Stress has detrimental effects on the human body. In a new study, scientist report on the relationships between chromosomes that control aging, stress and depression. Read the Story.
Does Depression Contribute to the Aging Process?
Dr Weil on the Link between Diet and Depression
Great post about the connection between the typical American diet, which sets off the inflammatory response in our bodies, and the high incidence of depression in this country. Read the Blog
How Stress Can Shape a Life
The psychologist Richard O’Connor believes that we tell ourselves stories about our lives to control stress. Stress has a way of becoming a chronic condition. It wears down your body and damages your brain, especially when combined with depression.
Yet stress is a killer we often crave like a drug. We create stories that help us make sense of an unbalanced life.
Stories of Challenge
In my work, I often felt I wasn’t doing much if I weren’t insanely “busy,” meaning stressed out completely. As much as I swore to cut back and lead a more balanced life, I could never do that for long.
Unless I felt the edge of stress, I thought I was drifting and had little motivation. I didn’t think of it as stress. It was the excitement of challenge.
Like a lot of us, the people I considered the heroes of our culture and workplace could handle more stress than anyone. They could take the heat, drive themselves ceaselessly and thrive on the challenge of super-achievement.
Take this story that made the front page of the local paper where I used to live. An attorney was driving to work on a snowy day and saw a car ahead of him slide off the freeway, hit a rock, and crash-land on its side. He stopped, rushed to the scene, pried open a jammed door and pulled out the dazed driver.
Just then another car plowed into them and sent the lawyer flying into a ditch. He got up, brushed off the snow, stayed with everyone until help arrived, then drove to work where he had a great day in a high-stakes case. Wow, what a guy! The super-achiever who jumps into the challenge and feeds on the energy of each wild situation without a moment’s rest.
There’s an important story-line here. It’s the heroic control of stress. It becomes a challenge, a test of strength and endurance. It’s a story that hides the biological damage under praise and success.
Stories of Loss
The rest of us tell humbler stories about living with stress. We try to control it through schedules and medication, lists of priorities and days of relaxation. The tools usually don’t work because the world won’t let up its constant pressure to do more.
Stress is one of the connectors between the social world and our intensely private experience of depression. I’ve read a lot about the effects of broad social and cultural changes on our inner lives, but most of that is far too general to relate to what I feel right now in my little corner of the world.
OK, we’ve lost the old bonds of community and extended family, we’re on our own in a storm of information. We face the confusion of choice, confusion over identity, rootlessness – all that may be true. But it’s the immediacy of stress that helped me make the connection, not with big social changes, but with more immediate crises.
Stress hits us through tension and the fear that we can’t handle the most threatening problems. There isn’t enough money to pay debts. I could lose my job any day. We could lose our home to the bank because we can’t make mortgage payments. I’m sick – or my partner or my children are sick – and the health costs are staggering.
The fear of loss is always there – more and more loss until disaster hits or until we settle into a pattern of living in a diminished way. We’re trapped in a world of pressures that have pushed us down. Trying to get up is a constant struggle.
That’s the way the social dimension has combined with biology and my inner life. The constant stress has deepened depression.
Spiraling Down, Spiraling Up
The story I tell myself in depression is that all these dimensions of my life have proven too much for me. I’m not good enough to handle them. I’ve never been good enough. I’m stressed all the more by memories of failure – threats I’ve run from, challenges I couldn’t meet, self-destructive actions.
The person I am, I’m certain, continues to lose control to the pressures of living.
But when I’m not depressed, everything looks different. I feel I can live the story of victory over challenges. Stress is a stimulant, one I need to stay motivated, to live at the top of my game. I’m even afraid that if I lose the tension and excitement of constantly pushing myself, I’ll start to drift into emptiness again.
There’s always an imbalance, tipping me into a spiral. One spiral takes me deeper into depression until it spins itself out. From the bottom of the whirling storm, I start to spiral upward on the other side.
