Ep. 240 2 Effective Coping Skills to Ease Stress and Anxiety Around Career Disappointment in Midlife

Does your career feel disappointing in midlife—and leave you questioning your worth?
You’re not alone, and this quiet kind of stress is far more common than people admit.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
1.    Why career disappointment in midlife often turns into anxiety, stress, and self-doubt—even when nothing is “wrong” on the surface
2.    How internalizing or constantly venting about work both keep your nervous system stuck
3.    Why naming the truth about your job—without fixing or quitting—can restore steadiness and self-worth
 Take 12 minutes to understand your career disappointment and calm anxiety—you’re worth it.

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

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 how understanding career disappointment in midlife can ease anxiety and protect your sense of self-worth.

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. When you were 20, you probably had some version of a picture in your mind about how your career would go. That picture was formed before pandemics. Before housing prices exploded. Before ai reshaped entire industries and before work became this relentless mix of pressure, uncertainty, and speed. Your career was shaped in a time that assumes stability, and you're living in a world that no longer offers much of it. So if you are in midlife and your career feels disappointing, I want to say this clearly. This does not mean you failed. It doesn't even necessarily mean you chose wrong. For many people, it's not dramatic. It's not burnout. It's a quieter, more confusing feeling of this isn't what I thought it would be. And what often surprises people is how much stress, anxiety, and self-doubt can grow outta that quiet disappointment. In this episode, you'll discover why career disappointment in midlife so often turns into stress, anxiety, and self-doubt, and how awareness not fixing helps you separate your job from your sense of self and how you might begin to reframe your job not as a dream from your twenties, but as an essential part of midlife. And we'll end with an Inner Challenge, a simple way to apply what you're noticing so you can feel steadier. When people feel disappointed in their careers, I tend to see two very human patterns. The first is what I call the externalizer. This is the person who complains about their job a lot. They vent, they process out loud. They replay the same frustrations with friends, partners, or coworkers. There's often some relief in talking, but over time nothing really changes. I had a client whose spouse sent him to therapy because she could no longer listen to his daily complaints about his work environment, which in his defense sounded awful, not abusive, just draining. The second pattern is the internalizer. This is the person who rarely says it out loud. They minimize, they rationalize, they tell themselves they should be grateful, and instead of talking about the disappointment, they carry it quietly as anxiety, tension, irritability, resentment, or a slow erosion of self-worth., My client who was an internalizer, shared her sleep patterns for the week. She was averaging just under six hours a night. When we explored this, she shared that she often would work until one in the morning to get everything done. I asked her what it was like to work 60 or 70 hours a week. Her answer, I try to not think about it. Most people move between these two patterns depending on stress, temperament, and season. And whether you externalize or internalize this episode is especially for you because you might be surprised to learn that the coping skills for dealing with midlife career disappointment are often the same. Once you see yourself in these patterns, something important becomes clearer. Here's the core idea I want to share with you today. Silence drains you constant venting, drains your relationships. Neither one resolves career disappointment. They just move the discomfort around for the internalizer. Silence keeps the nervous system activated when you don't name what's true, anxiety often becomes the container for everything you're holding for the externalizer. Repeated venting can slowly overwhelm the people who care about you and even the people you work with. They don't pull away because they don't love you or care, they pull away because they don't know how to help and nothing ever shifts. These two clients were different genders, worked in very different careers, and both came to therapy completely drained by their jobs. One was giving too much with the belief that relief would come once they got on top of the project. The other's constant criticism was an attempt to make things work better so the job would feel more sustainable and more enjoyable. Many people, go into a career thinking of it more like a spouse. This job will fit me and make me a better me. All of this makes sense. All of it is an attempt to cope, and yet none of it works. Both my clients felt unappreciated and exhausted. Silence drains you. Constant vetting drains your relationships. There's a middle ground between venting and suppressing. Neither tends to lead to a healthy way of coping speaking truth is not the same thing as complaining, and it's not the same thing as quitting or making a big decision. This is where I want you to start. Name it. Speaking your truth simply means naming your reality not to others, but to yourself. Name it, speak it once. Honestly, without spiraling, I often invite clients to do this on paper. Write down in two or three sentences your disappointment about your job. All sentences. Need to begin with the word I, just two or three sentences. Your core truth. When I asked my client who was the externalizer to do this, it took him four attempts. His first three were about the organization. His last one read. I am bored in this job. I am not challenged. I don't work with people who feel passionate about doing a good job. I feel alone. My client who was the internalizer, Wrote, I am being taken advantage of because I am willing to over-function and do the work others don't want. I don't get to work on projects I care about. And I feel empty. Immediately after you put your core experience on paper, turn to your body and notice how it's responding. Much to my externalized client's surprise, he began to get teary-eyed. Not someone who cries easily. He put his hands over his face and took deep breaths, letting the hurt out. My other client took a deep breath, placed her hands over her heart, looked me in the eyes and said, I am pissed. When you do this, something important happens in your body. After you tell yourself the truth your body becomes your biggest validator. I want you to honor your body's reaction. Even if it's uncomfortable, I invite you to stay with it. Don't move to fixing. No quitting, no resume making. Just stay with your body. Stay with it for a day or two. This is deep internal work as you move through your day, notice do I feel a little relief. Tightness, sadness, unexpected, calm, A bit of clarity. This reaction matters more than the story you tell yourself. From a brain body perspective, naming reality reduces threat activation. It helps your nervous system dial down a bit. Both of these clients reported going back to work feeling better. Not about their jobs, but about themselves. The internalizer was no longer minimizing. The externalizer began to understand that he had to carry this and do the work himself, not hand it off to others. From this truth comes the next natural step of what to do about career disappointment. In your twenties with fewer bills, quitting can feel imaginable. In midlife, in this job market, quitting is much more complicated and needs to be thoughtful and realistic, or it creates unimaginable stress as you sort this out. Let me share a piece of wisdom my accountant once gave me when my own job wasn't so great, he listened to me and then said, MJ, it sounds like a job. In that moment, something in me shifted. I stopped expecting two things. First. I stopped expecting my job to meet my needs. After all, they hired me to meet their needs. Second, I stopped expecting my job to make me feel worthy. Jobs can support our self-esteem, but self-esteem is more like the weather. Some good days, some bad days. Your worthiness is something you're born with. It never goes up. It never goes down. You're always worthy. There is real beauty in reminding yourself that in midlife, from many people, work shifts from being about identity to being about provision stability. Or contribution, even if social media tells you it should be more, that shift doesn't mean you failed. It often means you're maturing and appreciating what work does for you while understanding its limits. Limits, in self-esteem, in pay, and in promotion. I want you to remember career disappointment doesn't automatically mean something needs to be fixed. Sometimes it means something needs to be understood. Here's your Inner Challenge for the week. In two or three sentences, name your truth about your career. Don't solve it. Don't explain it away. Then notice what your body does. What eases. What tightens? That's it. Awareness only In this episode, you discovered why career disappointment and midlife can often cause an increase in stress, anxiety, and self-doubt, and how. Using the tool of self-awareness to understand if you're an internalizer or an externalizer can help you feel a little more grounded and steady, and how you might begin to reframe your job. Not as something you dream of, as an essential contribution that you make to those you love the most and those you work with. I know this is a very big issue for many people right now, so I invite you to share this episode with a friend or family member who may be struggling with career disappointment. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife Calm.