When dealing with the spectrum of problems faced by Texas attorneys, there is no single solution that will take care of everything, but many tools are useful for both mental health and substance abuse issues.
Attorneys are reluctant to listen to opinions about how they should live unless there is Daubert-like reliability shown for what is suggested. Therefore, the following are evidence-based strategies that are shown by research to be effective:
1. Practice Gratitude
There is a growing body of research showing the powerful positive effects of thinking about what we are glad to have in our lives. This research shows that there are significant benefits psychologically, spiritually, and physically that result from reflecting on the things for which we are grateful.
In fact, due to its powerful consequences, gratitude has been one of the three most studied of 24 character strengths of people who lead flourishing lives. The most important of the findings of these studies include that people who practice gratitude experience more positive emotions, lower stress, and healthier relationships.
These studies also show that practicing gratitude physically results in more energy, healthier bodies, better sleep, and increased life span. Studies have found that gratitude has profound effects on self-esteem, depression, and the prevention of suicidal ideation.
Practicing gratitude by means of a gratitude journal—for example, thinking of three things a person is grateful to have in his or her life each morning—has been shown to increase a person’s happiness by 25% over ten weeks. Another major study found that regularly practicing counting one’s blessings and visualizing our best possible selves elevate and maintain positive mood.
A 2016 study by Indiana University showed that the effects of gratitude practice can actually make physical changes to the brain that last for extended periods of time. There, researchers found that those who completed the gratitude practices months earlier reported feeling more grateful two weeks after the task than members of the control group and months later showed more gratitude-related brain activity in the scanner.
I have often wondered what happened to me in law school that caused me to be such a negative thinker. Before law school, I could do a number of things that were exciting and fun without a lot of worry.
After law school, the idea of the consequences for every possible action automatically flowed through my mind, taking the fun out of some parts of my life.
For example, during my third year in law school, a close friend of mine had a bachelor party that would be categorized by almost all people as extremely tame. However, about midnight, a few people thought it would be fun to jump off the high diving board in the old swimming pool we grew up swimming in.
My mind filled with horror at the felonies that would pile up from such an act. After all, there was a residence adjacent to the pool, it was at night, and I had everyone convicted of burglary and myself barred from practicing law all within a minute of thinking about it.
Some of this new skill is essential to being a good lawyer. If we can’t sift through possibilities and risks with some knowledge, we can’t foresee issues and help clients effectively.
Unfortunately, many of the skills we develop in the legal profession can bleed over into our personal lives and cause a negative impact if we are not careful. This is where gratitude practice can have a substantial impact.
If we don’t use a skill, it atrophies. For most of us, thinking about what is good in our lives on a daily basis is something that was suffocated long ago by the daily anxiety of what our schedule held for our busy day practicing law.
The studies above show that by inserting back into your life some gratitude, happiness levels increase significantly.
Suggestion: Gratitude Journal or Letter
Become conscious of your gratitude. Studies have shown that taking the time to make a list of things for which you are grateful or writing a letter to someone to express gratitude for that person can result in significant improvement in the way you feel and the amount of happiness you experience.
If you doubt the science, try making a list of three to five things for which you are grateful each morning for a week and see what happens.
2. Practice Mindfulness
For attorneys, relaxing can seem almost impossible. The mind is an instrument, but sometimes it seems that the instrument has become the master.
Breathing exercises, meditation, and mindfulness practices have been very effective for attorneys who need to relax, or “quiet the mind.” Much has been written to express how impactful these tools can be to bring about peace in the life of an attorney.
I want to note some interesting findings relevant to lawyers from the mountain of research that illustrates the importance of mindfulness for lawyers.
One study that looked at a cell phone application to sample users’ thoughts, feelings, and actions at random times throughout the day found that people are least happy at times when their minds are not focused on the action they’re performing.
Another study showed that people in the 90th percentile for stress in their lives reduced their stress levels to the 57th percentile after only a couple of weeks of mindfulness breathing exercises just a few minutes a day.
Meditation has been shown to increase focus, reduce negative affect, decrease depressive symptoms, and decrease rumination, all things lawyers need. Another study indicated that meditation increases memory and recall function among those dealing with high-stress situations.
A recent major study of many of the effects showed strong evidence of the benefits of mindfulness meditation, including:
- Increased emotional regulation
- Decreased reactivity
- Improved relationships
- Less psychological distress
- Better physical health
- Less depression and anxiety
- More focus
What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment with intention and without judgment.
Practicing mindfulness is most often done by focusing on the breath, but there are countless variations of breathing exercises and resources to learn how to build control of your thoughts and worries through a sort of mindfulness practice.
TLAP’s website includes links to several of these wellness resources at www.texasbar.com/TLAP.
3. Help Others
Service work sounds like just one more thing to add to the list of things you do not have time for, but this is something helpful for you, so consider really making time to do it.
