#216: The Real Truth About Lawyer Stress (Rewind Episode)

[00:01:14] This is Heather Moulder, your host of the Life and Law podcast. And I’m so happy that you are here with me today. Today we are talking about stress. Today, the legal industry, y’all, the stats are sobering.

What The Statistics Tell Us About Lawyer Stress

Now, you probably heard about the 2016 report from the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. If you aren’t, prepare to hear some really sad statistics. So of the respondents within that study, up to 36% reported that they were problem drinkers, 19% suffered from some form of anxiety, and 28% suffered from some form of depression. And it’s not just a recent thing. So back in 1990, Johns Hopkins did a study of numerous occupations, and of the 28 occupations that were studied, lawyers were the most likely to suffer from depression. They were 3.6 times more likely than the average person to suffer from depression. So we’ve known this for a long time, right? We’ve known that stress is a problem. We know that lawyers, I mean, it’s a stressful industry. And yet it remains.

[00:02:22] Not much has really changed. The needle’s not moving, certainly not enough. Why?

Why Is Lawyer Stress So High (Despite A Near-Constant Focus)?

[00:02:28] Well, I think the biggest reason is that we’re not adequately understanding what’s behind our stress, what the real causes are. And if you don’t understand the why, you’re never gonna be able to deal with it. You’re never going to be able to effectively manage it. You’ve got to understand the why. And so that is really what we’re getting into today.

We are going to get into the why of stress in the legal industry so that you can start dealing with it. Differently and rethink how you’re managing it.

Now, I want to be clear about what I mean by stress management. Stress management is not about coping. I am talking about reducing your stress levels drastically and keeping them there and adopting behaviors and strategies that will help you avoid and prevent stress from ever happening in the first place. Okay, so where do we start? I think it’s important to differentiate two main causes of stress.

Internal vs. External Stress

There’s a lot of different ways to classify stress. I want to go super simple.

External Stress

There’s what I call external stress, and then there’s internal stress. External stress are the things that we often think about as causing our stress. You know, you got a client who’s high maintenance and they call and apparently there’s an emergency and they demand that you get on it immediately and resolve it within 48 hours. And you’re crazy busy already.

[00:03:56] Obviously that’s stressful and it’s an external event that’s causing it that you cannot control. The pandemic is a perfect example for external stress, not something you can control.

Internal Stress

Now, internal stress has to do with what you can control.

How do you control it? It’s about your internal thoughts, what you think about stress, about the situation, how you process the thoughts around it, what emotions come up from it, and then the behaviors that that result from it.

The Science Behind How The Brain Works (& What That Means for Stress)

So now that we understand that, it’s also important to understand a couple of other things. I want you to understand the science behind how your brain works and how that feeds into the internal stress. And the reason this is so important is because that’s what you can control. You can only control you, your mind, your thoughts, how you respond to things. And that happens to be what internal stress is, right? It’s caused by all of that. It also happens to be not just what you have control over, but the lion’s share of what causes most stress. And we’re gonna get into how that works.

Neural Pathways

[00:05:06] So a couple of things to understand first, about how your brain works. Number one, neuroscience tells us that we have neural pathways within our brain. And every time you think a thought, it creates a neural pathway. The more you think something, the more more likely you are to believe it.

[00:05:23] I kind of think of neural pathways as paths in the forest.

[00:05:27] So think about this. If you’re walking along a well worn path, if you decide that you’d like to go a different way, and you go off on your own beaten path, you’re not going to create a new one. But if thousands of people follow you, then yes, you will create one. And if they keep doing that and stop going on that other path. Eventually that other path will grow over. It’s kind of how neural pathways within your brain, when it comes to thoughts, behave.

Your Brain Processes More Thoughts Than You’re Consciously Aware Of

Now, you think a ton of thoughts every single day. And there’s all kinds of theories about how many thoughts our brains think.

[00:06:00] And there’s really nobody who completely knows or agrees on it. But what we do know is there are lots of thoughts within your subconscious that you’re not even aware of that go through your mind every single day. And they do tend to be repetitive. You have a lot of repetitive thoughts.

[00:06:12] So this is why it’s so hard to change your mind on things.

