Ep. 238 Why Meditation Feels So Hard For Anxious Midlife Minds and the Coping Skill That Makes It Possible (Part 1)

Why does meditation feel so frustrating when you’re already anxious and overwhelmed in midlife?
If you’ve tried meditation and quit—more than once—you’re not broken, and you’re not alone.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    Why anxious midlife minds resist traditional meditation—and how understanding this reduces self-blame
2.    How a simple, compassionate coping skill can calm anxiety without forcing your mind to be quiet
3.    Why learning to “sit” with your mind differently can gradually retrain your nervous system and restore calm
 Take 16 minutes to relate to your mind with more compassion and ease—you’re worth it.

Phyllis Coletta, JD

Learn to train your wild puppy mind...

The Book: How to Be a Good Dog

Apple Podcast: Sit, Stay, Heal

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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 why meditation feels so hard for anxious minds and a surprising way to make it easier. 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 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 0:56

Welcome to the podcast. Do I have a special episode for you? If you've ever thought meditation just isn't for me, or you've tried and you quit more than once or maybe a hundred times like I did, you are not alone. Every so often. I have a guest on creating midlife calm, and today's guest is Phyllis Coletta Phyllis is smart. Funny actually. She's hilarious. And refreshingly honest about why your mind resists stillness. You've heard all the research about how good meditation is to calm, anxiety and stress, but just still can't make yourself sit. Or perhaps you do meditate, but you're not quite finding the joy and calm that those monks talk about. Trust me, this episode is for you. In her book, how to Be a Good Dog, she uses the principles of dog training to help us mere humans build a meditation practice that's realistic, compassionate, and surprisingly effective, especially if you struggle with anxiety or overthinking. In this episode, you'll discover why meditation feels so hard for anxious minds, and how understanding it through the lens of dog training can completely change your relationship with Comb. this is a conversation about understanding what's actually happening when you sit, why your mind behaves the way it does, and how learning to stay can gently change your nervous system over time. So welcome to creating Midlife Calm, Phyllis. wanna begin by just asking you to introduce

Phyllis Coletta 2:26

yourself to our listeners. Oh, thank you so much, MJ. This is so great. I'm happy to be here. I guess when I introduced myself, we're used to a list of things like I was a litigation attorney, a writer, a teacher. I've been a lot of things, but I think the most important thing is I am one of six kids from a first generation Italian family from Philly. So mostly I am loud and funny, And busy. The opposite of stillness.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 2:51

That is correct. Yeah. I wanna begin with the obvious question, and that is why do most people quit meditation?

Phyllis Coletta 2:58

I love that question because like you said, you quit a million times. I struggled with it. It took me probably a decade to really get into it because two reasons for me, I think it's overwhelming to people the idea of sitting still and it looks religious or spiritual or something. And I would look at these young women in their, Lou lemons with their flat bellies sitting on a mountaintop. I'm like, I'm a hot mess, so this is not for me. I can't be that. I have to be me. So I didn't think I would fit into the meditation thing. I even would go to groups sometimes and I can't wait to get outta here.'cause I just felt like I wasn't worthy and it wouldn't work for me, so I didn't do it.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 3:35

I think that's true. If we can't imagine ourself doing something, we're not gonna do it

Phyllis Coletta 3:41

a hundred percent. The advertisements from people meditating should be like a distraught woman with bad hair trying to get quiet in her house.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 3:50

I came across your book because I heard you on a podcast and you were fantastic. And I thought, oh, I have to have this woman on a podcast. I bought your book and I read it while we were at my daughter's for Thanksgiving and I was laughing and reading lines out loud. And I think your metaphor for dog training, whether someone's trained a dog or not, is genius and presents a completely different way for people to think about meditation. I want you to explain this metaphor so our listeners really feel like, Hey, I don't have to be on a mountaintop. I can be this person training my mind, like the person training their dog.

