Ep. 203 — Why "Pushing Through" Midlife Anxiety Backfires and Coping Skills To Regain Energy & Calm

Do you pride yourself on powering through—but secretly feel drained and resentful?
Pushing through anxiety and stress feels like the only option in midlife, but the truth is it often backfires.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    Why pushing through actually keeps the stress cycle open and makes anxiety worse
2.    The hidden costs of  the “push-through mode” in midlife
3.    How to use RESET coping skills to calm anxiety, conserve energy, and reconnect with what matters
 Take 13 minutes to stop burning out and start building calm—you’re worth it.

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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 why pushing through anxiety backfires and a reset that will give you more energy and calm.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:08

Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, the podcast where you and I tackle stress and anxiety in midlife so you can stop feeling like crap, feel more present at home, and thrive at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 50,000 hours of therapy sessions and 32 years of teaching practical science-backed mental wellness.

M.J. Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:32

Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we talked about stopping a bad day before it takes over your week. Today we're looking at a habit many of us rely on without even noticing it, pushing through. Do you skip lunch to keep up, answer emails with your jaw tight, or tell yourself I'm fine. When you actually feel full of resentment that's pushing through. this episode, you'll discover why pushing through feels natural and why it often makes your anxiety worse, the real costs, physical, emotional, and relational, and a better way, how to use reset when you catch yourself power and through. Before we dive in, let's quickly check in on Monday's Inner Challenge because we're gonna use RESET again today. On Monday, my Inner Challenge was to find your reset. When a bad day starts brewing, hit reset. R, recognize and reframe. I am having a bad day and I'm turning it around. E, Exhale and breathe. Yep. Breath work. It's free and it works. S self-compassion, not self-pity. This is hard and I can do better. E. Engage your thoughts. Is this the whole truth? Will this matter this afternoon? Tomorrow, next year, and t take a tiny step in a healthier direction. A client came in yesterday and said, I reset a bad day this morning. She told me that her boss walked in grumpy, looked at her and said, have you noticed your team is late on everything? Instead of spinning, she got up from her desk to get some coffee. She told herself, I am not gonna let that comment ruin my day. She breathed while the machine made her latte, and thought, there are lots of factors to why we miss deadlines, and it is not just my team. Her body moved from defensive to calm. she walked back to her desk and shook her arms, and all of a sudden the song from Frozen popped into her head. Let it go. Trust me. When you decide to not let something ruin your day, you will often get a little bit of help from things that catch off guard like a song. What used to steal the whole day? Venting to a coworker, skipping lunch to prove, see, I do work hard can become a reset. Reset helps you step back into your power. But the key is you have to decide that you want to change your mind. A little bit of intention goes a long way, and when you do this, it gives you energy for what needs attention. That day's work, project planning, the birthday party. And scheduling those doctor appointments because you didn't let a bad mood steal your day. On Monday, we practiced a fast reset for bad days today. Same tool, new target, the push through habit. because Pushing through, it's common in midlife work, caregiving, logistics, teens that won't clean their room or leave the house on time. It is not easy. And you probably trained yourself to keep going no matter what. For many of us, pushing through is so ingrained that we barely notice it. Especially if you had anxiety as a kid, you may have been told lovingly or maybe sometimes not so lovingly just push through sometimes. This is helpful. When is pushing through, helpful. When you need to get through that moment, you know you have a short presentation. You know, you're anxious, but you push through or you're facing something that you usually avoid. Such as driving on busy highways. Or you're going to a social gathering that really has triggered your social anxiety. In each of these examples. Pushing through actually is the healthy thing to do. But what I wanna encourage you to do is to push through and let your body recover. So after the presentation, take some breaths and a short walk. Instead of challenging yourself to drive 15 miles on the highway, just go one exit until you really feel comfortable and going to that social function and staying for 20 minutes. Notice that in each of these examples, pushing through is a good coping skill, but you're doing it with support and recovery afterwards. The problem is when push through becomes your only tool. You get a lot done, but the costs are often invisible. So let's look under the hood of pushing through the reason that pushing through often backfires is it keeps you in the stress cycle. Your body never gets the message that the threat is over. If you want more about the stress cycle, listen to episode 1 79. Are you using, pushing through as a form of emotional regulation? To be honest, it isn't. It's actually emotional suppression, a form of avoidance. When you shove feelings down, they rebound stronger, your anxiety gets louder, not quieter, and it often turns into resentment. Midlife adds, load. Aging parents, teens launching or maybe not relationships. Work and menopause. Powering through