Your Brain Needs Rest & Space

So the other thing to understand is to note that your brain is a lot like a muscle in the sense of you cannot work out your muscles 24, 7. They need rest, they need to relax. Right? Your brain needs the same thing. And yet we don’t live that way, do we? We cram it full of stuff. We busy our days, we try to do everything. And we never allow our brains the space to just think freely and let go. I’m often amazed at the number of clients who come to me.

Your Brain Needs To Wander

And when we start working on their stress management and we start scheduling downtime for their brains, just let it be how uncomfortable they are with allowing their minds to wander. They think mind wandering is bad.

[00:06:57] Let me just tell you, it’s not. Your mind is meant to wander from time to time. It absolutely needs it. You have all these subconscious thoughts in there. Some of them are fighting to come out to the surface, and they never will if you do not allow yourself for space to think. The other thing about allowing space is it allows you to become more aware.

[00:07:18] It’s really hard to know what’s going on in there and what might be causing you to act in certain ways when you’re not aware of the thoughts around them.

The Ripple Effect of Thoughts and Emotions

[00:07:30] So something to note. You have thoughts, right? You have a thought. Thoughts create emotions. We have emotions that attach to each of our thoughts that can be good or bad.

[00:07:40] Those emotions create a response.

[00:07:45] So the thought brings on an emotion which creates a response that happens even if you’re not aware of it. And so when you have a lot of subconscious thoughts in there that you’re not allowing to get out, they’re going to cause you to be more reactive. This is why you might come home late at night after a really rough day or week, and your kids run up to you and they want to talk to you, and you snap and then you feel bad because you don’t understand why you snapped at them. You love your kids and you want to spend time with them, but you just can’t deal. It’s because you’re not giving yourself enough downtime for your brain to just let go.

The Role of Lawyer Training On Stress

[00:08:22] Okay, Something else to understand.

[00:08:26] You as a lawyer are trained a particular way and there are certain traits that lawyers seem to have. So I don’t know if all of these are natural to us or not. I do certainly think that some of these traits were born with or we develop at a young age and having these traits make us more likely to choose the law. I know this was definitely the case for me.

[00:08:48] And then others are, we’re trained to think this way. Okay, so one of these is lawyers tend to be very driven. We’re success oriented.

[00:08:57] And that drive is partly because we want to be known for our accomplishments. We want to be rewarded. And we really do value what others think. Think, okay. I call it collecting gold stars. You know, when you got the gold stars when you were a kid and you loved it. Well, a lot of lawyers that I’ve known, and this is definitely the case for me, love to collect gold stars as an adult too. And we want to have all the answers. We don’t like to be wrong. In fact, we’re told we’re supposed to have all the answers. All of this only serves to increase our stress levels, right?

[00:09:32] And worse off, we are trained to be skeptics and very risk averse. Now that can be incredibly good for our clients because we are always looking out for them and we are always planning for the worst case scenario to ensure them that they come out on top.

[00:09:51] But that can be really bad for you personally. There’s a little level of this can be helpful, but it can make you hypercritical, incredibly judgmental and always looking out for the bad.

The Brain’s Negativity Bias & Survival Instincts

[00:10:02] Look at all of that and you couple it with the way our brains work and it’s no wonder we’re so stressed. And you add to that one more thing. The brain is pre wired for the negative. You’ve probably heard about the negativity bias. We talk about it all the time when it comes to social media and the way that the news media works. But it’s basically this.

[00:10:25] You are pre wired to see the negative more quickly than the good. There are reasons for this, right? You want to look out for yourself, you want to protect yourself. This is a protection, effective measure of our brains.

[00:10:37] But if you don’t understand it and you don’t guard against it, it can really work against you, especially as a lawyer because we’re already, you know, we’re so trained to look for the bad and to guard against it at all times. And so all of this can work against us. So that’s all the bad news.

[00:10:57] And it might sound a little depressing listening to this, like, oh my God, I’m trained to be this way. How am I ever going to overcome it? Well, there is some good news.

[00:11:06] And before I share the good news, I want to share one other thing with you.

[00:11:13] Because what’s really important is hopefully you’re seeing how your thoughts and how you think really do matter and how there’s a ripple effect and it can create so much more stress.

