I met Jennifer Riggs, JD, PCC, through LinkedIn when she reached out after reading one of my previous posts on Wellness in the Legal Profession. When I read through her biography, I was instantly drawn to her work, as it is something I have also been curious about. Jennifer works at the intersection of neuroscience, mindfulness, and mind-body principles to enhance wellness, leadership, and executive functioning. Being a lawyer herself, Jennifer deeply understands how these skills and tools can help lawyers navigate the challenges of the profession.
After a few conversations, Jennifer and I decided to collaborate on a three-part series to share these valuable tools and resources with the pre-law and law community.
We bring decades of legal, professional, and wellness experience to the table. Additionally, we share a passion for educating, supporting, and guiding legal professionals toward a career full of meaning and success.
We hope you will join us for a virtual conversation after this series ends. We will be there to answer questions, debrief the series, and create community.
Thank you for being on this journey with us!
Warmly,
Gabriela Brunner & Jennifer Riggs
Thinking about Stress
Stress.
It is inevitable in practicing law. But what’s your relationship to it? Do you stress about your stress? Do you feel that stress is a negative reflection on you, therefore piling judgment and shame on top of it? Maybe you’re not sure what to do with stress when you have it, and that, in and of itself, can be stressful.
Unfortunately, the common strategies for dealing with stress are often not strategies at all. They’re pitfalls. In this article, we’re going to help you turn three common pitfalls into strategies that will improve your stress resilience. But first, let’s take a moment to understand more about stress and how it manifests in the body.
Stress and the Brain
The first point to share about stress is this: stress is a necessary and very human response to a perceived threat. Stress is there to keep us safe and alive. Without it, humans would not have survived and evolved. Stress is important.
The second point is, we all need some amount of stress just to get us out of bed and keep us functioning each day. However, the problems most commonly associated with stress arise when we don’t respond well to the stress, don’t recover from it, or it becomes chronic.
Left unchecked, stress can be harmful.
With the right strategies, you can build your stress resilience. Yes, there is hope! And, after reading this series, you’ll be better equipped to understand your stress and how to turn it into a tool for resilience and strength.
First, let’s quickly review what happens in the brain when we’re stressed. When we perceive a threat, whether physical or emotional, there is an uptick in the release of stress hormones (e.g., cortisol) to quickly get the body ready to respond to the threat. You might notice a quicker heart rate or shallow breath, for instance. By listening to your body, you will start to understand your reactions to stress and build greater awareness.
At the same time, these stress hormones activate the amygdala and inhibit our access to the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The amygdala is in the limbic area of the brain and is the space where emotions come from. It is one of the older parts of the brain in terms of our evolution, and its number one job is essentially to scan for danger and keep us safe. The amygdala is very sensitive and is part of our brain’s alarm system, designed to get our attention and help us react quickly when it senses a threat.
For example, you start to cross the road when you see a car speeding toward you. Your amygdala kicks in, and almost without thinking, your body works in sync quickly to get you out of the way. It's where our fight-or-flight reactions come from.
One thing to note: the amygdala doesn’t just perceive physical threats (such as the above example). This fight-or-flight response can also kick in when emotional or psychological “threats” arise. For example, you have had a series of negative interactions with someone at work, including by email. Now, every time you receive a new email, your brain predicts a threat, which means your amygdala kicks in, your PFC checks out, and you begin operating from a state of fear, instead of from the higher thinking brain. With the number of emails we receive in one day, you can start to understand the toll this kind of stress can take on your brain and body.
The amygdala is not a place of our high-level thinking and performance. It is a primitive tool designed to help keep us safe.
The next area affected by stress is the PFC, which is part of the brain’s outer layer, or cerebral cortex. This is where much of our high-level thinking happens. Consider it the CEO of the brain. The PFC helps regulate attention, memory, behavior, emotion, and thought, including high-level decision making and future planning.
And, it is also the area of the brain most susceptible to damage from stress. When your PFC is not functioning optimally, it can result in:
Foggy thinking & memory problems
Poor decision-making
Poor impulse control
Inability to understand others
Difficulty controlling one’s attention and behavior (reactivity)
As you can probably imagine, this is NOT the greatest place to operate from as a law student or lawyer.
With this elementary understanding of the interaction between the amygdala and the PFC, let’s focus on some strategies to get back to higher-level thinking and safeguard well-being long-term.
3 Mindsets: from Pitfalls to Strategies
Here are some common and understandable ways that we might react to stress (pitfalls) and ways to shift our mindset around that pitfall (strategy):
PITFALL # 1: DENY/SUPPRESS
This is probably the most common and understandable reaction to stress, especially for those in high-pressure environments. You are busy, whether it is the billable hour ticking or the stress of an upcoming final exam, and you deny/suppress the stress and plow through. Usually, we just don’t know what to do about our stress anyway, so it feels like if we just keep going, no matter how burnt out we may feel, we will get the work done and then feel less stressed. But the stress chemicals are still there, affecting our brains and our bodies. And when we do nothing, those stress chemicals and reactions mount, much like that junk closet in your home. In the short term, we may not notice the consequences of ignoring the stress, but left unchecked, more serious issues could arise—just like opening the closet one day to suddenly have the pile of junk come crashing down on you. You don’t want all that built-up stress coming down on you at once.