Phyllis Coletta 4:29

Meditation somehow has been co-opted by a lot of spiritual, teachers and stuff, people trying to make money, frankly. So it became unreachable. But this concept of training a puppy, the analogies are so clear. It's easy, relatable, and listen, we don't scream and yell at puppies. They're so adorable. And in ways our crazy mind is also adorable. We have to learn to love. Ourselves in order to train that mind. You can't be screaming at it. You can't hate it. I've had people actually say to me, I hate my mind. You have to love it like you would a puppy. And I actually came up with it when I was working with teenagers in Seattle. I was working with kids in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and they're gnarly and their minds are wild. I broke it down one day and they loved the idea and they could relate to it almost immediately. It requires a lot of self-compassion. There's no woowoo whatsoever. It literally follows. All the things that we can actually do easily to and with our minds.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 5:30

That is so true. I worked in the junior high for 21 years and I used to say to kids, because they had a lot of. Issues with, their own self-esteem, just the age and stage. Think of yourself as a puppy and they immediately soften. all we have to do is hold a puppy and not only our mind softens, but our body softens. I want you to start with your foundational skill that you write about in your book. The practice of sit.

Phyllis Coletta 6:00

Why do we teach a puppy to sit? It's always the first thing we do. We are trying to contain its energy. We're trying to get its attention because they are literally all over the place. Just like our minds, they're adorable, but the energy is just unhinged. Sitting is a way to contain energy. You teach the dog that first, and then you can breathe and then you move on to more difficult things. Teaching a puppy to sit to contain the energy is exactly what we're doing with our mind when we do that. You know how a lot of dogs love their crates because they're safe spaces, if you leave the door open, they'll often just go into the crate to lie down. The idea of sitting creates that safe, quiet space where we can actually begin the process. For a lot of people it's still really difficult, but it's just a very simple first step. And I like to recommend you sit on the floor just'cause you feel more grounded. It feels like preschool story time crisscross applesauce, take a deep breath, sit still, and then that's that. It's really important to get the puppy to pay attention, and that's the whole point of meditation as well, to pay attention to her mind.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 7:10

I have to ask, what if somebody can't sit on the floor?

Phyllis Coletta 7:13

No, I'm so happy you bring that up. Just sit anywhere. Just sit on the couch, sit on a chair to have your feet on the ground is good if you can, but don't lie down because when you lie down, you're gonna fall asleep, which is also good, but it's not meditating. So I would just say sit anywhere you feel comfortable in any way. Part of the reason people don't meditate is too complicated. Mudras and mantras, and sit this way, and breathe this way. My instruction is just sit down. Just sit. That's all there is to it, and then you just don't do anything. You just sit there, which is the opposite of how we operate in the world, right?

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 7:46

Everybody knows the research about meditation, that it's really helpful. But people don't do it because once they sit, they end up realizing that their mind is really busy, it's anxious, it's bored, it's angry, whatever. I want you to talk about that terrible part

Phyllis Coletta 8:04

of meditating. Oh, staying still. I was crawling outta my skin. MJ, I can't tell you how many times I'd be like, get me up, get me. And I just, it was really hard. It took a lot of discipline.'cause we are prone to action. That's what the culture does. We move a lot in this culture. Our brains have been co-opted by devices. It's like digital fentanyl. We can't get enough of it. We are totally addicted. We've got a lot of barriers to the concept of just sitting still, but it's really crucial to the concept of allowing that natural wisdom.'cause with all the noise in your head, you can't hear what I call the alpha dog. Like the kind of quiet awareness, the quiet, strong dog that takes care of everything. We have that within us, but we'll never have access to it unless we can stay still for just a minute. So yes, we get fidgety. But try it in very small doses, like two minutes. Put a timer on, see if you can stay still for two minutes and bring a sense of humor.'cause I got news for you. When the mind starts, it's like a sitcom. It's hilarious the stuff we think about. So if you can enjoy the show. Some people don't even know MJ, that their mind is talking to them all the time. We're not even aware of it. But once you're aware of the fact that this is crazy. I have the real housewives in my real life, in my real head, all of this drama, what is this? So it's really crucial to not try to banish anything, to try to just breathe for, I don't know, two minutes and then that's a good start. A sense of humor, self-compassion, and know that it's really important to be able to be still. So risk it for the biscuit, like you would if you were a dog, right? I wanna do a good thing, because your life is gonna get so much better. When you train a dog, you always have rewards available. Usually it's food For us, the reward is. Peace of mind, and there's nothing better than that in the whole world. Yes, it's hard and we can do it.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 10:08

Answer this for me. Often people start to meditate and they say, this is actually making my mind busier. This is actually making me overthink. Talk about that dynamic.