How You Choose To Perceive Stressors Matters (& You Can Change This)

[00:11:26] But there’s one other thing, and this is how you perceive stress itself. So, so there was a survey done back in the 90s, I think it was, and the respondents basically had to answer a bunch of different questions about how stressed they were and what they thought about their stresses and, you know, how it was affecting them, et cetera. Well, years later, the University of Wisconsin went back and looked at the study and they went back and looked at the respondents and they, they wanted to see kind of where they are and what the long term impact had of that stress had been on them. And they found some really interesting things. What they found is that people who had high levels of stress that viewed their stress as a negative had a 43% increased risk of dying prematurely.

[00:12:08] Now, I don’t know about you, I expected it to be higher, but 43% kind of seems high to me.

[00:12:14] It is a little scary, right?

[00:12:16] But here’s the really cool thing. People who reported as having high levels of stress, yet did not view it as a negative, had the lowest risk of dying, even lower than those who reported low stress levels. What does that mean? Well, it means that how you perceive stress. Yeah, it matters.

[00:12:38] And remember, based on neuroscience, based on how we know the brain works, you can change how you see things, you can change your thoughts. It does take work, but you can.

Case Study (Me)

[00:12:50] And that’s the important thing. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about internal stress. Because when you take control over your thoughts, what you’re thinking, how you’re thinking, how you process your thoughts, you can change your thoughts over time and drastically, and I mean drastically reduce your stress levels. And I’m telling you this from personal experience, I know this to be true because I did it.

[00:13:16] I was very high anxiety, high stress growing up.

[00:13:20] If you didn’t listen to episode one, you might want to, you’ll know why. And I entered My legal career that way. And the first five years of my practice, I was a stress ball, in all honesty.

[00:13:32] And then I decided, you know what? I gotta take control.

[00:13:35] And I started to realize that a lot of it had to do with internal stuff, decisions I was making, and also the thoughts I had. And as I started to slowly work on that, my life improved greatly. And it is what changed everything for me and allowed me to become a partner in an AmLaw100 firm, to build my practice without being miserable. I enjoyed my practice, and you can too. That’s why we’re talking about this.

Effective Stress Reduction, Management & Prevention: 3 Keys

All right, so the question becomes, well, what does all this mean? What do you do? All right. There are three keys to effective stress management.

Awareness

[00:14:12] Key number one is awareness. You need awareness so that you can identify what’s stressful and what’s not, what’s causing it, what’s triggering it. Understanding your triggers helps you to plan better in the future, helps you to quickly respond to it. You also want to understand how stress manifests within your body. And the reason for this is twofold, because understanding that better is gonna better help you identify when you are stressed and you didn’t know it. And it’s also going to help you better understand what to do about it when you get stressed.

[00:14:46] And you wanna know how you tend to react, you know, when do you act more emotionally? Those high emotional responses cause the biggest ripple effect, so you wanna pay attention to that too. So awareness is key. And this is why you need to make space.

[00:15:03] Remember, space is good. Mind wandering can be incredibly good.

Resilience

[00:15:09] Part of the reason for that is to become more aware. Key number two is resilience to be stress resilient. That basically means how fast do you bounce back?

So remember, you can’t control the external.

Something happens like a global pandemic, you’re gonna feel stressed from it. But once you become aware of it, oh, this is showing up as stress in my life. You want to be able to be resilient to it and bounce back more quickly and not go into a negative stress spiral where you go into all that negativity thinking, why me? Or this always happens, oh, my God, I have no choice. And then you start taking it out on your team and your spouse and your kids and it phrase relationships. And yet all that happens.

[00:16:00] Stress resilience is about not going down that spiral. How do you do that? Well, you do it through thoughtwork to rewire your brain to process your thoughts differently and start relating to them differently. I call it getting comfortable with the discomfort of your Negative emotions.

Because here’s the thing, y’, all, you don’t stop the negative feelings.

[00:16:23] You still feel them, but you get to choose what you do with them. And you can get more comfortable with the fact that they’re uncomfortable and then move on from them, process them accordingly and move on so that they don’t impact you and make that big negative ripple effect within your life.

Prevention

All right, Key number three is prevention. Avoiding stress in the first place. So you never have that negative ripple effect and that speed basically through your choices, through your behaviors. So let’s be honest here, part of the internal is also what you choose, right?

[00:16:58] And when we talk about your choices, we’re partly talking about whether you react to something or not, but we’re also going deeper than that. We’re talking about do you understand what your priorities are and are you actually prioritizing them? Do you have boundaries?

[00:17:13] Right, so. So the same strategies that help you be more stress resilient and help you be more aware, help you to make better choices. And so that’s part of stress prevention as well.