In both modes, the stress is a powerful force: stress from the world and stress from inside.
Awareness of the Story
These days I feel as close to balance between the spirals of excitement and depression as I’ve ever been. I believe I have a better chance now to sustain this balance because I’ve worked at learning skills to keep me going.
I think we all have the capacity to observe ourselves in action. Usually, I used the ability to detach from experience enough to tell myself the story of how I’m living.
That’s the basic tool. Today it’s known as mindfulness – the ability to see your life as your living it and accept its changing flow without being controlled by it. Then we have to work with that awareness to retell our stories.
I know everyone doesn’t live this way, but does it make sense as one explanation? It rings true for me. How about you?
Visit John’s award-winning website Storied Mind.
This article is reprinted with permission of the author and is copyrighted.
Mechanism Sheds Light on How the Brain Reacts to Stress
Prolonged exposure to stress can lead to anxiety disorders and depression. Read The Story
Working Too Much is Correlated with a Big Increase in Risk for Depressive Episodes
The odds of a major depressive episode are more than double for those working 11 or more hours per day compared to those who only work 7 to 8 hours. Read the Story
My Desk, My Enemy: 6 Helpful Ways to Get Organized
I spend time – too much it – trying to keep my desk in check.
Like a taciturn child, it erupts with tantrums of disorganization. The fact that it’s a mess today seems unfair, as if a hole suddenly formed in the ceiling above me and dropped a cache of briefs, case opinions and half-used legal pads onto my workspace.
I shuffle the papers that lay before me. They look back at me. Ten minutes go by. I reshuffle everything all over again. Sound familiar?
Mind you, on the Clutter-o-Scale, my desk is only a 4 out of 10. If so, why the grief?
Some of my angst comes from having trouble finding things. But an equal measure comes from the sense that I should be more organized. We have made a religion out of organization in this country which has sprouted temples of crazed worship like The Container Store or Organize.com. Maybe this growth industry is in reaction to how much stuff/junk/information we like or have to obtain and perpetually reorganize. This mania has even spawned an inane reality T.V. show “Hoarders.”
Too many things compete for lawyers’ attention besides the usual culprits of returning phone calls, court appearances and last minute deadlines. When you add a messy desk to an already stressed-out life, well, it becomes the enemy.
Desks are the pedestals of our productivity. How we organize the stuff on them has a big effect on how well or if we get things done in a timely fashion. But just as important as these practical concerns is the impact it has on our mental health.
What is your Organizational Style?
According to Kelly Lynn Anders in her book The Organized Lawyer, “Not everyone prioritizes about what the eye needs to feel relaxed. Some ideas work for some and not for others. That’s why it’s important to know your type.” She identifies four types of organizers:
Stackers organize by topic in stacks. They are visual and tactile and like to give the appearance of order. The busier these people are, the more stacks they have.
Spreaders are visual like stackers, but must be able to see everything they’re working on.
Free Spirits keep very few personal belongings around the work area. They like new ideas and keep reports, books, articles and magazines near.
Pack Rats have emotional ties to things. They like the feeling of fullness around them and like to tell stories about what’s in the office.
Which type are you? She has a lot of useful suggestions, among them is color coding files. On her own desk, she keeps commonly used files close at hand. Because she identifies herself as a “stacker,” Anders avoids cabinets and other hidden spaces for her files. “The reason I don’t have a lot of hidden storage is stackers have a tendency to squirrel things away,” she said. Check out some of her other suggestions at her website.
A Contrarian Point of View
Einstein considered his cluttered desk a help rather than a hindrance to his prodigious creativity.
While we don’t have his brain’s elephantine computing power, it’s worth considering that your desk mess might not be so bad after all.
