Rewire Your Burned-out Brain

Burnout often results from extended periods enduring the emotional stress precipitated by unaccomplished expectations or failure to fulfill unreasonable demands. The symptoms can include intensified emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, lowered self-worth, changes in eating and exercising habits, social withdrawal, sleep disorders, anxiety, and depression.

If You’re Burned Out, Your Brain Has Rewired to Survival Mode

There are specific and reproducible patterns of changing neural activity and brain connectivity associated with the stress buildup that leads to burnout. In the high-stress state subjects’ neuroimaging scans reveal less activity in the higher, reflective brain (Prefrontal cortex/PFC) and more activity in the lower, reactive brain that controls involuntary behaviors and emotional responses. Prolonged stress correlates with structural increases in the density and speed of the neuron-to-neuron connections in the emotion-driven reactive networks of the lower brain and corresponding decreases connections in prefrontal cortex conscious and reflective control centers.

The explanation of these changes is attributed to the brain’s neuroplasticity defined by the phrase: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The brain literally rewires to be more efficient in conducting information through the circuits that are most frequently activated.

When stress is frequent, the more frequent activation of the neural pathways to the lower, stress-reactive brain results in their strengthening from enhanced wiring (dendrites, synapses, myelinated axons). These pathways can become so strong that they become your brain’s fast route to its lower, reactive control centers. The stressful, burned out state when the lower, reactive brain is in charge overcomes the calm, reflective, and productive higher neural processing in the (PFC) – the preferred brain locale for control of behavior and emotional self-management.

As your efforts to achieve unreasonable goals are thwarted or increasing demands recur, and the lower brain dominates more frequently, you lose touch with your reflective brain. With less management coming from your reflective PFC, it becomes harder and harder to logically see these challenges in realistic perspective or to solve problems creatively.

Disappointments take on more emotional power and without your higher brain’s perspective, they are interpreted as personal failures. Your self-doubt and stress further activate and strengthen your brain’s involuntary, reactive neural networks. The spiral down to burnout accelerates as these circuits become the automatic go-to networks. Your brain achieves less success in problem-solving and emotional control and ultimately reacts by withholding efforts to escape the burnout state.

Reset Your Brain’s Default Neural Network from Retreat to IGNITE!

The good news is you can apply what we’ve learned from neuroscience about your brain’s survival mode to take actions to retrieve voluntary control of your choices and emotional wellbeing.

You can activate the same neuroplasticity, that gave dominance to the lower brain networks in the burnout state, to construct a new, stronger positive default response. With increasing successful experiences in achieving goals, you can reset the circuits to redirect your brain to access its highest cognitive resources. You can build up newly improved circuitry switching your responses from retreat to IGNITE for mindful awareness and creative problem-solving!

Since an effort-failure pattern sets up the brain’s survival response to withhold effort, you’ll need to strengthen your brain’s recognition that effort toward your goals can result in success. Your weapon of mass reconstruction can come from your brain’s very powerful drive for its own intrinsic neurochemical reward— dopamine and the deeply satisfying and motivating pleasure it brings. When the brain releases dopamine in rewarding bursts, you experience a deep intrinsic satisfaction along with increased motivation, curiosity, perseverance, and memory. Dopamine is particularly released when your brain recognizes that you’ve achieved a challenge (from the “I get it” of figuring out a joke to the satisfaction of completing a marathon).

To get the dopamine-pleasure response from challenges achieved, you’ll need to plan for your brain to experience frequent recognition (feedback awareness) of incremental progress. The choices of what you set as a goal should be guided by their desirability and the goal’s suitability to be broken down into clear segments. You want to set goals, the progress of which, you can chart or easily recognize with each stepwise challenge and success. The pleasure burst of dopamine’s intrinsic motivation accompanying your brain’s recognition of each progressive increment achieved in the goal pathway will keep you motivated to persevere.

Goal Buy-In for Your Brain’s Neural REWIRING

Buy-in and relevance are important in choosing your rewiring goal. Since your goal is to rewire your brain’s expectations that your goal efforts do yield progress, despite increasing challenge, you need to really want the goal. This is not the time to challenge yourself with something you feel you should do, but won’t really look forward to, such as dieting, climbing stadium stairs, or flossing after every meal.

The idea of planning and achieving goals as a burnout intervention is probably not new to you. These are likely to be activities you’ve considered but didn’t do for the obvious reason. They take time. when it comes to adding another activity to your schedule, past experiences have left you with the expectation that there is not enough time.

