Ep. 268 Why You Still Feel Emotionally Flat, Anxious & Stressed Despite All the Self-Care

Why are you still feeling emotionally flat even though you’re doing all the “right” self-care things?
There’s a meaningful way to reconnect to yourself, your nervous system, and the small moments of joy, calm, and emotional aliveness that chronic stress can quietly bury.
In this episode, you’ll discover:

1. Why your nervous system can adapt to chronic stress and high alert without you realizing how much it’s costing you emotionally
2. How the “glimmer gap” disconnects you from joy, awe, presence, and the ability to fully feel your life
3. Why small moments of connection, beauty, laughter, and emotional openness can slowly help you feel more alive again

 Take 13 minutes to better understand why self-care may not be fully restoring you—and how to begin reconnecting to yourself again—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 why doing self-care the right way can leave you feeling emotionally flat and disconnected.

MJ Murray Vachon LCSW 0:09

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 0:33

Welcome to the podcast. You may be taking walks, eating better, listening to podcasts, trying to get more sleep, drinking less alcohol, and even making time for yourself, yet something feels missing. Not terrible, not dramatic, just dull. You're functioning, you're showing up, but deep down, you don't feel fully alive the way you used to, and that can become confusing in midlife because sometimes it looks like you're doing everything you're supposed to to feel better, but you still don't feel better. In this episode, you'll discover why self-care doesn't always reach the deeper exhaustion happening in your nervous system, how chronic stress and emotional overload can quietly disconnect you from joy and vitality, and why understanding what I call the glimmer gap can help you stop blaming yourself and help you begin to reconnect to yourself again And we'll end with an inner challenge, something you can do today to feel better. I was at a beautiful event last week that focused on health and longevity. I began talking to another attendee, and when she learned about my mental wellness program, Inner Challenge, she said something that immediately made me think, she said, "I am a self-care queen, and I feel like a pauper." I had a little laugh. You know that feeling, that self-care has become almost like a part-time job that doesn't seem to be giving much back. One of the things I see over and over again in midlife is people treating self-care like another responsibility, another task to accomplish, another box to check, another thing on your already overcrowded to-do list. So you get to the gym, you pass on the office donuts, you take breaks from your screen, you hydrate again and again and again. You go to bed when what you really wanna do is stay up and scroll. All these outside strategies that are supposed to help you feel better, but internally, you may feel emotionally muted, flat, numb, or disconnected. Or perhaps you feel like your life has slowly become more about doing and maintaining instead of truly living. And to some degree, yes. As we age, life does ask more of us and our nervous system. You may be caring for aging parents while supporting children. You may be managing work stress, health concerns, financial pressure, changing relationships, grief, uncertainty, or simply the emotional weight of constant responsibility. You can adapt to chronic stress. You can adapt to exhaustion. You can adapt to loneliness, over-functioning, and even emotional numbness. You can even adapt to living on high alert for so long that it starts to feel normal. In fact, you can confuse adaptation with wellness because you're still functioning at a really high level. Just because your mind and body adapted to stress doesn't mean this is how you were meant to live. There is a better way. I think many people imagine emotional numbness as something severe or dramatic, but often it's much quieter. It looks like nothing sounds that exciting anymore. You rarely feel rested. You struggle to feel present. Even enjoyable moments don't fully land emotionally. You're constantly managing life instead of experiencing it. Your nervous system feels tired even when your schedule slows down. This is where the idea of the glimmer gap comes in. A glimmer gap is a small moment where your nervous system experiences safety, connection, vitality, awe, peace, pleasure, meaning, or emotional aliveness. And perhaps you, like many adults, are still functioning, but you're no longer fully registering these moments of glimmer. Not because you're failing, not because you're weak, and certainly not because you're doing self-care wrong, but because chronic stress changes how the nervous system operates. When your system spends years prioritizing responsibility, vigilance, productivity, caretaking, or emotional survival, the brain begins focusing more on management than emotional openness. What's emotional openness? It's the ability to move from constantly doing to simply being long enough to notice beauty, joy, connection, or awe. Adapting to stress means your nervous system becomes very efficient at getting through life, but not always fully feeling life. And this is where it's easy to become discouraged