exercise and depression Archives - Lawyers With Depression

10 Ways To Recharge Your Law Practice

1. Clean out the junk.

It’s easy to let our offices become cluttered: our desk is a mess with on-going or half-digested projects, scattered pens, and things on our to-do list that have been perched on the corner of the desk so long green mold has overtaken them. Clean it up. Check out my previous blog, My Desk, My Enemy and The Organized Lawyer for tips on how to improve this situation. I’ve found it particularly helpful to have a place for EVERYTHING. I line up hanging file folders in my credenza, label each one and drop documents in there to keep my desk tidy. I try to keep five projects on my desk that I’m actively working on. If my discipline lapses, I put aside time at the end of the week, dump all contents of desk into a huge box and go through each item one-by-one (toss things in the garbage, take other stuff home and keep items I really need to file later on). Another nifty item that I value as much as my beloved North Face ski jacket: a ScanSnap. It allows me to scan and trash paper documents that I don’t use often, but need to refer to later on or preserve, quickly and easily.

2. Marketing.

Most lawyers have this on their to-do. Nevertheless, they never get around to working on it. But giving it the time and energy it deserves energizes us because taps into our creativity and invests in our future. We all need more clients and marketing is an important part of any serious game plan to get them. Check out these greats blogs on this topic from the Attorney at Work website for more ideas.

3. Mindfulness.

Mindfulness mediation involves taking a set period of our day to sit in silence and watch our minds as thoughts and feelings roll by without reacting to them. As lawyers, we’re hammered all day by stress. It depletes our energy and effectiveness because our brains are knocked off balance by all the moment-to-moment crises, both real and imagined. Sitting quietly for a proscribed period of time allows us to regroup and refocus. Check out this article from the ABA Journal, Minfulness in Legal Practice is Going Mainstream. I do it everyday for 15 minutes. I’m a busy lawyer, just like you. If I can find the time, so can you.

4. Exercise.

Everybody knows how important it is for our health. It clobbers high levels of toxic stress, gives you pep and leaves you less prone to anxiety and depressive disorders. If you’ve been avoiding the gym or have “fallen off the wagon,” try doing it before work. I’ve found it’s critical to always keep my gym gear in my truck. It serves as a constant reminder to hit the elliptical and gives me one less reason (“I don’t have my workout clothes with me”) why I can’t go to the gym. Check out the excellent book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain for further reading on the connection between exercise and our mental health.

5. Find Meaning.

If you dig hard enough, you can always find meaning in your day-to-day law practice. Stop thinking of your job solely as a matter of dollars and cents and as much a matter of service to others. When we don’t do this, we dehumanize our clients and, in the process, ourselves. It’s all about balance. You don’t have to forget that law is a business. But you also shouldn’t forget that your clients are flesh and blood folks with real problems that need your care and attention. I love this quote from author Studs Turkel: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

6. Stop blaming the law for your problems.

This is a big energy sucker. And whining never helps. Blaming is the opposite of taking responsibility for one’s self: you become a victim of your own life. Choice empowers us. Complaining disempowers us. It’s as simple as that. It’s a question of attitude. I had a friend who blamed the law for all his misery. So, he chucked it all and went back to school to become a teacher. What happened? He was unhappy and blamed his dour mood on teaching. The moral of the story? While it’s true that the practice of law is tough and demanding, our experience of it is greatly influenced by our attitude. Resolve to have a better one.

7. Be careful about the company you keep.

Lawyers are known pessimist – they tend to see the worst in everything. Check out this article, Why Lawyers Are Unhappy, by Martin Seligman, Ph.D. Dump lawyer friends who incessantly gripe about being a lawyer. If you have to work with them, don’t join in their bitch sessions. You don’t have to, after all. You have some choices here. Sit quietly, offer something constructive, or change the subject. Over my twenty-five years career, I’ve found that hanging out with complaining lawyers that love to bitch about how shitty life is or tear down other people behind their backs leaves me dispirited about life and law. It’s cancerous.

8. Enhance your relationship with those you work with.

We snap at co-workers, are dismissive of their needs and don’t treat them with the respect and thoughtfulness they deserve. As a consequence, we don’t get much good energy in return. Would it take much time to get your secretary a cup of coffee in the morning? Small acts of kindness count in life. How about stopping whatever you are doing to actually listen to a co-workers problem and not check your e-mails or texts on your cell phone? When people do this to me, I find it rude. Being considerate to others goes a long way!

9. Find pleasure outside of work

Lawyers bark they don’t have time to do neat things after work or on the weekends. When we talk about importance of the work/life balance, this is what mean. For me, I’ve found it with blogging and volunteering at a wonderful place called St. Luke’s Mission in a poor section of Buffalo. I find these things not only meaningful, but also pleasurable. Silliness is also good tonic for all the seriousness that ails us. And lawyers are an all too grim-faced bunch. I finally got around to going to a new indoor go-kart track they recently built at our mall. Frivolity is a good thing!