Dr. Jay Brand, a psychology professor, argues that a squeaky clean desk doesn’t always equate with a productive employee. It can actually hinder personal efficiency because a person’s desk is an extension of his/her mind. That’s because our human memory has a limited capacity, or finite ‘cells’ available for storage and since most people do multiple things at once they almost immediately ramp their working memory to capacity. They need a place to park some of the information from their working memory into the environment and what more logical place than their desks?
According to Dr. Brand, “these cluttered desks that people use to store information from their working memory are called ‘cognitive artifacts’, and they expand a person’s capacity to think and utilize the environment”. He argues that companies with clean desk policies waste time by requiring workers to clean up their cognitive artifacts every night and re-clutter them the next morning. He points out that everyone has a different working style and piles can be organized topically, chronologically, or according to an individual system. As long as the pile means something to the person who made it, it is effective.
I’ve known plenty lawyers in this group. But I ain’t one of them. Maybe it has to do with my own depression over the years. Or, as Kelly Anders suggests, it’s just my type that determines how I lay out the work space in front of me.
The Depressed Desk
When a lawyer has depression, motivation and organization are BIG problems. A lack of energy blunts motivation. We already know that it’s a good idea to keep our desk together, but there simply isn’t much neurochemical juice to get it done. But, time or a court’s scheduling order waits for no one. If we don’t keep the paperwork on the conveyor moving, we end up a casualty of our work days and add to the stress/anxiety/depression mix.
In her book Get it Done When You’re Depressed, Julie Fast writes:
“Many people equate depression with the inability to work. In reality, the problem is often the inability to feel like working. People who are depressed assume that their lack of motivation is a sign of weakness, and if they could just buck up a bit, they would be more productive. But waiting until you feel like doing something is the single biggest mistake you can make when you’re depressed and need to get things done.”
Yes, we need to start working in spite of our desire not to. Dr. John Preston, in the same book, elaborates further:
“Depressed people find it very hard to ignite this self-generated action due, in large part, to decreased metabolic functioning in the frontal lobes of their brain, which are responsible for initiating behavior. So if a person waits a long time and not only not accomplish the non-rewarding tasks but also miss out on the big projects that can bring big rewards.”
So it appears that folks who aren’t depressed and are motivated people have ramped up brain metabolism. I’m envious. Yet, there is something we can do about it. As I’ve written about before, consistent exercise helps boost the happy chemicals in our brains, jacks up metabolism and improves our motivation and focus. Moving is motivating.
We must outfox depression. It would have us do nothing. So we must do something. When I apply this simple wisdom to my day, I’m always pleasantly surprised at how my feelings catch up with my doing and how my doing affects my feelings.
My experience during bogged down moods, was that I’d get most things done, but it would take lots of energy. When I’d come home from work, I’d be spent.
Six Simple Solutions
I agree with an observation made by Leo Babauta on his blog Zen Habits: “The most important thing to remember is that you must have a system in place, and you must teach yourself to follow the system. Otherwise, you just clean your desk, and it gets messy again”.
Here are a couple of tried and true tips that have helped me:
1. Get rid of all those pens. Only keep three or four. More than that, and there’s too much ink in your work space. If you love pen, keep your stash at home. I often troll the pen aisle at Office Max — strange, but true. So I know how difficult it is to part with them.
2. Take home any books that you don’t use on a regular basis. It’s just more clutter and keeps you from easily putting your hands on the important stuff you need to do your job.
3. Hide cords – these are like a floating octopi with tenticles that seemingly go everywhere. Use twist-ties or coil your cords up.
4. Only keep on your desk what you need for that day. Then section off your desk and workspace so that everything has a specific space.
5. Have a dump day. Take everything off your desk and out of your drawer and then put it in a big pile. Then, sort through what is garbage and what you really need throughout the workday.
6. Schedule a date and time to clean your desk. Ideally, at the end of a workday. Weather permitting, do it on Friday’s around 4 so that I start my Monday fresh.
