Emptying the Stress Bucket: Mental Health Tips for Lawyers
One of our focuses in The CLJ Member Space, by The Corporate Law Journal, is focusing on wellbeing and coaching when trying to balance your life when it comes to work. The CLJ Member Space gives members, every month, TEN materials with advice and help on your legal career exclusively for our network of 165,000. In the February 2023 edition we have a CV template approved by magic circle firms, barristers chambers, international firms and other legal organisations. We also have free legal practice tests, how to network, a commercial awareness guide, a guide on how to ace legal tests, exclusive material from solicitors and barristers, and finally we have exclusives from therapists and coaches who provide advice on how to deal with stress when navigating the legal career ladder.
The CLJ Member Space has all this plus more, join now so that you do not miss this month’s edition! Find out more here.
Pictured: Gin Lalli
Traditionally law graduates are placed under a lot of stress with professional exams, dissertations and the ever-competitive jobs market to find roles. If you’re at that point in your career right now then this article is for you.
If you can understand the science behind how the brain works, then you can understand the issues that surround mental fitness. It’s great that there is so much talk around mental health awareness, but I strongly believe more needs to be done and a new approach is required.
However, instead of examining anxiety, depression and stress in finite detail we should place more emphasis on studying those people with good mental health, those who have happiness, achievement and purpose. Many lawyers before you have gone through the same thing and survived – you can too.
I make it my aim to educate people on how the brain functions during stress to create mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and anger. It’s actually a lot simpler than you think and this overcomplication of mental health means that we’re not finding the solutions we need.
Think about the part of the brain you’re using now to read this – the conscious, intelligent part of your brain. This is the part of the brain that makes motivated, intelligent decisions. It’s the bit you know as YOU, it’s attached to all your intelligent resource and tends to be quite positive.
There is another part of the brain, the original, primitive part and your ‘fight or flight’ response comes from here. Now imagine you were to go outside right now and run into a polar bear! What would happen? Your anxiety would shoot up, your heart would race, you’d get sweaty palms, you’d have a full-blown panic attack and you’d be out of there like a flash, right? That’s a perfectly appropriate survival response in that situation. However, it’s much the same in life.
As your anxiety increases, and it can do so gradually over time, you lose that intelligent, rational control and your primitive brain steps in to take over. It won’t analyse the situation but it will go into ‘survival mode’ just as if there really was a polar bear attacking you.
This primitive brain has 3 opt-out clauses for survival – Fight or Flight or Freeze. Doing one of these would ensure you survive the polar bear. Except there’s no threat of polar bears anymore and yet we’ve taken those responses and translated them into modern day symptoms of anger (fight), anxiety (flight) and depression(freeze).
Being under that constant stress of trying to do well and succeed creates anxiety which in turn makes your primitive brain step in to take over. It’s just your brains way of trying to look after you as it feels threatened. These responses are great for surviving polar bears but don’t work so well when you’ve got deadlines to meet, a dissertation to write and other work demands. Once you’ve been ‘hijacked’ by that primitive brain it’s really difficult to remain calm and relaxed. So, this basic understanding of how your brain functions is essential to being more accepting of your stress. Trying to eliminate stress from your life completely is impossible but human beings have a huge capacity for stress too.
In fact, the brain loves a bit of stress, it loves a challenge, it likes to take a risk now and again and learn new things. The problem occurs when your stress becomes overwhelming and your ‘stress bucket’ overflows. Please consider how much residual stress you may be accumulating from all parts of your life that may be fuelling your primitive brain to go into the fight-flight-freeze response.
Now it’s at this point that you’re looking for me to answer your questions on how to take away stress from your life – but I’m not going to do that. I can’t do that! We’re all individuals with different lifestyles and that which increases anxiety in 1 person will not stress out the next.
What I’d like you to do is think about getting solution-focused and consider how you can take away any residual stress from your life. Exams and dissertation deadlines aren’t going to go away, but is there other parts of your life that you can focus on for now that will help you empty out the stress from your bucket.
Are you eating well?
Are you exercising well?
Is your desk/room/home tidy and organised?
Are you maintaining your social connections with friends and family?
If you’re not doing any of these things, adding your work and studies on top of that will definitely make your stress bucket overflow. There must be a few things that you can tackle, which may seem simple or time-wasting at first, but I guarantee, once you get these under your control your mind will be able to focus more on the important tasks. This is the solution focused approach to control; look beyond the problem and find something that you can do easily which will lower your anxiety immediately.
One last thing; I assure you that when you do those other things – your mind is not ‘switching off’ from your important tasks. Your brain is actually ‘switching OVER’ into something called the default mode network or inner rehearsal mode – it’s a very valuable and powerful state of mind where your subconscious mind is working on your problems in the background, getting things organised and coming up with the answers.
So, keep solution focused and allow your vision of your preferred future to pull you forward. Good luck!
If you enjoyed this article The CLJ Member Space, by The Corporate Law Journal, gives members, every month, TEN materials with advice and help on your legal career exclusively for our network of 165,000. In the February 2023 edition we have a CV template approved by magic circle firms, barristers chambers, international firms and other legal organisations. We also have free legal practice tests, how to network, a commercial awareness guide, a guide on how to ace legal tests, exclusive material from solicitors and barristers, and finally we have exclusives from therapists and coaches who provide advice on how to deal with stress when navigating the legal career ladder.
The CLJ Member Space has all this plus more, join now so that you do not miss this month’s edition! Find out more here.
Pictured: Gin Lalli
Gin Lalli is a solution focused psychotherapist specialising in anxiety and is based in Edinburgh.
She published her first book, How to Empty Your Stress Bucket, last year and is host of her own podcast, Stress Bucket Solutions.
Gin’s book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-empty-your-stress-bucket/gin-lalli/9781739977504
Gin’s podcast: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/A3BKSJPg9s
Edited by Prerna Deep