How To Start Managing & Reducing Stress

So then it becomes, well, how do you do it? What do you do to manage stress?

Physical Self-Care

[00:17:33] Well, here’s what we know works and I like to break this up into four main categories. Number one is your well being, right? Taking care of you self care is obviously important. Exercise, eating well, sleeping, these are the things we all know we need for a healthy lifestyle that also combat stress.

Now let’s get into exercise a little bit more specifically. Exercise increases your endorphins. It helps relax you like doing something really big afterwards. There’s that kind of that high and then that relaxation.

And so it helps to combat stress in that way. It also can increase your confidence levels and make you feel more in control, which can have obvious effects on your stress levels. And it’s really a form of movement meditation when you think about it. So when you exercise, you’re forced to really focus on just what you’re doing.

[00:18:27] Now sometimes your mind wanders, which, as we’ve said, it can be a good thing. But you’re usually when you’re exercising, you’re not allowing yourself to be bombarded by all of life’s pressures and thoughts. And so it can be a form of movement meditation as well.

Breathwork

The other thing that we know works is slow, deep breathing. This is why so much of mindfulness, especially with respect to meditation, has deep breathing within it. Slow, deep breaths activates the amygdala, which is responsible for emotional regulation. It slows the heart rate and it stops the Release of stress hormones. So something you can do when you bring more awareness around your stress levels and you become aware that, okay, I’m headed down that path, take a minute. If you don’t have more. I mean, if you could take five or just three, that’s great, but one minute will really help. Take a minute. Close your eyes. Go somewhere quiet. Close your eyes and breathe just slowly through your nose, deeply and focus on it. Count your breaths.

You’re gonna notice that you’re gonna bring back a little more clear thinking. Your heart rate’s gonna slow. It’s gonna stop all those stress hormones being released in your body.

The quicker you do this, the better. Cause the more stress hormones that are released in your body, even if you stop them, they don’t all of a sudden go away. So you wanna catch it earlier. This is why awareness is so important.

But slow yourself down for just a minute or two, it makes a world of difference. And it really does help you stop and become less reactive and more responsive in a more rational manner.

Mindfulness

[00:20:11] The third thing we also know that works is mindfulness. This is where meditation comes into play. But meditation is not the only mindful activity you can do. I plan to do an entire episode around mindfulness within the next couple of months, so be on the lookout.

But the whole point of mindfulness and meditation is to increase your awareness, to change how you relate to stress, and to become better at self regulation so that you’re less emotionally reactive and you take better control of yourself.

Mindset

And then finally, we also know that mindset, Mindset is a big deal.

[00:20:50] And that’s really what we’ve been talking about most today, what you think about stress. Remember your perception of it matters. And how you process your thoughts about yourself, about your abilities, about other people, about the world around you.

That’s really what mindset is. I think I know it’s a buzzword that a lot of people overuse these days, but it’s the mentality you utilize to perceive the world and how you fit into the world.

[00:21:20] And that is the biggest game changer in my mind that lawyers seem to be unaware of. That can really change your stress levels very quickly. When you work on your mindset and you allow yourself to feel the emotions you have, not bury them. Process your thoughts and move on so that you don’t hold onto things.

That’s what we’re really talking about, right? All right. So I can’t leave you without at least something to try.

And I will tell you that I have a free resource for you that has What I’m talking about within it and some. It’s got eight separate strategies. I’m only going to give you three today because we only have so much time and I don’t want to go over it. And that resource is called 5 Minute Stress Solutions. Every single one of the strategies can be done in five minutes or less. Most can be done in under five, like well under five minutes, like a minute or two. I highly recommend you get it. You can get them in the show notes.

So look there and there will be a link for you to grab hold of it.

Stress Management Tools + Strategies

Take 10 Method

So strategy number one is what I call the take 10 method. And it’s basically just setting aside 10 minutes per day for your thoughts just roam to go free. It’s a mindfulness type exercise for you to become more self aware.

And not only does it allow for you to become more aware of what’s going on because remember when you get really quiet, those subconscious thoughts that you’ve been having that you’re unaware of are gonna bubble to the surface.

But it allows you to just have space. And it’s really interesting when people do this, how they start off very uncomfortable because it feels weird. We’re not used to doing this. But then how much they start looking forward to it. And after a while it’s where they get their best thoughts. Like they become more creative. They have breakthroughs on difficult projects or cases that they’ve been working on, but they haven’t been able to find an answer.