It’s About Time
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we’ve rushed through life trying to save – Will Rogers
Time is the enemy of our synapse challenged world. This beast is always just a step behind us; we keep losing ground as it nips at our heels and bears its sharp fangs. We tap on the brakes to try and slow down, but even the vacations and weekends aren’t always terribly relaxing. We attempt to break apart our days into manageable segments or, as the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Measure out our lives with coffee spoons.”
We often experience time as a force outside of ourselves; as if the clicking clock on the wall or Timex on our wrist had its own personhood that nags at us: “Do this not that, wait, what about that other that?” There is the visceral sensation that everything – everything – must be done NOW. We spin like a top trying to take it all in. We labor to manage our time while our nervous systems overload, toasted to a crisp in the microwave of our modern times.
No doubt most folk dream of chucking it all; of hopping on a Jumbo 747 to Italy to sip Chianti in a verdant field near a Tuscan village – hence the popularity of the best-selling book and movie, “Eat, Pray, Love.” But most of us will never go aerial; we soldier on and muddle our way through our lives as best we can. This becomes all the more a sticky wicket when life’s engine seizes up in the throes of a murky anxiety and/or depression. Trying to stop this pain moves to the top of our priority list; we hammer away at it, but sometimes it just won’t relent.
We feel that we must figure out our sorrow and mind-bending stress before time runs out and we find ourselves in a real pickle: “If only I didn’t feel stressed and depressed, I could get all this shit done!”
In his book, You Can Feel Better Again, Richard Carlson, Ph.D., writes:
When you feel down, depressed, or blue, there is a strong tendency to try to figure out why you are feeling the way you do and to try to do something about it. The worse you feel, the stronger the urge. Many times, particularly with regard to a ‘depressed’ person, this need to escape from the way you are feeling is ‘urgent’. One of the tricks to overcoming depression, or even extended low moods, is to learn to relax when you feel down – having faith that the low period will pass if you are able to leave it alone and do nothing. The important point to remember is: The factor that keeps you feeling down is your reaction to the ‘urgency’ you feel.’
I love this psychological approach: I had never thought of my reaction to my depression as “urgent”, but so often it is. Depression’s five alarm pain can burn down even our best laid plans. We think that the way to stop this unruly visitor is to squash it, when we might be better served by waiting it out.
Today, walking up a leafy sidewalk thinking about past fall memories, I said to myself, “I accept where I am right now.” And I really meant it. It calmed me. I accepted all that lay in front of me today. This gave me a sense of peace and rootedness. I somehow felt a kinship with the blowing trees who so timelessly anchor themselves in the rich brown soil.
Take time for yourself today. Take time to appreciate your daily bread – moment by moment – because it’s the only loaf of time you’ve got. There is much to be appreciated beyond depression’s grasp or the clatter of our anxiety. Depression, stress and anxiety do not last forever; there are gaps – some shorter or longer – between these turbulent emotional states. Learn to see that this is so.
Sometimes, I catch myself. I sense that I have let hours whizz by without having paid attention to neither my life nor a scintilla of the dear people and events that surround me. I had lived too much in my head. We all need to step out of the limitations of our own thoughts and through the portal of all the rich possibilities and blessings that lay both within and without in the time we’ve been given.
The Storm Rolls In
There are many myths and misconceptions about clinical depression. One of the most tiresome is that depression is just being down in the dumps – in my experience, it’s more like being down in the abyss. Or, that depression is just everyday sadness. Who doesn’t get sad, after all, in today’s crazy world?
But depression isn’t normal sadness – not by a long shot. Everyday sadness – which is part of the human experience for everyone bar none — is usually a reaction to some sort of loss whether in real-time (you just lost your job) or in your mind (you have a sad memory). After some period of time, our ability to adapt kicks in and our emotional world levels off; we regain a sense of emotional balance and are ready to face life challenges.
In contrast, clinical depression is persistent sadness (according to experts, something that last two weeks or more – see a list of other symptoms from the DSM- IV as laid by clicking the link above). This sadness does not go away. We do not adapt. We do not return to an emotional balance without some sort of treatment — whether it’s therapy, medication, life style changes (e.g. a committed exercise regimen) or some combination of all three.