10. Get more sleep.

We neglect sleep at our own peril. In fact, we’re a country of sleep-deprived people. Our bodies evolved to need a minimum amount of sleep and lawyers don’t get enough. Perhaps their bodies are too jacked up with stress or they can’t stop ruminating about their law practice. Recent research indicates that a lot of depression’s worst symptoms (lack of concentration, chronic fatigue, etc.) are deeply influenced by poor sleep. Maybe you need a sleep study to get to the bottom of what ails you in this department. Take care of this and you’ll be in a better position to wake up refreshed and ready to charge through your day.

7 Things Lawyers Can Do to Break the Bonds of Depression

Helplessness and hopelessness.

Two pillars of depression. And they’re tough to topple.

Helplessness

Lawyers, when in the vise-like grip of depression, feel helpless. Despite their best efforts to pull out of it, they still feel depressed and all endure the consequences that flow from their chronic melancholy: a lack of productivity, chronic fatigue, falling behind on work projects because of procrastination and a pervasive sadness or feeling dead inside.

Hopelessness

This sense of helplessness, if not addressed, often leads to a profound sense of hopelessness about the future. Sufferers’ conclude that they doomed to feel depressed for the rest of their lives. They just can’t envision good things happening to them in the future. They have a type of tunnel vision: they only see a crummy future ahead of them and on-again, off-again skirmishes or battles with depression.

Lawyers breaking the bonds of depression

But many lawyers not only survive depression; they pull themselves out of it. They break the bonds of the depression that have shackled them to a life sucked dry of joy, wonder and vitality. If you’re a lawyer who struggles with depression and can’t see any light down the road ahead of you, remember that you too can not only survive it – you come out the other side, thrive and grow.

To do so, you’ll have to leave some negative things behind and grab onto some positive ones. Here are some kernels of wisdom that I’ve learned over my decade-long journey of helping depressed attorneys recover:

Learn to let go. Depressed lawyers tend to nurture wounds inflicted by clients, judges and other lawyers. The wounds can be the result of an opponent’s downright nasty behavior, a cold and unsympathetic judge or a badgering client. Lawyers take all of this too seriously and personally by magnifying these exchanges. They churn infractions and insults over and over in their head. This type of ruminative thinking not only wears them out, but feeds their depression. The truth is that a lot of the bad behavior we see in the law really isn’t really about you. It’s usually the product of the ignorance and unconsciousness of others. Remember this. AND LET IT GO.
Let go of hanging around other negative lawyers. It’s easy to gravitate to other attorneys who, while that might not be clinically depressed, are extremely negative about law and life. Hanging around these folks will only feed your negative view of your law practice and life. It fosters a corrosive and cynical view of the world. You have a choice to make. LEAVE THESE PEOPLE BEHIND.
Let go of surfing the net. I know many lawyers that are on the web for big chunks of time during their workday. It’s a maladaptive stress, anxiety or depression management behavior and, in the short or long term, destructive. They surf for everything under the sun during work: music, porn, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera. Deep down, they feel like they “deserve” these breaks because law takes so much out of them. In their minds, these surfs are something pleasurable they crave because it distracts them from the pain of too much stress, unhappiness or depression. But it comes at a cost. They waste precious time, procrastinate and then beat themselves up for it for being unproductive. Beating one’s self up only leads to low self-esteem, which chips away at self-worth. They don’t make positive changes. They just don’t think we’re worth it. But, you are worth it and you need to start acting as if you are. LET GO OF THIS TIME WASTER.
Embrace a sense of hanging around more positive lawyers. Yes, they are out there! And there are more of them than you think. I know because I’ve met and developed friendships with them. Finding others, who are doing more than just complaining about the law and are trying to do something constructive about it, will help you gain some sense of hope about the future and a more positive direction. IT’S IMPORTANT TO LET NEGATIVE PEOPLE GO.
Find silence wherever you can. There’s something profoundly healing about silence, wherever you may find it. The practice of mindfulness meditation to cope with the stresses and strains of modern life has become widely popular. It has found a powerful foothold in the law. Mindfulness has been studied and found to be a powerful antidote to everyday unhappiness, too much stress, anxiety and depression. What makes it so powerful? The practice of unhitching our wagons from the constant stream destructive thoughts and feelings that batters our brains that are accomplished by following one’s breath and not buying into troublesome thoughts or emotions. Basically, we get “out of our heads” and drop back down into our bodies and short-circuit the negative rumination that fuels depression. An excellent book on this topic is The Mindful Way Through Depression. If mindfulness mediation isn’t your cup of tea, I know many who find solace in their local church or synagogue. There’s lots of research to support the theory that people who have a regular spiritual practice cope better with their anxiety and depression than those who don’t. FIND SOMEPLACE TO DRINK IN SILENCE.
Find a way to be more organized. Researchers have found that chronic stress is a powerful trigger for depression. Realistically, there are some things we’ll never be able to change about the demanding nature of the legal profession. But, it’s equally true that there are many steps we can do that significantly lower our stress load. One of the most powerful things you can do to help yourself is to be better organized. If you have trouble with this issue, and most depressed lawyers that I know do, delegate it to someone else to help you with this. It may be your secretary or even an outside consultant who are pros. Also, check out my prior blog, My Desk, My Enemy: 6 Helpful Ways to Get Organized.
If you can’t go to the gym, walk. I’ve resolved so many times to go to the gym, but often don’t. I have come to accept that sometimes I will and sometimes I won’t. Even when I know it would really help my mood. Sometimes it’s because my day is full of too many commitments, I’m feeling lazy or I’m unable to find the one-hour block of time to do it.