These first goals that can provide ongoing awareness of your progress are often tangible (visible, such as planting a garden or making pottery on a wheel, or auditory such as playing an instrument, or physical such as learning tai chi), but your goal can also be spending more time at something you already do, but want to do more frequently or successfully, such as journaling, practicing yoga, or sketching.

You’ll Find Your Own Goal for Buy-In, but Here are Some Examples of Planning 

Physical goals: Notice I didn’t say exercise. That’s not as motivating as “training” for a physical goal you want to achieve, even though they often overlap. If you want to run a 10K, and you enjoy running, the goal for an achievable challenge could first be building up to the distance starting with your baseline distance you comfortably run now. Then, plot out the increments that you’ll consider progressive successes, such as adding 100M each day or a week (with increments based on what you consider both challenging and achievable). Once you reach 10K goal, speed can become the next goal again plotted out in segments of incremental progress before you start.

Hobbies: From woodworking to shooting wooden arrows, hobbies really are opportunities for brain rewiring. Again, plan your stepwise achievable challenge increments. If you select darts, start with a home dartboard—low initial investment and throw from a close, but challenging distance at first. As you get better in accuracy move back further. Record your results with the notations of the distance of each improvement you set as an achievable challenge. If you get so good that you are no longer challenged by the dartboard, try that archery!

Mindfulness and meditation are certainly positive interventions for burnout and will be topics of a subsequent blog.

Your Rewired Brain’s Default Changes from Defeat to Ignite

With your understanding of what happened in your brain to create the hopeless frustration of burnout, you’ll hopefully have more positive expectations to help you put in the effort to try (or retry) suggested interventions. Your own natural dopamine-reward system will then be at work deconstructing the resistance network built by your burnout as you reset your circuits of motivation.

The repeated experiences of dopamine-reward you’ll experience as you monitor your goal progress will literally change your brain’s circuitry. Repeated effort-reward experiences promote the neuroplasticity creating neural networks that expect positive outcomes in your new default network. This is because your brain will build stronger connections into the memory pattern. The expectation in achieving this challenge will bring pleasure. As with other less used networks, the previous lower brain stress-activated go-to response network you developed in burn-out, that caused you to react negatively to stressors, will be pruned away from disuse.

You’ll be rewired with optimism and renew positive expectations about your self-efficacy. With your higher, reflective brain back in control, as you access your perseverance, innovation, and creative problem-solving when you need them.

Just be sure to take the time to break down big challenges into opportunities to recognize incremental progress as you achieve each small step en route to your goals. With that positive recharge, your well-deserved dopamine reward will sustain your brain’s motivated perseverance on to the next step of the path to your goals.

Dr. Judy Willis is a board-certified neurologist and middle school teacher, specializing in brain research regarding learning and the brain. With a unique background as both a neurologist and classroom teacher, she writes extensively for professional educational and parenting journals and has written six books about applying the mind, brain, and education research to classroom teaching and parenting strategies. The Association of Educational Publishers honored Dr. Willis as a finalist for the Distinguished Achievement Award for her educational writing. Check out her website.

 

 

Am I Depressed Because I’m a Lawyer?

Patrick Krill, a lawyer turned mental health counselor and consultant to law firms about lawyer mental health issues tries to answer the question: “A predicate to all of this, however, is the need to determine if you are actually depressed. Maybe you just hate your job, end of story. Moving on to a different practice or firm could be the change you need.  Or, maybe you have an underlying medical condition that is masquerading as or causing a depressed feeling.”  Read the rest of his blog here.

Why We Need to Talk About High-Functioning Depression

Emily Laurence writes, “High-functioning depression is when someone seems to have it all together on the outside, but on the inside, they are severely sad. Carol Landau, Ph.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior and medicine at Brown University, says she primarily sees this in women with a penchant for perfectionism—AKA the same people who are likely your colleagues and friends with enviable lives and a long list of personal achievements.” Read the rest of her blog.

Success Syndrome: The Ambition-Depression Connection

“I’m trying to get comfortable with the idea that I am a human BEING not DOING, and that being a child of God is enough. With therapy and lots of soul searching, I am digging inside for the strength that lies at my core — naked, unassociated with any accolade or achievement,” writes Therese Borchard. Read her Blog

An Interview with Will Meyerhofter About Depression in the Law

Will Meyerhofer, JD LCSW, is an author and a psychotherapist in private practice in NYC.  He holds degrees from Harvard, NYU School of Law and The Hunter College School of Social Work.  Following law school, he worked as an associate at the BigLaw firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City before becoming a therapist. He is also the creator of the website and blog The Peoples’ Therapist.  I spoke with Will about what depression is, how it forms and why so many lawyers are afflicted by it.