This is where those come out the most is when you give your brain space to think. So what you want to do when you do this type of thing is just set aside 10, 15 minutes if you can have it. But at least 10 minutes of time. Go somewhere very quiet. Bring a journal or pen and paper with you. And no electronics other than maybe a timer of some sort. So if you bring your phone, you want to turn everything off other than the timer. Okay. Because you do not want interruptions at all.

I like to go outside sometimes for this because I just get, I get a lot out of being outdoors in my backyard especially. I’ve got birds out there. Go somewhere that makes you feel good where you can just allow your mind to wander and let it go.

[00:24:04] And you may find this hard at first, but just keep it up, it’s going to get easier. Now the purpose for the pen and paper of a journal is sometimes something’s going to come to you that’s going to seem important and that you’re going to want to write down. That will allow you to do that and that’s it. Now, I do recommend that at first you maybe do this daily because you’re not used to giving yourself any space.

You don’t always have to do it daily. You may decide that you love to do it every day. Some of my clients will do it daily for a couple of weeks and then start doing it like three, four times a week. And not necessarily daily. You play around with it and see what works. But I promise it will help you become more self aware of all kinds of things, of where your stresses are coming from, some of the thoughts and feelings you’ve been having that you didn’t understand, why you were acting in a certain way, and they’re really the cause. You’re going to become a more creative thinker. You’re going to solve problems more quickly. It’s really, really helpful for all of that.

Cognitive Reframing

Exercise number two is, I guess, not really an exercise. It’s a strategy. It’s called cognitive reframing. So when something happens that is negative and or stressful, you have the ability to reframe it, focusing in on whatever the positive is. Because every single thing that happens to us, there is something to be learned, gained, or a positive from it, no matter how bad. So I’m a cancer survivor and that’s one of the worst experiences I’ve ever been through. But there was a lot of positive that actually came from it. And I can reframe that and look at that mostly from the benefits as opposed to focusing in on the negatives. Do I still have a risk of recurrence? Yes. Does that scare me? Yes. Has that gone away? No. Reframing doesn’t change that yet. I can choose to look at the positive. I learned how to live, like truly live, how to enjoy the present moment, how to be more present.

[00:26:00] I learned the practice of gratitude, which we’re gonna get into next and how life changing that can be. Those are the.

[00:26:08] I choose to look at that experience in many ways was a gift. I could choose to look at the bad side. I could choose to look at how hard it was. I could choose to look at my risk of recurrence, but I choose not to. Now, when you cognitively reframe, it doesn’t mean the negative goes away. I want to be really clear on this. And it’s not about making stuff up. You actually have to identify the real positives. But I guarantee there is something there. There is something you’ve learned, okay? Even the pandemic, there is something positive that has come from it. I’M certain within your business or your life or something you’ve discovered about yourself. Find the positive and reframe it so that you don’t obsess on the negatives and you look primarily at what’s good has a huge impact on your mentality moving forward.

[00:26:56] And if you start doing this regularly, you’re going to find very quickly that it becomes a natural thing that you do anytime something happens. This is, let me be clear, not the same thing of positive thinking. Just thinking positive. That’s when you ignore all the, you know, the bad. You’re not doing that, but you’re also not obsessing over all the negatives and allowing yourself to take what you can from it and move on.

Gratitude

[00:27:21] All right, the final strategy for you that I’ve kind of mentioned before is gratitude.

[00:27:27] Now here’s how gratitude works. Just think about if you were practicing. If you were grateful every single day for three to five things, especially little things, things that you’ve learned, things that you’ve experienced, how would that change your outlook?

[00:27:42] Especially in the midst of difficult times like a pandemic, like a cancer diagnosis, it could be a huge game changer and massively reduce your stress levels because you are perceiving things in a better light.

[00:27:58] This is how gratitude works and it is powerful and it is the simplest practice anyone can do. Just be grateful.

[00:28:07] All right, so that is it for today. I very much hope that you’re walking away with a much better understanding of how your brain works. How the lawyer trained brain can sabotage you, but also how you can start taking control of that.

[00:28:23] And by taking control of your thoughts and how you process your thoughts, you can get control over your stress levels. You can drastically reduce them and you can take control of your life. Bye for now.