Ep. 220 Why Understanding Stress, Anxiety, and Overwhelm in Midlife Brings More Calm To Your Holidays

Do the holidays feel heavier because you’re carrying stress, anxiety, and overwhelm you barely had room for in the first place?
You’re not alone if this season amplifies everything your midlife brain is already managing.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    The real difference between stress, anxiety, and overwhelm—and why holiday pressure intensifies all three
2.    What happens in your midlife brain and body when you’ve quietly exceeded capacity
3.    How understanding overwhelm helps you reclaim clarity and calm without adding anything to your plate
 Take 9 minutes to bring more calm to your holidays—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 the difference between stress and anxiety and overwhelm, and why that clarity brings more calm to your holidays. 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. Lately, I hear the same thing from so many people. I feel constantly overwhelmed. It's not just the season, it's the pace of life, the rising costs, the pressure at work to do more with less, and the sense that things just aren't running as smoothly as they used to. That's not a personal weakness. It's a cultural weight pressing on already full minds and bodies. In this episode, you'll discover the difference between stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. What's happening in your brain and body when you've hit capacity and why overwhelm is a signal, not a shortcoming, and how to start responding with compassion instead of criticism. Let's start by getting clear, because naming things helps you regain control. Stress, anxiety and overwhelm are not the same, even though they can all feel equally crummy. Stress is the external load deadlines, bills, caregiving, constant notifications. Anxiety is the internal forecast, the fear that something might happen or the regret that something already did. And overwhelm happens when your brain and body simply can't keep up with what you, others, or life expects of you at this moment in time. Overwhelm is like your Inner fuse blows. You're no longer in your thinking brain. Your mind feels sluggish. Focusing is difficult. Exhaustion becomes the norm. Your probably cranky, irritable, and just trying to survive the day, or maybe even just the next hour. Have you noticed that things just aren't running as smoothly these days? You go pick up a prescription and it's out of stock. Property taxes rise to shocking levels. You pick up your car from the mechanic and it still isn't fixed. You wait six weeks for a medical test last week, several of my clients shared these exact frustrations. Life is hard enough when things run smoothly, but when the systems around us falter, overwhelm quietly sets in and what about work? It seems to me that many of you are being asked to do more with less. What used to feel like stress is now tipping into overwhelm? One client told me that after her third failed attempt to pick up her medication, she sat in her car and couldn't think straight. That's overwhelm. We often use the word interchangeably with stress or anxiety, but it's different. If you wanna understand more about the first two, check out episodes, 1 79 and 180, but this week we're adding the third piece of this puzzle, overwhelm. Overwhelm is your brain embodies way of saying. This is too much. Let's break down what's happening so you can understand. This isn't a character flaw. It's biology. When you are overwhelmed, the amygdala, your brain's alarm system takes charge. You become flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. And your prefrontal cortex, the part that plans prioritize and regulates emotion goes offline. You literally lose access to problem solving your nervous system moves from handle it to protect me. This is called psychological flooding. Your body isn't betraying you, it's protecting you. It's basically saying I can't take in any more data right now. A very competent friend called me last week and said, I'm frozen. I can't write this report. I think I might have Alzheimer's. What she was really describing was overwhelm. Her brain was simply flooded. So what drives this overload? Too many demands, too fast with no space for recovery, including enough sleep. A high ratio of passive challenges, things happening to you versus active challenges, things you choose, and chronic stress that's been running for years without restoration. When passive challenges outweigh active ones, you lose your sense of agency, and that's when the brain sounds, the alarm called overwhelm. When I was caring for my elderly mom, I often felt that same sense of overwhelm. I'd have my day all planned out and then she'd have a health emergency and I'd have to pivot instantly. Humans crave control when life keeps interrupting our plans for weeks or months or even years, you can expect overwhelm to naturally set in. The danger in not noticing and naming overwhelm is that you keep living as if these interruptions won't happen. You don't leave any margin for the unexpected, and when life inevitably shifts, you freeze. But here's the truth, overwhelm isn't failure. It's your body's intelligent signal that you exceeded safe capacity. The way back to calm. Doesn't start with doing more or trying to be more efficient. It actually starts with looking honestly at your life right now. Ask yourself, how vulnerable am I to overwhelm? Is my life so packed, so demanding that when the unexpected happens, a sick child, a project gone wrong, an unexpected expense, I have no room to pause, reset, or feel. Creating even small margins of time, quiet or movement allows you to restore rhythm and reclaim a sense of choice. That's how your thinking brain comes back online when you treat overwhelm as information, not evidence of failure. You move from shame to self-compassion and from exhaustion to recovery. Remember, you're not a human doing. You're a human being. This week's Inner Challenge is quite simple. All I want you to do is take a minute. And assess yourself for overwhelm. Maybe when you're walking from the parking lot or waiting to pick your kids up, just quietly turn inward and ask, am I in my thinking brain or my survival brain right now? If it's a survival brain, just notice what that feels like. Maybe your jaw is tight or maybe your thoughts are racing or blank. Do you feel a heaviness in your chest or an urge to check out? You don't have to fix anything yet. Just notice awareness itself begins to bring your pre-frontal cortex back online. And if it's the holiday season, let that awareness be your gift to yourself. Permission to simply see when you've reached capacity. In this episode, you've discovered that overwhelm is different from stress and anxiety. It's not about failure, but it's your body's full volume messaging, saying Enough for now when you slow down and notice and name it and begin to make space for the awareness, your brain and body begin to reset and clarity slowly begins to return. Be gentle with yourself and expect resistance. You know that little voice that says, I don't have time to think about this. You have probably been on the treadmill of overwhelm for some time, so understanding it is the first step. If this episode has been helpful, I hope you forward it to some of your friends. These are hard times that we're in, and

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we all need a flood plan. That's why I am looking forward to our episode Thursday, where I'm gonna share with you practical coping skills to help you manage overwhelm. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife calm.