For Attorneys: Burning the Adversarial Candle at Both Ends

Attorneys must deal with the same stressors as the rest of us.  Balancing work, family, financial pressures, raising children, dating, marriage, divorce, and surviving Thanksgiving dinner in the age of Trumpian politics.  But attorneys also have several special stressors, and some of the stressors that most of us need to deal with, often get handed to attorneys on steroids.  Let’s look at the stress in attorney’s lives and some tips for self care. 
First, attorneys are often competitive by nature and work in a competitive environment.  This is more obviously the case for litigators, who are modern gladiators, using paper, pen and their verbal arguments as their swords and shields.  The fight hormones and fight brain and nervous system mechanisms exist in order to get us through fights and are in our basic DNA.    But turning them on for the courtroom battle, means that attorneys are switching on their fight and flight mechanisms, and may have difficulty turning them off.  Cortisol and other stress hormones enable our fight, but when they stay in the system chronically, they have destructive impact on our health, sleep, and mood.
Second, attorneys often work long hours and may work on difficult life issues where they are witness to life tragedy.  This not only adds stress, it may take a toll on exercise, and encourage grabbing fast food, or too many restaurant meetings.  Add to this, attorneys may take their work home in their heads, even if they leave their briefcase at work or undisturbed in their home office.  They “work” cases in their heads, go over details of what they did, what upset them, and what they may have missed.  In our electronic world, we can add to this surfing the web late at night, checking emails, and responding to work issues late into the night or early in the morn.  For many of us, our smart phone is the first thing we check in the morning, the last thing we check at night, and even the thing we check in the middle of the night.
Another way that attorneys may take work home is by bringing their adversarial training and experience home to their families.  No one benefits from an adversarial stance on the home front. It is the wrong way to be a spouse, partner, friend, or parent.  Indeed, this is worse if you are very good at it, as it is a kind of unfair fighting.  As an attorney you have been trained to win arguments, and other family members haven’t.  So, you are a trained fighter and they are amateurs.  Indeed, the very idea that you should “win” arguments at home is the wrong attitude.  You should be an advocate for your partner, spouse, friend, children…anyone you care about.  You should be looking to see how they can “win” first and foremost and how the whole family, or both friends can “win” together.
Sleep can be a big problem for attorneys.  Like any busy person,  attorneys might not exercise, often sits sedentary at a desk for hours, and has a lot on their minds.  Add to this the adversarial aspect of legal work, and you have a formula for poor sleep.  Sleep research shows that we need about 7 to 8 hours a sleep per night.  It does not matter if you can perform on less, as many people can, but this takes a toll on physical health and mood.  Poor sleep is associated with anxiety, depression, anger, heart disease, weight gain, and diabetes.  Genetically, we are endowed with a certain number of hours of being awake.  We don’t yet know how to read those genetics, but nevertheless you can use your waking hours as you like.  In other words, sleep less and you will live less years.
Poor sleep makes us edgy, agitated, and more prone to anger and depression.  If we have something going on with our physical health it interferes with healing and makes for greater pain.  And then we sleep even less.  When we don’t get enough sleep, our bodies get a signal to slow metabolism, and so we burn calories more slowly, leading to weight gain with the same number of ingested calories.  Poor sleep also becomes a habit, leading to chronic insomnia and shortened sleep patterns.  These can be very difficult to break.
Given the high stress in many attorneys’ lives, it is no wonder that some might turn to alcohol or even drugs. Alcohol and drug use are all too common among attorneys.  How much is too much? The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA) instruct  that for women, low-risk drinking is defined as no more than 3 drinks on any single day and no more than 7 drinks per week. For men, it is defined as no more than 4 drinks on any single day and no more than 14 drinks per week. Prior to driving, 2 drinks may be 2 too many.  And of course if you double the alcohol in the glass, that already counts as 2 drinks! Even if you drink less than this, 2 drinks can disturb sleep, which means you may not have a drinking problem, but you may have more impaired sleep.
Tips for Lowering Stress

1. Put work aside.It is critical that you carve out time for other activities.If time is short, put these leisure activities on steroids, like you do your work.So, if you can’t golf for 4 hours, run or vigorously work out for 45 minutes.Join a spin class, form a running group, take your kids to Sunday brunch with no cell phones allowed.
2. You need to shut off the fight and flight stress system.Yoga is increasingly popular and it is a great workout and forces a meditational state that counteracts stress.Running or doing the elliptical machine can do the same if you get your heartbeat up, as blood moves from your brain to your workout muscles and heart.Romantic comedies and adventure movies or a good novel are all means of escape, but you must put your smart phone in another room.Every check of your smart phone brings you back to your starting point, and you are starting the whole R & R process over.
3. Leave your adversarial prism and skills at work. They have no business in family life.If you want to bring a skill home, bring home your advocacy skills and advocate for your loved ones’ position, not yours.
4. Quality time with loved ones and friends is critical, but I am also an advocate for non-quality time.Kids, spouses, and partners all benefit from just time together where you are present, and not working or on the phone.Relationships require both quality time and non-quality presence.
5. Sleep.Take time out for proper sleep. Turn off all smart phone and web activity two hours before bedtime, they disturb sleep.Limit you alcohol to improve sleep, even if you are only a social drinker or using two drinks to “take the edge off.” If you are not sleeping well, or have developed an insomnia pattern, get help from your family physician or a mental health professional.Psychotherapy for sleep, called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-Insomnia (CBT-I) is more effective for chronic insomnia than medication.
6. Take care of your body. It’s the only one you are getting.Exercise, proper eating, control of alcohol and drugs are all imperative.They help lower stress, they repair the body, and they make us better, more creative thinkers.
7. Workaholism is a whole topic in its own right.Make an honest assessment if you are using work to avoid the stress of family, dating, relationships, parenting, or because it makes you feel important.I remember working in therapy with a judge who saw his role on the bench as a welcome respite from family conflict, his poor parenting, and his bad marriage.Working on his relationship skills and couple’s therapy not only helped his mental health and relationship quality, it ended his workaholism.

 
Finally, if stress, depression, anxiety, agitation, anger, or poor sleep are weighing on you and not very temporary states, seek help.  Psychologists and other mental health professionals have effective tools to help you, as long as you have a commitment to change. If depression or anxiety are really severe, seeing a psychiatrist for medication, who might also bring in a psychologist, is imperative.  Psychotherapy can be somewhat costly in terms of both time and money, but your marriage, family, children, and your quality of life are worth the investment.  I have had the privilege of working with several attorneys at the end of their lives, and I assure you none said, “I wish I had worked more.”  If they have any regrets, they are about not living life fully and not enjoying work-life balance.  While I wish you long life, the perspective of how one would see one’s life looking back can help us see what is truly important in our lives.