everything. Becomes unsustainable, and your system can start acting like every task is an emergency. When the stress cycle stays open. Here's how it shows up in real life. Physically, you feel exhausted, your muscles are tight and tense. You may have headaches, disrupted sleep, and emotionally you feel lots of irritability, resentment, shame, and a thinning sense of joy. It can be really hard to feel happiness. There's so much on you. You're not really feeling much of anything and relationally you're there, but you're not available. The kids come home from school or your spouse comes home from work and you're busy getting dinner. You say hello, but you don't really connect. One of my clients who was caring for her aging mother had a wake up call her mother fell and she had to go to the er, and the doctor said to her, well, with all your mom's illnesses, a fall, may one day end her life. My client felt slapped awake. She realized that she had become numb racing through the tasks without letting herself feel the truth that one day her mom wouldn't be there. Think about it. When does pushing through keep you so focused on the moment that you lose sight of the big picture? And your body's so worn out, you've just kind of stopped paying attention to it. So the question is, if pushing through costs so much, why is it so sticky to let go of up? Because it works in the short term and that's why it's hard to stop. You get a lot done. Checking boxes does give you quick relief, but the long term costs stack up on your body, your mood, and your relationships, and honestly. Being able to enjoy life. It isn't okay to wait for your vacation to enjoy life. Why not enjoy it today? Probably because the moment you consider slowing down your anxiety's gonna say, but what if I don't get it all done? Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But either way, there is a kinder way to meet your moment. Let's apply Monday's coping skill to this habit. Reset. When you use reset in the moment, you're gonna catch yourself muscling forward. Let's use an everyday example that still plagues me, but I have really made good progress grocery shopping. Revs me up. I wanna get it done fast. I walk in like it's a race and my body pays for it. So I have trained myself to push, reset, or recognize and reframe. I am often in the middle of the produce section before I notice. Whoa. I'm in push through mode and I'm grocery shopping. This is not necessary. More force won't bring more calm. What do I do? E exhale and ease. I loosen my grip on the cart. I take a few breaths. I move my awareness to my feet, and I begin to walk in the moment. This calms my nervous system. It reminds me that I don't need this to be forced urgency. It can be enjoyable. I then do a little dose of self-compassion. This is a hard habit to break, and I kind of laugh because I've been really working on this for a couple years, but I often forget it. It is just a part of me. It doesn't make sense, but we all have parts that don't make sense, but we don't have to let them run the show. Then I do EI engage my thought. I actually have this thought. MJ rushing to the grocery store will probably save you two minutes. And you're gonna walk out with your body tense for absolutely no reason at all. I say to myself, Hey, I'm here every week. Slow down, feel your feet, and enjoy what really is incredible. All of the options in the American Grocery store. Do you have things where you push through and it's absolutely not necessary? Think about one of those things right now and make a commitment. The next time you find yourself doing it, just say, I'm in push through mode and I am gonna turn it around. Let me share with you another coping skill that really softens the habit of push through. It's a mindset shift. You move from, I have to, to I get to. I get to take care of my parent before they die. I get to make dinner for my kids who I love and someday won't be living with me. I get to connect you to the why you do the thing. Care, integrity, love, or maybe just so you don't feel guilty. That's normal. It's also really normal. To feel resistance when you try to let go of these old patterns. Don't be afraid of that. It's hard to change. I call'em updates and a lot of times we avoid updates because our critical voice gets activated. Well, if I'm gonna do this better now it means I was doing it bad, then it's really not true. Our whole life is updating. If you can lean into the spirit of updates for the rest of your life, it actually just means that you're committed to improvement, to growth, and to really sinking yourself up to what you need at this age and stage of your life. Which leads me to the homework I give every client who struggles with the desire to push through, do one thing you like each day. Yep. One thing I have noticed that most of my clients who are push throughs have this in common. They keep putting themself last on their list, and in midlife you will never. Get to the top. There's just too much to do. Don't make this difficult. Just do one small thing. Get a latte dance to your favorite song. Read for 15 minutes. Call your grandchild. Or watch a show and do nothing else. One thing for you each and every day. A few minutes does a lot. Remember pushing through does reduce anxiety in the moment, but it also increases exhaustion and erodes connection unless you slow down long enough to smell the roses. So let's bring it all together. In this episode, you discovered why pushing through keeps the stress cycle open and amplifies your anxiety, the cost it creates in midlife on your body, your emotions, and your relationships, and how to use reset so you can move forward without burning out. And why one small, enjoyable thing each day softens the push through habit and returns you to a sense of choice. If today's episode has helped share it with a friend who pushes through. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.