Many folks with depression may also have an absence of the normal range of emotion – particularly the ability to experience joy. There is a flat affect – an emotionally deadening; tears are replaced by simply torment. Our emotional range, if you will, our palette of colorful emotions, is reduced to variations of grey or black. Purples, greens and yellows are simply unable to bloom in depression’s arid soil.
The predominant feeling that all depression sufferers endure, if you could call it a feeling, is unadulterated pain; a sense of darkness that sets up residence in the core of our humanity like a burned out sun that has lost its sense of heat and light.
Some people recover from depression and go into complete remission. For many that fall into this group, their depression is contained by medication, therapy, life style changes and/or some combination of all of these. Depression does not return, thank God.
Others – in my experience many – do not per se recover. They have periods of recovery and episodes of relapse. Or, their depression goes from being Major depression (a truly crippling condition where daily functioning is all but impossible) to Dysthymia (a milder, but more chronic form of depression). The biggest difference between the two is that Dysthymia does not usually incapacitate someone and thoughts of suicide are absent.
Stress can trigger the mercenaries of depression to return during a relapse and assault our mind’s garrisons – – a big problems if you’re a lawyer. Too much stress, too many triggers and a lawyer who had been doing pretty well finds herself or himself falling into the basement of despair. This underscores the importance of learning about the patterns of depression in our lives so as to head it off at the pass.
It’s as if each person’s depression (while sharing some common features – hence the DSM IV) has its own personality, like the classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. We must learn read the habits of our depressions because we will then be able to recognize the signs of the trouble brewing inside our heads.
Like a storm seen in the distance from the shore, those who’ve been through a depression can sense the barometric pressure dropping and see the threatening clouds approaching. We may not tell others of this sense of foreboding because we don’t want to concern others, feel that they wouldn’t understand or conclude that they can’t do anything to help anyway.
Other signs begin to appear as the storm moves closer to shore: we don’t have the energy to return calls at the office (our voicemail box becomes digital chunks of impatient clients or opposing counsel calling back for the third time), a fragmentation of our ability to think and concentrate and a strong desire to isolate ourselves and wait – for God knows how long – for the storm to pass.
Just as storms form because of a combination of climatic condition, so too does depression.
For law students, their personality types (often neurotic, perfectionist and overachieving), run head on into the pessimistic thinking style they learn in law school – the buzz saw of learning to “think like a lawyer.” This pessimistic style, finds trouble everywhere it looks. It may make us good lawyers, but often unhappy – and depressed – human beings.
For practicing lawyers, the qualities they took into and learned from law school meet head on with the extraordinary demands of a modern law practice. We’ve come to name those who grew up and fought in World War II “The Greatest Generation.” Perhaps today’s lawyers might be thought of as “The Driven Generation.” Law has become less of a profession and more of a business.
For a lawyer who has goes through a relapse of depression, it’s often befuddling to them why they’re they are going through all this shit again. But regardless of the reason, there you are in the thick of it; the vaporous stink of depression has fallen on you like used up coffee grounds. It seems, most assuredly, unfair. Yet, there it is.
Here are some thoughts about preventing relapse and how to keep you feeling well:
- Learn about how your depression expresses itself. When you start to experience the early warning signs of a depression, talk about with a professional. Read 5 Depression Relapse Triggers to Watch For which should give you some further signs to watch for.
- Watch your thoughts. In myself, I can see a shift from a relatively optimistic outlook to a pessimistic one. I am quicker to judge others and assume the worst about them and their behavior – as well as myself. When not in this space, I am likely to be more forgiving and – I am sure my wife would agree – easier to hang out with! Read, Therapy Better Than Antidepressants at Heading Off New Bout Triggered by Sadness.