Obviously, until you secure your oxygen mask, you should not attempt to rescue others, but lawyers have been found to gain “intense satisfaction” from doing service work, and studies show it helps improve mental health and happiness.
Evidence suggests that service work can help offset the effects of stress that lawyers face. In a major study of 30,000 people, those who were employed in high-stress jobs had a 43% higher rate of death over a ten-year period.
However, in a related study of those who regularly performed service work to give others help, the rate of death was completely normal despite having high-stress jobs.
Therefore, doing service work is absolutely a strategy that can offset the harmful effects of stress in your practice.
A researcher named Dr. Martin Seligman showed how this kind of work can also increase happiness.
In an experiment called “Philanthropy versus Fun,” Seligman divided up his psychology students into two groups. The first partook in pleasurable pastimes such as eating delicious food and going to the movies. The second group participated in philanthropic activities, volunteering in feeding the homeless or assisting the physically handicapped.
What Seligman found was that the satisfaction and happiness that resulted from volunteering was far more lasting than the fleeting reward of food or entertainment.
Even if you feel that it is being done for your own selfish gain, try it anyway and before long you will experience a heightened sense of peace, joy and satisfaction in life.
Lawyers can serve each other as well. This is illustrated particularly well by one famous lawyer’s powerful story:
Some may recall a little-known member of the Illinois bar, a lawyer who suffered from suicidal depressions as a young man. After losing his true love to an early death, he became so despondent he told others he felt like killing himself. Recognizing his despair, his friends and colleagues in the bar rallied to his support, took away his pistols and knives, spent time with him, and even locked him up to protect him from himself. Thus did Abraham Lincoln survive his suicidal crisis and learn to live with and gain insights from the depressions that revisited him throughout his life. If one life lost to suicide is too many, imagine the cost of not preventing the suicide of our next Abraham Lincoln, who may, right now, be attending law school.
4. Practice Self-Compassion
Self-compassion for lawyers sounds like some kind of punch line for a half-decent joke, but this is a strategy that has a lot of research and some remarkable effects behind it.
Self-compassion is one of the most powerful tools for resiliency available to attorneys, and it is a pretty simple practice to learn.
Essentially, self-compassion is showing oneself the kindness and concern that one would provide to a good friend; put differently, it is the sensitivity to the experience of one’s suffering and a deep desire to alleviate it.
The components of self-compassion are:
- Self-kindness
- Common humanity
- Mindfulness
The research shows that self-compassion significantly reduces anxiety and depression, two of the most prominent problems faced by attorneys.
Those who practice self-compassion also ruminate far less than those who do not. Self-compassion has been found to deactivate the “fight or flight” nervous system that causes so much ongoing stress and returns us to the self-soothing system associated with secure attachment and safety.
Self-compassion has been found in a recent study to help people deal with negative life events and reduce the negative effects of difficulties stemming from negative life events.
Furthermore, self-compassion has been shown to help substantially with motivation, coping abilities, and interpersonal relationships.
There are many powerful self-compassion practices that a person can find by looking to the numerous resources on the Internet, such as Dr. Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion.org site or Berkeley’s Greater Good project.
Examples of ways a person could practice self-compassion include:
- Write yourself a letter as if you were a compassionate friend.
- Make a journal of the self-critical thoughts you have and serve as a kind critic to those harsh thoughts.
- Use the practical interruptive question when dealing with yourself harshly: “How would I talk to a friend about this?”
- Reframe self-critical thoughts as they arise so that they are fair and kind.
- Each time a critical thought arises, balance it with a complimentary or kind one.
5. Develop a Sense of Humor
The effects of humor and laughter have been heavily researched, and the impacts they have on boosting resilience are amazing.
Studies show that having a sense of humor is directly related to:
- Reduced stress
- Better psychological well-being
- Improved coping ability
- Better perspective
- Stronger social support
- Better temperament
- Better physical health
Humorous reading has been found to help people heal from negative experiences and make more of a healing impact on those negative experiences than positive reading—for example, reading about a wonderful father’s experience with a successful little-league team.
A 2014 study overviewed many important things that humor provides those with high-stress jobs and found that a good sense of humor may be one of the most important ingredients to resilience.
It noted that humor provides a behavioral tendency to engage in acts that promote happiness, a valuable portal to resilience through comical reframing, and it stabilizes positive attitudes.
Due to these extraordinary rates of burnout, depression, and other mental health consequences of chronic stress, having an experience that is fun, silly, and hopefully hilarious is scientifically just what the doctor ordered for addressing or reducing the effects of stress for lawyers.
While keeping humor within its appropriate limits in the practice of law is necessary, particularly in court and in other professional settings, lawyers should try to get a healthy dose of humor and try to take to laughing a little more often to get the positive health benefits overviewed here.
We all know that lawyers have been the subject of many jokes, but the time has come for us to do more joking for our own health and resilience.
