and returns information you may not have at your fingertips, like a supercharged version of Google, but in a conversational format. You don't just get links or scattered facts. You get summaries. Lists or even step-by-step plans based on what you asked, that blend a prediction and information retrieval makes it especially useful when your mind feels overloaded or unsure where to start. Another way to say when you're avoiding, that's where AI can really help. It brings structure to chaos and clarity to spiraling thoughts. I've come to think of AI as a thought partner. It won't do my thinking for me, but if I give it a clear prompt, it helps my thinking become more focused, more actionable, and less noisy. But like any thought partner, especially one that's not human, it's not perfect, and that's worth remembering. Let's take a moment to talk about both the benefits and concerns of using AI to manage midlife overwhelm. First, the benefits. It gives you a place to start when you're stuck or when you're in avoidance mode. Second, it holds your thoughts without judgment, especially helpful if you have a strong Inner critic. And lastly, it returns structured ideas, list reminders or timelines which helps your brain shift from foggy to focused. Here's an example of the first time I understood the power of ai. Last Christmas, I was hosting family for eight days. My daughter-in-law and her family are vegan. My grandson has a serious milk allergy. My daughter can't eat gluten. Just thinking about planning meals to a day for eight days was so overwhelming. I shut down the year before. I spent six hours making a plan, but this time I decided to experiment with chat GPT since it seemed to be all over the news. I put in the prompt, can you help me create lunch and dinner menus for seven people over eight days with these three dietary needs. In 15 minutes I had a complete outline with a shopping list. Did I use everything it suggested? No, but I went from dread. To clarity and that changed everything. So let's look at the concerns. If your question or prompt is too chaotic, AI can mirror that and overwhelm you back. It's only as helpful as the prompt you give, so expect a short learning curve as you figure out how to ask it, what you need it to do for you in a clear, more helpful way. My last concern is an over-reliance on AI can weaken your Inner voice if you stop checking in with yourself. Let me give you an example. In the meal planning example, AI suggested things that were far too complicated. A fermented jackfruit stew I mean, really. I laughed out loud and said, thanks, but no thanks. Then I remembered AI isn't a friend. It's a tool, and that's where it gets a bit tricky. AI is nice. It's too nice, in my opinion. It's easy to feel like you're talking to someone who understands. Some people even name their ai. I don't because it's not a person, it's a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Because it leans towards the positive. It can feel like you're talking to a person. And I just wanna say upfront, the last thing any of us need to do is be on our devices anymore than we are. AI isn't really artificial intelligence. It's Google on steroids, and while I never felt the urge to thank Google, I often feel it with chat GPT, but I've learned not to because each response takes energy, my emotional and intellectual energy, as well as earth's energy. So treating a tool like a person can be misleading and wasteful. I have found AI when used wisely to be helpful, not only in my personal life, but my professional life. Here's the science. The average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. Wow. That's part of why seemingly small chores can leave you feeling mentally fried, but when you use AI wisely, it will help you reduce that load. It supports the executive functioning part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, the system responsible for planning, organizing, and prioritizing. That's the part that gets hijacked when you feel overwhelmed. So I want to ask you to consider trying AI to break down one overwhelming task and see what you think. Think of it as a tech thought partner who helps you take action. Not overthink. You can access the tool for free@chat.open ai.com. I'll link this in the show notes. You'll have to create a login and start typing. It's like talking to a very organized assistant. The key is knowing how to ask it the right kind of question. Let me show you how with these two real life examples, one of my clients who often feels frozen by weekend housework, decided to try chat GPT after feeling completely shut down by the site of laundry piles, unopened mail, and two messy bathrooms. She typed in help me divide two hours of weekend cleaning into manageable chunks with breaks. Make it fun. Chat GBT returned a gentle structured timeline. 20 minutes of sorting laundry, five minute break, 15 minutes clearing surfaces 10 minute rest with tea. Final 15 minute cleanup round. Play, your favorite playlist, or call a friend. It even suggested a simple reward at the end. She told me it helped her move from feeling stuck to feeling like she had a doable plan, and that changed everything. Here's another example from the couch. Another client with a DHD and anxiety starts her day by asking Help me plan my day. I have my best energy from eight to 10 and low energy from noon to two. These are the things I need to get done by 2:00 PM chat, GPT gives her a basic plan. Including short breaks and even encourages her gently. She reports that it helps her move from panic into a soft, sustainable action. When she is done, she goes back into chat GPT, and tells chat what worked and what didn't. That way chat begins to understand what works for her in a more personalized, useful, and actionable way when she enters her requests the next day. Which leads me to the obvious question. How do you use chat as a skill without losing touch with your Inner authority? Here are three guidelines. Be specific. Not perfect. You don't need the right words, just the right direction, especially if you lean towards perfectionism. Don't spend a long time on your prompt. Trust yourself, type it in and revise if needed a prompt such as help me create a plan to adjust my kids' bedtime from 10:00 PM to 8:00 PM over the next 12 days, or organize family weekend chores, so they're divided fairly amongst my two children, ages eight and 10. Give me tips on how to guide them to do the chores and not complain. Another guideline is keep your own Inner compass, your own authority. You don't have to follow its suggestions. Exactly. Edit, adapt. You're the expert on your life. It's a thought partner. Not a dictator. You be you. And lastly, practice reflection. After using it, pause and ask. Did that help me feel more calm or more confused? Use it wisely and AI won't replace your Inner voice. It will actually strengthen it. Here's your Inner Challenge this week. Use chat, GPT or another AI tool to help you with one chore that feels overwhelming. Start with a prompt like this. Give me a three step plan to get started on. And insert whatever it is you wanna do. Laundry, grocery planning, inbox cleaning, organizing a room. When you're done reflect, did I feel calmer? What surprised me would I try this again? No pressure to master it. Just try it and observe what happens. In this episode, we explored how AI can reduce the mental clutter that often makes daily chores feel impossible. We covered what AI really is, a language prediction tool. The benefits and concerns of using AI for mental clarity and a coping skill, using AI as a calm, structured thought partner, not a crutch, and most importantly, how to use this tool in a way that supports not replaces your own Inner voice, your own Inner wisdom. Join me on Thursday for a follow-up where we'll dive into how to use AI as a thought partner for anxious thinking. Thanks for listening to creating Midlife Calm.