- People who relapse are often people who stop taking their medication. They do so because they’ve been taking it for awhile, feel better and decide they just don’t want to take it anymore. This can often have disastrous consequences: a return of depression or even suicide. Beware of this and carefully plan out with a professional how to taper off medication if that’s where you would like to go. Read, What is Depression Relapse and Can It Happen to Me?
The $tress of Success
We avatars of the legal system, we hired guns who ride into town and shoot up saloons, measure our success by the notches on our dusty belts: Did I win or lose? Or, perhaps more accurately, is it: Am I a winner or a loser? There is a thrill about winning and being successful, however we define it — but also a lot of stress.
Results, bottom-line bastards that they are, can spew toxic stress into our bodies like BP oil into the Gulf. Many lawyers struggle to shut off their inner dialogue that pings between their ears as they lay awake at night and their family sleeps: “Will I be successful tomorrow? Will I bill enough hours this month?” We mash ourselves up like Idaho potatoes flopping around in our beds as the minutes click away on our L.E.D. alarm clocks.
I wrote an article for Trial Magazine about the connection between stress, anxiety and depression. Here’s a part of that article:
“How our bodies and brains deal with stress and anxiety hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years. A wonderful defense mechanism, which is wired into our nervous system, is called the fight-or-flight response. When confronted with a threat – whether real or perceived – this response kicks in and floods our bodies with the powerful hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which propel us into action. This was an essential survival device for our ancestors who lived in the jungle and would have to flee beasts or fight foes trying to kill them.
Lawyers don’t face these types of real life-or-death threats. But they perceive life-or-death threats in their battles with opposing counsel while sitting in a deposition or sparring in the courtroom. Our bodies respond as if they were being chased by a hungry lion. Over time, this chronic anxiety causes the release of too many fight-or-flight hormones. Research has shown that prolonged release of cortisol damages areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression: the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory and the amydala (involved in how we perceive fear).”
Living in the jungle of our profession doesn’t involve warding off wooly mammoths, but it does involve a fight-or-flight from mental constructions in our heads: the fear of missing a court ordered deadline can create panic in our nervous system every bit as real as a tangling with a beast that tried to kill our ancestors.
Lawyers are perfectionists and overachievers who are never content to give things their just their best try. They believe in dumping large amounts of energy into each and every project. Such extraordinary efforts are stressful on our bodies and minds. Yet, we know all of this, don’t we? The truth is that many lawyers have already made the calculations in their heads and are willing to take the pounding for more dollars. We come back to our abodes at the end of our days exhausted, peak at our mutual funds statements and turn on the T.V. too tired to think about the implications of living this type of life.
Lawyer Steve Keeva, in his piece Take Care of Yourself, wrote:
“The dominant method of legal billing can, if you let it, subvert your ability ‘to claim a full and rich life for yourself,’ as litigator John McShane put it. Think about it. Billing by the hour is extraordinary in the way in which it so nakedly equates money with time. It thereby offers no incentive at all to stop working. The taskmaster par excellence can reduce grown professionals to slavish piece workers.”
When exploring the stress of success, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that depression happens in a context, a cultural milieu and a profession’s mores. Too often, we put everything on the individual – her depressive thinking, his genetic makeup – as if depression in a person forms and takes place in a vacuum: if it “takes a village to raise a child;” well, it takes a culture to create conditions for depression to develop.
We are social creatures that need support from our families, institutions and society. These structures help mitigate stress and prevent depression. Yet, contemporary culture has largely failed us: the breakdown in families, the betrayal of cultural and political institutions, a grimy cynicism in people, vacuous and crass entertainment unmitigated consumerism and a legal profession which endorses the value of professionalism while lawyers say that levels of incivility between lawyers is at an all time high. It’s become more of a business than a profession and calling, it’s become more mercenary in nature where lawyers forget that they are officers of the court and not just there to do the bidding of a well paying client.