You can break those bonds. One link at a time. And be free.

Springing Forward

It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! – Mark Twain

As winter begrudgingly releases it’s stony grip, my thoughts have begun to turn from my freezing feet (mine are cold from November to February) to looking for buds on trees, from hunkering down at home while a bastard of a blizzard rages outside, to talking hikes on the winding sidewalks in my tree-lined neighborhood.

I feel an excitement when spring is on my doorstep, a sparkling sense of newness, of beginnings and the urge to press forward and put into action creative ideas that have been percolating in my head for the past few weeks.

Here are a few spring-inspired things that I’m working on.

Not going to the gym. I never go to the gym. I feel like a real slacker for not doing it. I know that it would be good for me to grind it out on the elliptical sandwiched between two other sweaty bodies. But, I always fall short of making it off the couch. Maybe things will change with the warmer weather. But, I doubt it. I tend to see working out as some big production. This perspective deters me from actually doing it.

There are just too many steps involved, after all: I need to pack my gym bag, I have to determine the precise time that would be ideal to work out, I have to figure out if I need to eat breakfast before or after I workout, etcetera. My best laid plans to exercise collapse under the weight on my ruminations. For now, with the better weather beginning to break, I am going to just hoof it. No gym bag, no special plans or driving to the gym. I am just going to go for walks and see where that takes me.

Reading the New Testament. I grew up in a Polish Catholic home. I have wandered in and out of the church for the years. I’ll go to Mass on my lunchtime at a nearby Jesuit church and feel great afterwards. Then it will be two months before I go again. Go figure. When people ask me my religious faith, I usually say that I am a “left-of-center Catholic with sprinkles of Buddhism” tossed in the mix. I’ve never read bible from cover to cover. Like most, I’ve read snippets and heard bursts of liturgy during Mass. I’ve heard said that reading the bible for oneself is a path towards wisdom.

So, I’ve begun reading the New Testament from cover to cover during Lent. I scoured Amazon and found the perfect book for my journey, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, which not only has the full text of the gospels, but lots of commentary from theologians, historians and anthropologists.

Picking better movies. My wife tends to like the romantic comedies and independent films. I like these as well, but also laction movies with lots of explosions and mayhem. Like a lot of the junk on T.V., there’s a lot of crap showing at the theaters. I am going to try to be more choosey about what I see and expand my horizons. My next film up to see? The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson.

Keeping my clothes better organized. I have never been good at this. I come home and am tired from a hard day at work. The thought of taking off my suits and neatly hanging them up gives me a migraine. I am pooped, after all; I deserve to just throw my shirts on my bedroom floor, I rationalize. But later, when I see the mess on the floor, I feel like an undisciplined slob. I am going to be more respectful of my clothes and try to bring down my dry cleaning bill.

Eating better. I am going to keep this simple. I’ve reading and seeing lots of information out there about this and I’ve boiled it down to this: eat less sugar, more protein, more fruits and vegetables.

Keeping my office neater. Last week, we had a blizzard here in Buffalo that shut down our city. I have a brother in a downtown hospital that I had to see, so I drove to my office for a few hours to get some work done. Instead, I spent three hours just cleaning and organizing my office. It was a freeing experience. Somehow, the act of chucking last year’s phonebook, a stack of unused index cards, old receipts and piles of outdated reference books exhilarated me.

Completing my book on depression. It has been an off-and-on project of mine, but I feel a renewed sense of determination to finish it. I’ve decided to make the process more creative-tinged, than laborious.

What’s on your list of things to do this spring?

Combating Depression with Meditation, Diet

In his book Spontaneous Happiness, Dr. Andrew Weil writes of an ‘integrative’ approach to mental health, warding off mild and moderate depression with an an anti-inflammatory diet, exercise and activities such as yoga and meditation, rather than antidepressants. Listen to the Interview