Ep. 254 How Reassurance ACTUALLY Increases Anxiety and Stress in Midlife Even When It Feels Like a Coping Skill

How can something that feels like a coping skill actually increase your anxiety and stress in midlife?
There is a calmer and more effective way to respond.
 In this episode, you’ll discover:

1.     Why reassurance can feel like a helpful coping skill but quietly increase anxiety and stress in midlife

2.     How the reassurance loop keeps anxiety going instead of resolving it

3.     What to begin noticing so you can shift toward coping skills that build real calm and self-trust
 🎧 Take 9 minutes to understand your reassurance patterns and begin building calmer coping skills—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 when reassurance helps your anxiety and when it quietly makes it worse. 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. You've probably found yourself asking someone, do you think this will be okay? Or sending a text looking for a sense of certainty and reassurance. In this episode, you'll discover why reassurance is one of the earliest and most natural ways you learn to regulate anxiety and overwhelm. How reassurance can slowly shift from support to dependency, and why not? Trusting your Inner voice increases stress and what to begin noticing instead, we'll end with an Inner Challenge, something you can do today to feel better. Reassurance is foundational to being human as a child. You heard it all the time. You can do this. I'm right here. You'll figure it out. When you're learning to ride a bike, trying a new sport, walking into something unfamiliar, someone studies you with their words and their presence. What's happening in those moments is something called co-regulation. It's when another person's calm, helps your body settle. Before you learn to calm yourself, you actually borrow someone else's nervous system. Reassurance in childhood isn't a problem because that's how emotional regulation begins. Let me give you an example. Last week my son sent me an adorable video of him telling his 2-year-old son not to be afraid of the mannequins he saw in the mall. What followed were 29 pictures of this little guy posing in front of every mannequin with a huge smile, proudly showing the fear he had just conquered. Childhood is full of new and. Often scary experiences. The people who love you help you move through them with reassurance so you can not only feel calm, but you can also feel proud. And here's something to understand. Co-regulation doesn't go away. As you get older, you do outrow the need to feel steadied by other people, but it does change as a child. You borrow regulation as an adult. You're meant to build it within yourself and in midlife. It becomes a balance between being able to steady yourself and still letting others support you because reassurance is meant to support your Inner voice, not replace it as you move into midlife. Life becomes more complex. You don't need me to tell you that you're making decisions about work, relationships, health, family, and many of the answers are not always clear. Maybe you're anxious about your child, your health or decision at work, and you find yourself asking, what should I do? So you reach for reassurance, which makes sense. This is how you learn to feel steady. But here's the shift as a child, reassurance helps build your Inner voice. In midlife. Too much reassurance can quietly replace it. Instead of checking in with yourself, you begin to check outside of yourself. And over time, reassurance stops helping you trust yourself, and it begins to fuel self-doubt. Remember, reassurance was meant to help you find your voice, not replace it. And once this shift happens, it can show up in. Everyday ways. Here's a few examples. A friend recently texted me that her teen wanted to stay home from school and asked, what should I do? Another client told me she wants to start a small bakery business. She spent 20 hours researching on chat GPT, but still doesn't feel clear, not all Reassurance is the same. It's not all problematic. Sometimes it's about connection, feeling seen and supported. That's healthy reassurance because it builds your Inner voice and self-trust but most of the time it's about seeking relief, trying to get rid of anxiety as fast as possible, for example, when my friend texted me about her daughter, I could have responded in two very different ways. If I wanted to support her, I might have said, ooh, that's a hard one. Look at the whole picture and trust your gut. You're a great mom. If I wanted to fix it, I could give her my opinion without really having the full picture just to give her relief. Let's look at two patterns that tend to show up when reassurance becomes about fixing. The first is this, you're trying to discharge anxiety. You don't know how to carry. I think of it like the old fashioned game of hot potato. You feel anxious and instead of holding it, you pass it off as quickly as you can here. What do you think? Tell me what to do. It brings relief in the moment, but you never really learn how to hold the anxiety yourself. You know this feeling anxiety arises in your body. It feels tight, urgent, like something needs to be solved right now. So you reach out for reassurance and it softens that feeling. It does feel really good, but only for the moment. From a brain body perspective, reassurance reduces uncertainty, which lowers your threat response, and that's why it feels good. It does help in the short run, but not in the long run because it doesn't build your ability to tolerate discomfort. So over time you begin to need it more often. Reassurance when used to fix anxiety becomes the coping skill that stops working. The other pattern that shows up when you rely on reassurance to fix your anxiety. As you stop trusting and sometimes even hearing your Inner voice, you begin to look outside for answers that you actually have inside. You may not say it out loud, but it sounds like, I don't know. I need someone else to tell me what to do. I just don't wanna make a mistake. This is where anxiety and self-doubt start feeding each other, and this is painful and it tends to grow, if not tended to. And if this is happening for you, it makes complete sense. Remember, reassurance was a coping skill that worked beautifully in your childhood. It does offer short-term relief, but over time it leads to less confidence, more anxiety, and a growing dependence on others in a way that doesn't really work. I want you to be aware of the reassurance loop. You feel anxious, you seek reassurance. You feel better briefly. The anxiety returns, which often makes you more anxious and somewhat irritable, so you seek reassurance again. I see this cycle often between parents and children of all ages. One client's daughter had just started a new job and kept texting her mom for reassurance. The mom loving and supportive, kept responding, you've got this, I'm rooting for you. And eventually her daughter texted back, you have no idea how hard this is. And actually that was the truth. So for this week's Inner Challenge, all I want you to do is to begin to notice your relationship with reassurance. Be curious, not judgy when you feel anxious, and notice the urge to ask someone for reassurance. Just pause for a moment. Notice what your body feels like. Notice what you're hoping they give you. Is it certainty. Relief permission. You don't have to change anything. You just need to begin to see the moment anxiety rises, the pull towards reassurance and the relief it brings. And understanding your pattern is actually the beginning of developing some coping skills that actually keep on working. In this episode, you discovered that reassurance is one of the earliest ways you learned to regulate anxiety through co-regulation. But in midlife, it can quietly shift from support into something that increases stress when it replaces your Inner voice. If you are not following this podcast, I invite you to do so. Or if you know someone who would benefit from this episode, please forward it to them. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more creating midlife Calm.