Phyllis Coletta 10:19

That's really interesting, because thinking is a way of distracting us from having quiet. We think constantly and we are told that we should be thinking, but thinking is actually the cause of our problems. Ecker Toll, his advice is think only when necessary. We don't need to think as much as we do. And it's all fake news. All that overthinking is really nothing when you think about it. Like a brain surgeon could not locate a thought in your head. It's nothing. We don't even know what thoughts are, and yet they seem to be driving the bus. We have to distract the mind a little bit, and that's what breathing does. It's like a chew toy. You know how you give a dog a distraction, right? So the breath is like that way of distracting us from the cacophony in the head. We do go into overdrive most of the time, because we're afraid that if we stop, the hurt is gonna come, the pain is gonna come, the fears, the buried childhood stuff is gonna come. It's legit to fear that stuff, right? Because guess what, eventually it is gonna come, but you're not gonna die by meditating. You're going to be okay. You can sit there, you can manage those things. You just have to teach it to come in and out. It feels very loaded and our mind will go into overdrive to protect us in an egoic way from going into, trauma and pain. But that's exactly ultimately where we need to go. We can do it. Take the deep breaths, relax as much as possible, and let the show begin. So two questions on that.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 11:55

Can you demystify breath work?

Phyllis Coletta 11:58

It makes me so sad and frustrated that the simplest, most human things have been become so complex. Our society tries to grab, complicate, and monetize everything. A lot of this in your personal practice is gonna be you breaking things down for the way it works for you. I used to work in an ER as an EMT, and I would be. Astonished at how people didn't know how to breathe when they were in pain a deep breath lessens everything that's all in through the nose, out through the mouth. I don't know the physiology, I just know that it works and it's free and it's always there, but we're often just breathing really shallow and quickly because we're under so much stress all the time. There's really not a lot to demystify. You took your first breath before you knew what was going on, right? You were an infant, you knew how to breathe as a baby. And we still do. And yet we don't access that and then our body takes over and we breathe shallow, and then that's never good or healthy for us either. It's really simple. Just breathe like you were born to breathe.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 13:01

That's super helpful. When you say to people part of being quiet is you can expect a lot of noise at first. How long does it take for that noisy brain to settle down a bit? I don't mean like Buddhist monk bit. But just a bit so people begin to get

Phyllis Coletta 13:18

some of the treats, not that long, honestly. I began to feel a little bit calmer within a couple of weeks actually, of tiny, like a 10 minute morning meditation practice with no words in my head. I don't do guided meditation. I'm not listening to anybody else tell me what to do, i'm just like being me by myself. If you can do that for five minutes, once a day. For two straight weeks. It takes what, three weeks to create a habit? So if you do just that little and let the thoughts come and go and learn to step back and get a kick outta what's going on in your mind am I really thinking about this right now? What is going on? It's funny. Bring a light touch to it. You'll begin to feel like a spasm of relaxation. If you're tense all the time, after a couple weeks of just a small 10 minute meditation in the morning, you're gonna be like, huh, what is that feeling? And you'll be like, oh, I'm relaxed. Relaxation is. Foreign to many of us'cause we're so stressed out. It takes a little while longer to get to really a very peaceful, quiet, empty mind. But I've been meditating for 15 years. Thinking, happens all the time. I just let it go. It comes like a leaf on a river. It goes in, it goes back, That's the whole, all you have to do is just not stay stuck on it. And whenever I would stop meditating, my life would get more cranky, more messy. And I'd be like, oh, I gotta go back to my little 10 minutes in the morning. And then I became different. My life was the same, but I was seeing things and feeling things differently. It's unbelievably effective and it's free and we can do it. There's 8 billion people in the world. If just 2 billion learned how to meditate and calm their minds, the whole world would be a different place.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 15:01

Every Monday I give an Inner Challenge, and of course the Inner Challenge today is very simple. All I want you to do for the Inner Challenge is to sit, just choose a place on the floor in a chair. Don't overthink it. Just do it. And notice your mind for one minute. Our takeaway message is calm doesn't really come from forcing our mind to behave. It comes from deciding that I'm gonna relate to my mind differently. I wanna thank you because you're so articulate. This is such a fun and wise framework to do something that not only our body and our mind needs, but our soul needs.

15:42

Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.