Bruce Levine, Ph.D., author of the book Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, writes about renowned psychoanalyst and social critic Eric Fromm’s commentary on the connection between our cultural values and depression. Here is an excerpt from book about the dangers of a comsumerism driven culture:
“Fromm argued that the increase in depression in modern industrial societies is connected to their economic systems. Financial success in modern in modern cultural societies is associated with heightened awareness of financial self-interest, resulting in greater self-absorption, which can increase the likelihood of depression; while a lack of financial interest in such an economic system results in deprivation and misery, which increases the likelihood for depression. Thus, escaping depression in such a system means regularly taking actions based on financial self-interest while at the same time not drowning in self-absorption – no easy balancing act.
The idea that money and buying stuff and acquiring status = happiness isn’t treated for what it is – a paper thin myth. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with making money; buying things and wishing to obtain a certain level of success in our careers. It’s a healthy recognition of the limitations of our income and what it really can buy that makes all the difference and keeps us out of this downward spiral.
In the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, author Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., concludes:
“One of the reasons for the failure of materialism to make us happier may be that even hen people finally attain their monetary goals; the achievement doesn’t translate into an increase into an increase in happiness. Also, materialism may distract people from relatively more meaningful and joyful aspects of their lives, such as nurturing their relationships with family and friends, enjoying the present, and contributing to their communities. Finally, materialistic people have been found to hold unrealistically high expectations of what material things can do for them. One father confided to me that he believed that purchasing a forty-tow-inch flat-panel TV would improve his relationship with his son. It didn’t.
A more spiritual take on the issue was penned by famed author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In his classic work, No Man Is an Island, he writes:
“One of the chief obstacles to a sense of wholeness in life is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drains every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.
Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.”
For Merton, that one thing was God. For some of us with depression, this may be our touchstone as well; a center around which to slow down the centrifugal force of our spinning lives. For the others, it may be our family or friends. But whatever it is, it must ground us and bring out, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “The better angels of our nature.”
To lessen the stress in your life, and the risk for developing or exacerbating your depression, try these tips from your friend Dan:
1. Fast for a few days from the radio in your car, the newspapers or fooling around on your Blackberry. Take a time out. Think of it as an experiment. Lawyers complain that they’re stressed out only to dump more information and stimulation into their craniums at every few moment they have. Lawyers already read and think enough for a living – give your nervous system a break for crying out loud.
2. Hand in hand with the above, incorporate some slice of silence into your life. It doesn’t have to be a monastic experience. I wear a runner’s watch and do a ten to fifteen minute period of silence a day. If you don’t do something like this, you know what you’re stuck with – too much noise.
3. Start asking yourself some questions. What toll on your mental and physical health is your drive to succeed exacting on your life? Make an actual list, take it out every day and read it. The purpose is to try to become more conscious of the actual cost of your career to you. People tell me they don’t have the time to do this, but then spend hours researching whether to buy a Lexus or Audi. The irony of it all.We love accumulating things and experiences in our society. Instead of adding something into your life, what can you drop out of it that would make you feel better?
4. Read something that would nurture you as a person and dump the rest of the crap. Read only one thing at a time. Maybe a book of poetry or the biography of a heroic person.
5. Reconnect with the humorous, whether highbrow or sophomoric. Plug into it and have a gut-busting hoot.
6. Remember, that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. The time you’re spending at your job is a segment of finite time that you’re given. Once it’s spent, it’s spent. No one tells you how to spend it, despite what you might have gotten yourself around to believing. Remember, you choose. My priest once said that on every gravestone there are two dates: the date we were born and the date we died. We don’t get to choose those dates. But between those dates, is a dash line: “—.” That dash is our life and what we have done with it. Resolve to be a person whose dash is driven by substance and not solely by success. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Let your life sing so that upon your death, even the undertaker will weep.”