Dan:  As someone who has suffered from depression and treats people for depression, what is depression and how does it develop?

Will:  When Freud was asked why he went into neurology, and medicine, the career which developed, for him, into psychoanalysis, he said he was inspired by Charles Darwin’s astonishing breakthrough with the theory of evolution.  Freud was an admirer of Darwin.  That’s relevant, because evolution, I believe, plays an important role in depression.  Depression is an evolutionary adaptation of humankind gone wrong.

It’s a bit like Sickle Cell Anemia, which is actually an adaptation in our blood intended to prevent Malaria.  Unfortunately, that adaptation can also go too far and result in a harmful blood disorder.
Human beings have an enormously long childhood – the period of dependency following birth.  That is chiefly due to our single most important adaptation – large brains, which at full size, would never fit through the birth canal.  So we are born with a partially developed brain, about a third of its full size.  As a result, our brains require a strikingly long period following birth– at least compared to most other higher species – to develop and mature.  During that time, we’re utterly helpless.  Many species are born, brush themselves off, and a couple of hours or days later, they are up and running around – just think of horses birthing foals.  That’s not true for people.  Humans take 10-14 years before they’re in any shape to take care of themselves.  Our brains don’t even reach their full size until we’re about 6 years old.

Dan:  What does this long period of childhood have to do with depression?

Will:  We humans experience a very long period in our lives in which we demand and require enormous amounts of care in order to survive.  Otherwise, we’d die.  Little children comprehend that situation on a cellular level.  If you walk away from a little child – make it clear that you are planning to abandon him for any length of time – that little child is going to absolutely flip; he is going to scream so loudly it will peel the paint off the walls.  That’s because he knows he could die if he is abandoned.  A child will always experience solitude as abandonment.  To put it bluntly – the role of a human child is to please.  It’s more intense for humans than for other life forms, because we require a lot more care and for a much longer period of time.  Reptiles lay eggs and disappear.  They might even feed on their own young and not think much of it.  But mammals need care – milk from the mother.  And of all the mammals, humans need the most care – years and years of it.  So humans spend many years learning to please.  We grow up with this directive to please – and blame ourselves if we fail at that task.  It gets coded into our brains and becomes a trained behavior, an instinct.  Keep in mind, the threat of death is real.  Historically, as a species, humans display high rates of infanticide.  This phenomenon exists in many species.  Birds often cull their young and throw hatchlings out of the nest if there is insufficient food.  But with humans, because we require so much care in our early years, if things are bad, it would not be uncommon to take a child who is disfavored – perhaps an illegitimate or disabled or otherwise undesirable child – and leave it out in the woods to die or simply abandon it as a street urchin.  It is incumbent upon every human child to please so he can receive care and survive.

Ok, so how does this apply to depression?  Under stress, humans regress – they fall back instinctively into old, unconscious behaviors acquired during childhood.  In our case, that means falling back into the childhood pattern of locating the fault within –  feeling that you’ve failed to please and that if you’re not pleasing, you are going to die.  So, when you are under stress and things aren’t going well for you, you blame yourself – it must be your fault.  Instead of acting like an adult, and getting angry and thinking – I’m not being treated well, I have a right to get angry and advocate for myself, or take care of myself, if no one else is going to do it – instead of that healthy, adult functioning, it’s the old regression, to “I’ve failed.  It’s my fault.  I’ll die because I’ve failed to please.”

An adult – unlike a child – does not have to experience solitude as abandonment.  You can say I am an adult.  I am independent.  I can take care of myself.  Not only that, I can choose an environment that’s healthy for me and I can reassure myself.  I can self-sooth, I can self-parent.  I can say to myself, hey you are a good person, come on.  You choose who you are going to be each day. You are proud of who you are. You make that determination.  You make that judgment whether you are worthy of being valued and receiving care each day.  And you can tell yourself, Hey cheer up, you are going to get through this.  You’re going to surround yourself with people who value you because that’s what you deserve and you are going to take care of yourself.  And you can feel angry if you’re not receiving the care you deserve.  That – in a nutshell – is how you address depression.  You snap out of the regression to behaving like a dependent child and become an adult, a parent for your own child.

