Ep. 247 Why Cutting Back on Your Phone in Midlife Might Be the Wrong Coping Skill for Anxiety and Stress

Have you noticed that fighting your phone often leaves you feeling more anxious, tense, or deprived instead of calmer?
You deserve a more fulfilling way forward.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Why trying to restrict phone use can backfire and increase anxiety and stress in midlife
2. How your phone quietly meets ancient human needs for connection, consuming, and creating—and how those needs are met matters to your nervous system
3. How small, more fulfilling real-world shifts can bring back enjoyment, meaning, and calm while keeping your phone in your life

 Take 9  minutes to notice how you meet your needs for connection, consuming, and creating—your nervous system will thank you.

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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 trying to restrict phone use may actually be the wrong strategy for calming your nervous system. 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 talked about why anxiety about the future can increase even when your life is actually okay. How your nervous system gets flooded by constant input and distorted signals from the online world. Monday was about noticing what your nervous system has been responding to. Today we're gonna run an experiment. In this episode, you'll discover why restricting your phone use. You know that little device that gives you all that information that stresses you out may not be the best coping skill to create calm and part of your phone's pull is that it is quietly meeting ancient human needs and how some small real life experiments can restore balance and calm. I'm really excited about what I'm gonna share today because it comes directly from something that happened in my office a few months ago. A client came into session clearly frustrated and said, I am so sick of how much time I burn on my phone. Why did they even make this stupid thing? What happened next and how she responded to my answer ended up unlocking something really important, something that helped give her body the kind of information she'd been trying to get from her phone all along. Today is about gently giving your nervous system different information. Before we go on, just a brief check in from Monday's Inner Challenge, you were invited to notice how your body felt after being online versus after real world interaction. If you noticed a difference, even a small one, that awareness is exactly what we're gonna build on today. So back to my client who was exasperated and said, why did they even invent this thing? Sometimes our questions are the beginning of seeing things differently. At its core, your phone does three things extremely well. It helps you connect, it helps you consume, and it helps you create. Those aren't modern needs. They're human drives, as old as time. They're the things that have always brought people together around meals. Stories work and shared spaces. What's changed isn't the need. It's how those needs are met. Much of the time now they're met alone through a screen with very little sensory or relational input. You know the feeling being alone, but together or being siloed, and this matters because your nervous system doesn't calm through willpower or feeling deprived. It calms through the experiences it has. When I shared this with her. She looked at me with this spark in her eye and said, well, forget it. I'm going back to connecting, consuming, and creating without this. And in that moment a light bulb went off for me. As obvious as this sounds, maybe a little self-awareness and intention can help you meet these needs in ways that actually give your heart, mind, and body as well as your nervous system what they're craving. So what I want to offer today. Isn't a solution, it's an experiment and self-awareness. An invitation to notice how your phone meets some very old human needs, and what happens when those same needs are met in the real world. Again, this isn't about giving up your phone, it's not about rules or discipline or my two hours or less stay recommendation. It's about balance and noticing what your nervous system responds to, and just to name it, there's real science behind why it's hard to put the phone down. You can hear more about this in episodes 1 21 and 1 22. These systems are designed to keep your attention, but hard doesn't mean impossible. It just means awareness matters. Let me share with you a few examples of how my clients have run this experiment in their own lives. I had a midlife mom in my office who was concerned about her teens texting. She wanted to limit her daughter's texting time, but her teen said that I'll never talk to my friends. Like many of you, this mom felt torn. She wanted her daughter to stay connected to her friends, and she also wanted her to be able to carry on real conversations. So here was the deal. They. Equal FaceTime for equal texting. At first, her daughter was mad and frustrated, but a month later, she and her friends loved FaceTiming. Her mom said she could hear them laughing and chatting, And she said to me, what a simple fix. The biggest change she noticed her daughter's mood was so much better. Many of us connect all day long, but mostly through text. Texting is efficient, it's practical, and honestly. Why not? But you might try choosing a few conversations to have by voice or FaceTime, and notice whether you feel calmer or more connected afterward. Now, let's think about consuming. Let's be honest. Ordering online is fantastic. No one appreciates the ease and time saved by Amazon more than I do. If I had to shop the way I did 20 years ago, I probably couldn't produce two podcast episodes a week. But there are times when shopping can be genuinely pleasurable. A client of mine who was really working on her phone use, decided to go to the store to buy a birthday gift for a friend. She went to a small boutique she'd always meant to visit, and she ended up having such a great time. She talked with the saleswoman, ran into a friend, and bought a great gift. She told me the best part was that she didn't fall into that black hole of unlimited choice. And when she left the store with the gift wrapped, she noticed she was smiling, consuming in a shared space, seeing other people moving your body. Taking your time gives your nervous system information. That scrolling doesn't. This isn't better, it's just different. Now let's talk about creating in a world filled with images of amazing creations. It can feel daunting to tap into your own creativity, but watching isn't the same as doing humans are meant to create, whether that's cave paintings or paint by numbers. I had a client who used to paint, but now she has kids in a demanding job. At first, she said, I don't have time to paint. So I had her check her phone use about three and a half hours a day. Then she said, okay, so I could paint for 30 or 40 minutes, but was set up and clean up. It's just not realistic. And then she paused and said I could buy a watercolor book where the drawings are already done and do it at night. So she tried it. She ran the experiment, scroll for 30 minutes, paint for 30 minutes. She came in the next week and said, I painted while listening to my favorite nighttime playlist, and it felt so good. I actually did something for me. Creating doesn't have to look the way it used to. In fact, in midlife, it almost never can. It just has to feel like you're making something real again. And this is where I want to return to this science. It's not easy to step away from something designed to pull you in, but humans are capable of hard things, especially when you understand what's happening when awareness changes the equation. So here's the simple lens I want to leave you with when you're reaching for your phone. Just notice, what need am I meeting right now? Connection, consuming, creating, and then ask what happens in my body when I outsource that need to the phone? What happens when I step into my own agency and meet it myself? Get curious. Get self-aware. Not judgy. No rules. Just information. Balance doesn't come from force. It comes from gentle awareness. In this episode, you discovered how the phone meets very old human needs. How those needs can quietly drift into isolation, and how small real world shifts to connect, consume, and create in real time can help restore balance and calm. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Monday with more creating midlife calm.