7. The notion of “quality time” for oneself or others is largely bullshit. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D. once said that to overcome depression we need to start investing in ourselves like we’re worth it: exercising, sleeping enough, etc. No matter how you slice it, there is no small amount of “quality time” in which you can achieve these basic self-care routines. The reality is you will need to take whatever amount of time it takes because YOU are worth it.
8. If you are locked in the success matrix as a lawyer, remember that it doesn’t have to stay that way forever. Realistically, your life won’t probably change tomorrow. But it can begin to change in small way that can lead you in a healthier direction.
Stress, Depression and Our Bodies
Working as a lawyer and struggling with clinical depression is tough. I know, because I deal with both every day. In a peculiar sense, it’s really like having two full-time jobs that absorb all of our time. As we know, the daily demands and stress of our jobs as lawyers are often unremitting: Deadlines to meet, phone calls to return, and that motion to argue in Court the next morning. We often feel that others who aren’t lawyers really don’t understand us and our work because they haven’t walked in our shoes.
The “job” of being depressed seems to parallel my experience as a lawyer. A common experience of feeling depressed is feeling alone and isolated. When people who care about us reach out to help, there are times we push them away out of a sense of bitterness, thinking: “You really don’t know what it’s like to be a lawyer”.
Yet, there may come a time when we might want to begin seeing depression and our vocation as lawyers a little differently. Not as two jobs, but really one. The one job is to find a way to take care of ourselves. Mother Teresa once said that what God expects of humanity is that we be “a loving presence to one another.” Taking that further, I would suggest what God equally expects is for us to be a loving presence to ourselves.
In any law firm, the barometric pressure of stress rises and falls frequently. Consequently, we often find it difficult to be a “loving presence” to ourselves: to eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, and nurture a support structure of good friends. The gale-force winds of stress, burnout and depression can begin blowing and disconnect us even from this basic agenda. Yet, if we are to regain our health in the midst of chronic stress, burnout and depression, we must return to these basic concerns because these maladies afflict our minds and our bodies. Our physical state -our precious bodies- gets hammered by the unremitting punishment which they dish out. I have often described my depression to friends as “wet cement running through my veins.”
The biochemical imbalance that is so often a part of depression affects every part of our physical makeup: our eating, our weight, our energy level, and our ability to sleep. How can we realistically hope to “feel better,” to regain the healthy ground that depression has knocked us off, if we don’t offer a loving presence to our tired and afflicted bodies left unbalanced, weakened and fatigued in depression’s wake?
Being a loving presence to our bodies is like being a loving parent. We need to pause – and to have a support structure of people who remind us to pause – to ask ourselves what is good for our bodies. My family doctor once told me that our bodies are like giant tape recorders that remember everything we have done to them. Too little sleep, too much stress, not enough exercise tells our body that we simply don’t care and/or don’t have the time for it. This pattern can have catastrophic consequences when depression hits because the body that we need to help us is not fully able to be our ally. Because it has been ignored, it is of little help to fight depression and actually participates in it. Anti-depressant medication can be a way, especially in the beginning, to begin to soothe our bodies, to calm our minds enough, so that we can begin thinking of how we are going to rebuild that loving relationship with our bodies.
One of my favorite parts of the Bible comes from the Old Testament, the Twenty Third Psalm. To me, it speaks about the journey: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.” All humans must make this journey. We must all “walk through the valley” of a life which is certain to have its victories and times of happiness, but also its stunning defeats and times of deep sorrow. The shape of those victories and defeats take a particular form for lawyers. Even more so for lawyers who struggle with depression. The valley can feel more like a deep trench with no way out. Our bodies can feel buried in this trench with no light or air able to penetrate depression’s paralyzing weight. Yet, there are steps each of us can take to begin our climb out of this hole. In my experience, our bodies are like the ladders propped against the trench of depression. The great Psalm tenderly says to us that we are not alone; God is there with us in the deepest darkness. Yet, I would also suggest that our bodies are there for us also, waiting to assist us in our journey towards wholeness.
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