because you're trying. You're buying the candle. You're taking the bath. You're going for the walk in the woods, downloading the meditation app, and maybe even taking a weekend away. And those things help temporarily. But deeper restoration requires more than isolated acts of self-care. It requires helping your mind and body experience enough safety, regulation, connection, meaning, and emotional presence to begin opening again. Self-care can sometimes become another task, another thing to accomplish, another thing to optimize But calm is not something you force. Calm is something you cultivate. And often the first step is understanding why you feel disconnected in the first place. But when you begin to understand how chronic stress impacts your nervous system, something shifts. Your experience becomes understandable instead of confusing, or worse, shameful. And that matters because uncertainty and shame close the nervous system even more. Understanding begins to open it. One woman in my Inner Challenge masterclass shared this experience with me. She had gone to years of therapy and gained enormous self-awareness, which had helped her in many ways, yet she still felt emotionally numb. One day she said to me, "I wanna do this course 'cause I just wanna get my sparkle back." Another thing that complicates this is that most of us were never really taught how to relate to ourselves internally. We learned how to perform, how to achieve, how to care for others, how to push through, how to stay responsible, how to do. We weren't necessarily taught how to notice our internal state, regulate our nervous system, process emotions safely, recover from chronic stress, cultivate calm and emotional presence, and reconnect to meaning and vitality, or in short, simply how to be. So when numbness shows up, you often keep trying harder externally instead of listening internally. And in the first half of life, trying harder is often an incredibly important skill. It helps you survive, it helps you learn, it helps you build a career, raise children, handle responsibility. But over time, constantly pushing harder can begin working against your nervous system because it keeps your body in a subtle survival mode. This is one way of living, but trust me, there's another better way. But unlike updating your phone, it doesn't happen automatically. Your nervous system changes when you bring your attention back to the present moment and to the good that still exists inside your life. You begin walking through your days more present and noticing small glimmer gaps that matter. A meaningful conversation, a deep breath where your body actually softens, a moment of laughter, how your latte tastes, music that moves you, feeling emotionally present with someone you love, getting lost in a movie, stepping outside and noticing beauty, feeling connected to purpose, feeling connected to yourself. These moments may seem small. They're so easy to pass over, but they help reopen pathways of emotional aliveness, not instantly, not traumatically, but gradually. And often, healing in life is gradual. It's usually slower than you want, but it is trust me, you are already enough. And more about slowly reconnecting the parts of yourself that got buried underneath stress, responsibility, fear over-functioning, and survival. Those parts of you that were easier to access before life became so full and demanding. So if you've been wondering, why don't I feel better even though I'm trying? Maybe the answer is not that you're failing. Maybe your nervous system has simply been carrying more than you realized for longer than you realized. And maybe what you need is not more pressure or more doing, but more moments of noticing the glimmer moments that are already there. That client in my Inner Challenge Masterclass shared this story with me. She was sitting in her office trying to meet a deadline, and outside her window was this gorgeous magnolia tree. She noticed it for a second and immediately went back to work. But then she remembered our conversations about glimmer moments. She stopped, and she really looked at the tree. She noticed the purples, the whites, how delicately they were blended, how irregular, imperfect, but wonderful each flower was. And for a brief moment, she felt a glimmer of beauty, appreciation, and awe inside of herself. Later, she said to me, "That felt kind of strange, but also strangely helpful." So here's your inner challenge this week. I want you to begin to notice your glimmers, not the big dramatic moments, the small ones, the moments where your body softens slightly, where you feel even a little more present, a little more connected, a little more alive, a little more peaceful. Don't force them. Just notice them, Because awareness is often the beginning of reconnection, and that is often the path to feeling better. In this episode, you discovered why self-care alone doesn't always heal emotional numbness, how chronic stress can quietly disconnect you from joy and vitality, and why understanding the glimmer gap can help you begin reconnecting to yourself with more compassion and less shame. On Thursday, we're gonna talk about this in a deeper and more practical way. I invite you to join me. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on Thursday with more Creating Midlife Calm.