Nurturing Mental Wellness in the Legal Profession
The legal profession is no stranger to the challenges of stress, anxiety, and mental wellness. In the hustle of deadlines and responsibilities, it's crucial to recognize that mental wellness is not an uncontrollable aspect of life. Taking proactive steps to enhance mental health is an investment in overall well-being. Here are insights into fostering mental wellness:
1. Understanding Universality:
Common Challenges: Stress, self-doubt, and fears are universal human experiences, not unique to individuals in the legal profession.
Shared Struggles: Acknowledging that everyone faces mental health challenges helps destigmatize these issues.
2. Embracing Stress in a Meaningful Life:
Signpost of Meaning: Research indicates that individuals experiencing a high degree of stress often find their lives more meaningful.
Learning and Growth: Stress accompanies learning and growth, serving as a natural part of the journey toward competence and confidence.
3. Courage as a Precursor to Confidence:
Courageous Action: Stress is inherent when committing to new challenges. Taking action, even in the face of uncertainty, is a courageous step.
Competence and Confidence: Through action and learning, competence is developed, leading to increased confidence over time.
4. Stress as a Catalyst for Change:
Alignment Indicator: Stress can signal when aspects of life are out of alignment, prompting the need for change.
Motivational Alarm: Uncomfortable feelings act as motivational alarms, propelling individuals to address areas that require attention.
5. Proactive Mental Wellness Practices:
Prioritizing Mental Health: Similar to physical health, mental well-being benefits from conscious prioritization.
Holistic Approach: Balanced nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness contribute to positive mental health.
Recognizing that mental wellness is within one's sphere of influence empowers individuals to take charge of their well-being. By embracing stress as a facet of meaningful experiences and acknowledging the role of courage in personal growth, individuals in the legal profession can proactively nurture their mental health.
Here are five simple steps every lawyer can take to improve mental wellness today.
1. Talk to someone
Fears, shame, and negative thoughts begin to shrink when taken out of the darkness in your head and brought into the light when shared with others. The simplest first step to investing in mental wellness is to speak in confidence with someone we trust about our experience.
It may take a few tries to find a coach or counsellor you resonate with, but persevere. Having a trusted counsellor to listen and offer guidance is an invaluable support.
2. Adopt two important mindsets: positive stress, and growth
Positive stress mindset
The positive stress mindset recognises that our stress response is not a maladaptation but rather a highly evolved physiological response that helps prime us for high level performance. Stress research of the past decades has shown that much of what we thought about stress is wrong. Our stress response helps protect us from post-traumatic stress disorder, increases mental acuity, promotes the formation of memories, and helps us recover from stressful events.
It is time to stop getting stressed about feeling stress and instead take advantage of our stress response for good.
To begin to acquire your own positive stress mindset read Kelly McGonigal’s important work, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, and watch her Ted Talk—How to Make Stress Your Friend.
Growth mindset
The second important mindset to acquire is a growth mindset.
The growth mindset is the discovery of Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.
In 2006 Dweck and her grad student were puzzled by why some students were so caught up on proving their ability, and others could just let go and learn. Their research uncovered that two opposing mindsets are responsible. These mindsets are deeply held beliefs about ability—fixed ability that needs to be proven, and changeable ability that can be developed through learning and practice. She wrote about her findings in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
With a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them.
Dweck found that with a fixed mindset every situation is evaluated with questions like: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?
With a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities are things that can be cultivated through effort.
Dweck writes: “The passion for stretching yourself, and sticking to it when it is not going well, is the hallmark of a growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
All of us can benefit by taking action to adopt a growth mindset. To get started read Dweck’s book and watch to her Ted Talk—The Power of Believing You Can Improve.
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3. Don’t believe everything you think
Instead of simply believing what you think, notice what you’re thinking and analyze your thoughts. Give your thoughts the same scrutiny you’d give to unprovable statements from a client.
For instance, imagine you are on a weekend outing with your kids, at a park, when you begin to worry about whether you should have hired a particular new associate and whether he capably represented a client in a hearing last week.
That worry might lead you to have thoughts like these:
- I bet he didn’t prepare enough.
- I bet he did a terrible job.
- We’re going to lose that case.
- That client is going to be really mad.
- I hired the wrong person.
It’s important to recognize that nothing has happened, except in your head. Your thoughts are purely speculative, yet they create feelings of discouragement and anxiety for you—You’re distracted from your children and feel terrible.
Rather than automatically believing the content of your thoughts, analyze them as if a client were speaking to you.
Notice that you are thinking things that are unprovable and purely speculative. Wow! I’m having thoughts that we’re going to lose the case and I hired the wrong person. Do I have to believe that right now? Not really. Do I have proof? No. I can’t know that right now, in this moment we’re going to lose or that I hired the wrong person. Until I know for sure, I’m not going to speculate about it, especially now, while I’m with my children on this outing.
When we employ legal skills to challenge our own thinking, as we would if a client were speaking to us, we can often free ourselves from the unpleasantness and anxiety generated by thoughts that have no proof.
There is a branch of psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that does exactly these kinds of exercises. Clients are guided to reframe their thoughts from the negative and speculative to the positive and provable. You can also do it on your own.
4. Stop trying to multi-task
Multi-tasking is an illusion—it is impossible for the human brain to focus on multiple things at once. We may think we can simultaneously check email and text a friend during a boring meeting and still catch the essence of the meeting, but we truly can’t.
Multitasking actually causes harm to our brains. It weakens both our brains’ short term memory (the ability to temporarily store information while we’re working on a particular matter) as well as long term memory (the capacity to store and recall information over the passage of time).
Multitasking has also been linked to negative structural changes in the brain—in one study, multitaskers had measurably decreased grey matter in brain areas that are associated with emotional regulation, motivation, and cognitive control.
To improve mental wellness, stop trying to do it all at once. Use a timer to block out times for specific tasks, group similar tasks together during your day, and try to work on one task for an extended period as much as possible.
5. Get moving.
Finally, and we all know this—exercise is crucial to well being. It’s important for both emotional health as well as physical and cognitive health. Regular exercise helps us lift out of depression and anxiety, make new brain connections, and enhances learning, memory, and cognition. One study found that subjects showed marked improvement in depressive symptoms within ten to twelve weeks, after just 45 to 60 minutes of aerobic exercise or resistance training with weights three times a week.
And, in case you haven’t heard, sitting is the new smoking.
To get up and move throughout the day:
- Try standing during phone calls.
- Get a standing desk or elevate the one you have on blocks.
- Walk to nearby meetings.
- Take the stairs instead of elevators.
- Get up every half-hour and stretch or go for a short walk.
- You might increase muscle tone and burn a few calories, but you may also find big improvements in your mental health from a few relatively small adjustments throughout your day.
As you begin to implement changes to your routines however, it’s important to start small. Pick one thing at a time. Start with something that seems easy. Increase the frequency and then add another habit or practice. Remember that small steps can lead to big changes.