Dan: What signs do you look for to diagnose depression?

Will:  There are two major indicators for depression that give it away each and every time.

First, I see an absence of appropriate anger.  A child does not get angry when the parent fails to provide him with suitable care – the child sees himself as helpless.  You can’t get angry at someone if you need them desperately, the way a child needs a parent.  It’s not where the hell are you, I need a feeding, my diaper needs to be changed.   Instead, the child’s in absolute panic and thinking I’m bad, I’m bad, I’ve failed here, I have failed to please – now they’ll leave me to die.  That is the first characteristic of depression – absence of appropriate anger.  If I ask a depressed client “Are you angry right now?” I’ll always hear the same answer.  It will always be some variation of “I’m only angry at myself.”  The rest of that statement would be “. . . because I’ve failed to please and can’t survive on my own.”

The Second indicator of depression is a dismantling of a person’s self-esteem apparatus. There’s no sense of pride in yourself or a sense of value in who you are and what you do. You think I failed, I hate being me.  A depressed person will insist, over and over again – “I’m only angry at myself.  I don’t like who I am.”  That’s because the depressed person’s fantasy is to escape into someone else – someone who will please, and therefore be worthy of care – and survival.

Dan:  The absence of appropriate anger and a dismantled self-esteem.  I think those are two things that people on the street and even lawyers would associate with lawyers. We expect them to be tough and strong.  We expect them to have high self-esteem and take pride in what they do. In your experience, why is the exact opposite true for lawyers struggling with depression?

Will:  At a law firm, you are reduced to a child-like helplessness.  You have no right to speak your mind, to self-advocate – to stand up to authority.  Instead, you go helpless, and try to please.  Any anger, if it is acknowledged to any degree, is tightly bottled.  You can’t show it.  The environment at law firms is uptight, rigid and extremely constrained.  You can’t say to the partner – “Oh, for heaven sake, it’s Friday – why are you bothering me with this?”  You say – “Yes, sir.  I’ll do it right away.”  If the partner – who is clearly exploiting you to make money – announces you are going to be working all weekend, you say “Absolutely, no problem.”   You do not put up any kind of a fight.  Lawyers, especially young lawyers, imagine themselves as helpless as young children in the law firm environment – utterly dependent on the partners, utterly incapable of advocating for themselves, or providing themselves with the care they need on their own.  They permit themselves to be abused in an extremely toxic, exploitative environment – they often don’t even seem to realize they’re being abused.  They’re too busy attempting to please their abusers.

Dan:  Will, you treat a lot of lawyers with depression.  Is depression in some way different for lawyers?  Are there different causes for their depression?

Will:  If I were to design an environment specifically to create depression, I would design a law firm.  The reason is that lawyers are pleasers.  A lawyer tends to be the kid with the best grades in the class – a generalist whose primary skill is getting good grades – pleasing teachers.   If you are really good at math, you become a mathematician or a scientist.  If you are particularly skilled on the violin, you become a musician.  But if you get an “A” in everything, then your only skill set is getting good grades – and to monetize that skill set, you wind up heading to law school.  That’s pretty much how I did it.  I got into Harvard and then went on to NYU Law.  I wasn’t spectacular at any one thing – I was a generalist.   I was also the teacher’s pet.  I was an excellent student – but what is an excellent student?  It’s someone who gives the teachers what they want. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, they dropped out of Harvard, they weren’t good students – because they – and others like them – were geniuses, and entrepreneurs, not good students.  Lots of geniuses drop out of college – it’s a common feature they share.  They’re not pleasers. Einstein struggled to complete the academic rigamarole required to get a teaching post – he was too busy re-inventing physics.

Lawyers tend to be good students.  A genius or an entrepreneur – an individualist – says I’m going to do it my own way and the hell with you.  Screw Harvard. I don’t need it.   This is in contrast to lawyer, the pleaser – the type of person who says I’m going to compete viciously with my peers and get straight A’s at Harvard and then go to a top law school and compete some more to get more straight A’s and then get a job at a top law firm and keep on competing.  What happens to a pleaser when you get to these top firms? You do what you are told.  And you compete.  That’s a very typical lawyer behavior – you are essentially pleasing partners who are replacements for your parents and teachers, what therapists call the idealized parent object, the primary object – the person you’re programmed to please.  And you are killing off your peers – the other children who compete for parental attention and care.

Dan:  Big firms then have collections of pleasers and demanding partners.  What does that do to the psyche of a lawyer?

