Ep. 217 3 Midlife Coping Skills to Instantly Calm Anxiety, Ease Stress, and Find Balance Fast This Holiday Season

Do you ever feel like you’re either doing everything—or nothing at all—because stress and anxiety keep hijacking your balance?
Midlife often pulls you between over-functioning and under-functioning, but your nervous system holds the key to calm.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    How to engage your vagus nerve—your body’s built-in calm system—to regulate anxiety and stress.
2.    Three easy-to-use coping skills to help you restore steadiness in minutes.
3.    How to practice equanimity, the emotional balance that lets you stay grounded no matter what life throws your way.
 Take 10 minutes to slow down, reset your body, and find your calmest midlife self — 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

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW: 0:00

In this episode, you'll discover three practical coping skills to balance the extremes of over and under-functioning. 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. Welcome to the podcast. On Monday, we explored how midlife stress and anxiety can quietly pull you into two patterns, functioning functioning or under functioning. I received an email from a listener that said, as I was listening to the episode, I realized I was driving my car just like my mind in over-functioning mode. So I slowed down, set cruise control, and took a deep breath. I love that email so much. I threw out the outline of my episode and created a new one around her wisdom. It captures exactly what over-functioning feels like, your mind and body racing faster than your capacity to feel calm. So today we're gonna talk about how to move from those patterns into emotional balance. Equanimity or what my listener called cruise control. So your body stays calmer, more regulated, and your mind clearer. In this episode, you'll discover how to calm your body by engaging your vagus nerve. Your body's built-in reset system. Three, coping skills that can help you move from reactivity to steadiness, and how to practice equanimity, the emotional steadiness that brings real calm to midlife. Before we dive in, let's check in with Monday's Inner Challenge, curiosity, not judgment. You were invited to notice moments when you started to over function, jumping to fix plan, or smooth things over, and moments when you under functioned, pulling back, numbing, or hoping someone else would decide, not'cause you don't care, but because your body and mind just need to recover. That awareness is your starting line. but before we go into today's coping skill. Let's clear something up. Emotional balance is not the same as work-life balance. That's another episode entirely. Equanimity is about keeping your body regulated using simple, free tools to return to calm wherever you are, no matter what is happening outside of you, the foundation is awareness. But the fuel is movement. Small, intentional actions that bring your nervous system back to neutral and your mind to clarity. Once you notice your body speeding up or shutting down, here's what you do next. Coping skill. Number one, notice and name awareness is the first step, and it's how you step into your agency to help your body and mind feel better. The goal isn't to fix it immediately, it's to notice it clearly when you pause and say, I'm over functioning right now. Or I'm under functioning because I'm depleted. That simple act of naming moves the moment from your reactive brain to your reflective brain, and once you name it, you can actually change it. As you head into these busy months, noticing and naming is a superpower. Catch over functioning before it lands you in exhaustion or under functioning. When you wake up at night with your mind racing through everything that has to get done, or when you freeze, unsure what to do first, just say it out loud. I'm over functioning. I'm under functioning. Naming it begins the process of taming it, and that leads us directly to coping skill number two. Break. Break is a body-based reset for calm. To understand why this works, it helps to know about your vagus nerve. Your body's built in calm button. It is the longest nerve in your body running from your brainstem through your heart, lungs, and gut. It constantly sends messages that tell you whether you're safe or under threat. When stress hits, that signal gets scrambled. Your heart speeds up, shoulders tighten, breath shortens. What's the antidote? To help your body do the opposite. Slow your breath, drop your shoulders even hum softly so you stimulate the vagus nerve and your brain gets the message you're safe. That's where break comes in. Your simple body-based reset for calm. It's how your body says you can rest now, not necessarily sleep, but more like being on cruise control. Moving through your day, doing what needs to be done, but not all. Wound up break be. Breathe in gently or release your breath for six seconds. A, adjust your shoulders and jaw. Just soften them. K. Keep your feet or seat grounded and e extend or stretch. If you feel frozen, try it now. One slow breath in and a long breath out. Drop your shoulders. Feel your feet on the floor. That tiny shift is you reregulating your body, helping it feel safety again. One client used break every time she caught herself rushing between meetings, which was all the time. At first she laughed. MJ, this feels so silly. A week later she told me I didn't just feel calmer. I actually felt mentally clear. That's equanimity in action. When your body slows, your mind follows. Listen to that. When your body slows down, your mind follows. And honestly, I use break myself all the time, probably 15 times a day. When I hear that thought, if I just finish this last thing, then I can rest. That's my cue. I'm pushing too hard and I break. Remember, peace isn't earned. It's practiced. I can almost hear some of you thinking, but MJ, my problem isn't my body. It's my to-do list. And sure, that might feel true, but after 40 years in the therapist chair, I can tell you most people pay far more attention to their to-do list than to their body. When I suggest to my clients that maybe they could take a few things off their to-do list, many automatically become lawyers arguing why they can't possibly do less. But when I ask them to care for their body to reregulate throughout the day, something changes over time. They start to see how hard they've been pushing themselves. They begin to hear that quiet Inner voice with just enough energy to ask, what if I didn't have to run on empty? That's when you realize how over-functioning often flips into exhaustion and then into under-functioning, which brings us to coping skill number three. One of my favorite of all time. Create your own glimmer list while notice a name and break, help you reset in the moment. This third skill helps you prevent the extremes of over and under functioning. I call it your glimmer List, five small things you can do for 10 to 15 minutes that lift your spirit and remind your body it's safe. Think of it as a daily antidote for your nervous system. Ask yourself, what can I do that costs little or nothing and reliably brings me a bit of enjoyment, happiness, even joy I've helped hundreds of clients create glimmer lists. And to be honest, it takes about two minutes. Just the other day, in less than 90 seconds, one of my clients said I could play the ukulele, walk, cook, read, watch, 15 minutes of my favorite old series. That's it. Simple, accessible, grounding, and none of them were on her to-do list I wanna invite you to each day, spend 10 or 15 minutes glimmering doing one thing that lights your spirit and that creates small, steady sparks of enjoyment, maybe even joy. And those sparks will regulate your nervous system more than you might imagine. Happiness, enjoyment, and joy are not extra. They're actually regulation disguised as delight. So just take a moment and think of what is one thing you could put on your glimmer list that makes you feel alive. So if you notice yourself speeding, taking on too much, fixing, managing break, if you find yourself stalling, avoiding numbing, disconnecting, use the same steps. Either way, you're teaching your body to balance, that's equanimity, calm, that doesn't depend on the circumstances. In this episode, you discovered that equanimity is about nervous system regulation, not work life. Perfection. Three coping skills. Notice a name break end, a glimmer list to restore calm and clarity in midlife, and that peace isn't earned. It's practiced one small reset at a time. Equanimity doesn't mean you never wobble. It means you know how to steady yourself again when you do. And that's the kind of calm worth creating. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.