Will:  A law firm takes all these pleasers, herds all these kids who have always gotten A’s, and concentrates them in one giant feeding lot.  So you have an entire law firm stocked with pleasers, and no one to please!  There are no more teachers.  The partners are the closest thing to a parent-object, and they’re overgrown pleasers themselves.   It ends up with everyone competing with everyone else and everyone feeling like they’re failing.  Throwing people under the bus is not a management technique except in a law firm.   Anyone who’s ever worked in big law firms will tell you that folks get thrown under the bus every day at those places.  It’s the antithesis of good management.   That’s because they’re all competing – no one is stepping back and getting pleased, and saying – hey, you’re doing a terrific job!  Good management is a requirement for happiness at a workplace.  Everyone seems to realize that but lawyers.  Employees need to feel supported, appreciated and motivated.  They’ll do better work if they believe they’re good at what they do.  Employees need to feel like they want to come in everyday because they like their workplace.  Every time you walk in, you need to feel like Yeah, I know everybody here, my boss knows me, he respects me, he thanks me for my work.  A good manager understands this – it isn’t rocket science.  A fundamental management principle is that a review process needs to be supportive.  There should be about 90% praise, and the constructive suggestions should be just that – constructive and suggestions.  You don’t get anything remotely resembling that in a law firm because everyone is busy instinctively competing with each other like little baby animals trying to kill off the other baby animals as though they might die if someone else succeeds.  Management technique, at a big law firm, amounts to throwing someone else under a bus, and thinking you feel better afterwards – like, somehow you’re now in a safer position.  It’s madness.

Dan:  Please tell us about your two books.

Will:  My first book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy, actually started out as notes for  young therapists.  I was doing training for volunteer counselors at a hospital and I kept repeating the same things over and over to them, explaining anxiety and depression.  So I started with these notes and realized there was a book there that I could use with my clients.  That’s one way to look at therapy – as educating your clients – training them, really, to be therapists themselves, to the extent that they gain an understanding of emotions and how they work.

The first part of the book is about gaining awareness and understanding how anxiety and depression work. The second part tackles applying that knowledge to your life as you live it.

It’s interesting, how I came up with the title.  I wrote this phrase, somewhere around the middle of the book – “Life is a brief opportunity for joy.”  It was a literary agent, later on, who read the book and spotted it and said, that’s your title Will.  It seemed to sum up the entire book.  Let’s face it:  We are all heading to the same place – oblivion – a hole in the ground.  It’s a brief trip and it goes by quickly. Our mission is to be joyous. Life is a gift – it really is.

Many many lawyers make themselves incredibly unhappy. I think sometimes it’s as if they’re determined to make themselves miserable.  And depression is, at its heart, a self- punitive behavior.  You are doing this to yourself.  You are beating yourself up. You are being a bad parent to your inner child, by abandoning him to panic and attack himself for failing to please.

Dan:  So when someone struggles with depression as an adult, they’re basically repeating the maladaptive patterns they learned in childhood – – but this time they’re doing it to themselves.

Will:  Pretty much.  You’re not pleasing others, so you blame yourself for that failure.  You place the fault within and dismantle your self-esteem.  That’s what I did.  Instead of saying to myself maybe I don’t belong here, I kidded myself I did belong there.  The truth is, I never belonged in the legal profession.  I went because of the money and to try to please my mother in some misguided way.  I was a writer and a young therapist, at heart.   I would have become a therapist if my parents had done a better job handling my coming out as a gay man.  I  would have gone into mental health right away because I was fascinated by it.  But my parents hated that I was gay and sent me to a psychiatrist to be “cured.”  That scared me away from mental health, and in the end, I wanted to make my parents happy and provide them all the money and the status to compensate for being gay.  I didn’t even understand what law was. I just went into it blindly thinking well, okay, status and money.

Dan:  Now, tell us about the second book and why you wrote it?

Will:  Well, the second book has a silly title, Way Worse than Being a Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning.  I have a literary agent friend who always seems to come up with my titles and she came up with this one, too.  We were kidding over coffee and I said, well basically  if you’re not smart enough to get into medical school, you have two choices.  You can aim a little lower and go to dental school or you can become a lawyer.  Weirdly enough, I’ve had people write me who read the book and said,“You know, I went into dentistry and I am glad I did.”  Or, “I went law and damn I should have gone into dentistry.

So that was the idea – you should have been a dentist.  There are people who bash dentists and talk about their high rate of suicide or depression.  In actuality, I think that’s a myth.  The dentists I know are fascinated by it and doing a lot of good for people.  I have a bunch of dentist friends.

But anyway, I came up with this silly title and the book was based on a bunch of columns I wrote for Above the Law, along with additional materials that were either too personal or too honest or too long or too – something – to get included in the originally published columns.  Every time I wrote a column, I thought of more I wanted to say and I realized I was starting to exorcise my own demons from that very traumatic experience of trying to be a lawyer years before. I dedicated the book to the partners of Sullivan and Cromwell, just for a laugh.  The back photo, if you really look at it, is my firm’s facebook photo from my very first day at Sullivan. They took my photo in a suit and tie – I was terrified, but trying to look confident and successful.

Dan:  Give us just a few thoughts or ideas about how lawyers can recover from depression.

Will:  First of all:  Remember who you are.  I had a friend at the firm, years ago, a brilliant guy. He went to Yale Law School and then onto Sullivan and Cromwell.  I remember him looking at me one day as if he were saying the most forbidden thing he could ever admit: “Will I just don’t think I’m very good at this.”  And I remember thinking, God, that’s how I feel.  This guy was so accomplished and I thought, My God, they have really torn him down. He has forgotten who he is. I told him “Look at your record. You were a Yale undergrad and then Yale Law” and on and on; top of his class in everything and I said “How did they do this to you?”

How do you remember who you are?  There are a couple of things that can help to snap you out of depressive thinking.

One, remember that you are not always right, but you are not always wrong either.  It might not be your fault when things don’t go right at work.  Depressed people tend to put the entire fault on themselves.  Everything is their fault, they failed and they feel they have no right to anger. I always tell my clients “Look, you have the right to have anger, even if you’re just angry that it’s raining outside.  Get angry about something.”  It’s about dignity.  The inherent dignity of being an adult and possessing a right to your own opinion, a right to your anger.

A child doesn’t really get angry.  He gets scared and terrified.  But an adult can say, hey, maybe this isn’t the right environment for me.  I remember someone at Sullivan & Cromwell, at some point, very sadistically telling me, “Maybe you’re not cut out for this place.” At the time I was desperate. I went to my office and wept because I had to be cut out for it. I had to succeed.  Then I realized maybe I am not cut out for this.   And I remember laughing and then I thought Oh my God, there is a way out. I don’t have to please.  I can please myself.  I can remember who I actually am.

I pose this question all the time to my lawyer clients:  Who are you really, inside?  They say “Well, come to think of it, I was an English major, I loved reading, I loved computer games and I always wanted to go bicycling,” or whatever.   It starts to come back and they remember who they are “You know, I love to bake cupcakes and I love to go hiking. I’m mad about punk music from the 70’s.”  Whatever floats their boat – their very individual, quirky, personal boat.  And then a person starts to come back to who they really are, to their true self.  That’s the beginning of the end of depression – simply remembering who you are, giving yourself the dignity to be you – not trying to care for yourself by pleasing others, but doing it directly – by caring for yourself, in the way you need to be cared for, the way the child inside you – who celebrates life and drinks deep of joy – needs to be cared for.  That’s how you beat depression.

 

 

Attorneys Grapple with High Rates of Stress, Burnout

Business West reports, “Lawyers say they entered the legal field to help people with their problems — often very difficult, serious problems. The danger is internalizing those problems and making client stress a permanent part of one’s psyche. That pitfall, and other stressors common to lawyers, from time pressures to sometimes-adversarial work relationships, contribute to unusually high levels of burnout, depression, substance abuse, and even suicide in the legal field. One challenge, experts say, is to recognize those dangers before they take root.” Read the News

 

Holiday Survival Guide for Lawyers with Depression

From The Anxious Lawyer website, “Unfortunately, for all too many people, and particularly for all too many lawyers, the holiday season is a time filled with sadness, self-reflection, loneliness and anxiety. It is a season that comes with a “holiday depression” of its own which can affect anyone, whether it be due to time pressures, family issues, financial worries, memories of past holidays or just loneliness.” Read the Blog

Did You Know That Lawyers Suffer From Depression More Often Than the General Public?

The idea that lawyers shouldn’t have problems increases the sense of isolation for those suffering from this debilitating disorder. People with depression often feel emotionally numb, empty and completely alone, even when surrounded by other people. Many lawyers who struggle with depression suffer in silence so as not to appear weak to colleagues.  The Washington D.C. Bar offers help.  Read the Blog

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