STRATEGY # 1: ALLOW & LABEL
Practice shifting your mindset from the DENY/SUPPRESS pitfall to the strategy of ALLOW & LABEL. Through this strategy, you will learn to name the negative feelings (i.e., anxious, hurried, unfocused …) which research shows helps to decrease activity in the amygdala (that reactionary fight-or-flight) and activates part of our PFC (Source).
The brain likes to know what it’s dealing with, and naming what is happening empowers you to then take action to alleviate or soothe the feeling. It is difficult to know how to solve something if we don’t know what we are trying to solve. Naming also helps build awareness. The more aware you are of what is going on, the better equipped you will be to change it.
PITFALL # 2: SELF-BLAME
The next pitfall can stem from feelings of not being good enough. Whenever you start to feel stress, your mind may start telling you “I shouldn’t be feeling this,” “good lawyers are strong,” “good law students are impervious to stress”, or “you can’t take a break, power through, or you are a failure.” You may be seeing your stress as a sign of weakness. These thought spirals can lead to a very powerful emotion called shame.
Shame keeps us stuck. When we shame ourselves, it can be a way of trying to control our stress. If we believe we are the problem, we can change and be the solution. This appears to keep the problem within our control, which the brain likes. But it backfires and increases our stress because self-blame and shame are internal threats, like the self attacking the self. The stress response is the same as an external threat.
Self-blame and shame are a double-whammy. First, there’s the event causing us stress; next, there’s an internal threat on top of it. Research shows that criticism (whether from ourselves or perceived from others) negatively affects our mood and increases neural connections with the amygdala. Other research shows that self-criticism undermines our motivation in pursuit of our goals.
STRATEGY #2: SELF-COMPASSION
Self-compassion is a wiser strategy for your brain and your well-being. It may seem counterintuitive and even risky to practice self-compassion in a competitive field like law. You may already be thinking, “If I’m compassionate with myself, how am I ever going to get better? If I just give myself a pass all the time, I’ll never measure up against all the others.” Fair, but wrong, according to research.
Studies show that people who are compassionate with themselves are much less likely to be depressed, anxious, and stressed, and are much more likely to be happy, resilient, and optimistic about their future. (For more information and research on self-compassion, see the work of Kristin Neff at self-compassion.org). Studies have also shown that people with self-compassion are LEAST likely to procrastinate, and more resilient after a failure or setback. So if you haven’t started studying for that exam, or you failed it, self-understanding and forgiveness are more likely to get you into action than self-criticism.
Imagine this: you’ve been wanting to cut out sweets and were going good for a few days, but then you didn’t sleep well, made a mistake on a legal brief, and received some distressing news about a family member. At the end of the day, you find yourself at the freezer door, eating a pint of ice cream. The next day, which would be more likely to get you back on track?
Blame yourself, thinking that was stupid, and confirming you have no willpower.
Accept that it happened, and recognize that it provided you with some pleasure after a long, difficult day.
Most of us would go with (2) to get back on track. That’s the power of self-compassion over self-blame. While there are several ways to practice it, the simplest advice is: speak to yourself as you would a friend. (Most of the criticism we have for ourselves we would never say to a friend)!
Bonus: Research also shows that this strategy of self-compassion also supports our third and final strategy.
PITFALL #3: ISOLATION
When we’re stressed, we can isolate ourselves from others. It’s a natural response to a threat, as the brain focuses on self-protection and preserving our energy. We might choose to study alone, not collaborate, stay home, ignore messages, and pass on group gatherings.
Isolating ourselves may be fine in the short term, but over time, it can leave us feeling disconnected and lonely. Research shows this is harmful to our well-being and longevity. Studies have shown that loneliness significantly increases our risks for heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer’s. One study even showed that social isolation had a greater risk to our mortality than smoking 15 cigarettes a day! That’s no joke.
STRATEGY #3: SOCIAL CONNECTION
While it can sometimes feel like we need to force ourselves to get out and connect with others, especially at first, social connection is critical to our well-being and longevity. And don’t worry, even for introverts, we’ve got two pieces of good news for you.
First, once you begin to connect and notice that it feels good, your brain will remember this and be more motivated the next time. Second, you really don’t need to be a social butterfly. (You can breathe a sigh of relief, introverts). Even one or two high-quality social connections can be enough.
Research shows that quality is more important than quantity in terms of the effect on our well-being. Specifically, high-quality relationships affect our feelings of safety and ability to learn, engage, and grow. These meaningful connections also support our brain functioning, since we need to feel safe to access the prefrontal cortex, our brain’s CEO. Research confirms this, showing that people with greater social support had a thicker prefrontal cortex (right, medial PFC) and a smaller amygdala!
Conclusion
Stress isn’t the enemy here. The key is becoming aware of your stress response and having tools in your toolbox to ease your stress as it arises. The profession of law is a high-pressure, high-responsibility world. And honestly, that may be why some of us chose the profession in the first place. But just like leaving something on the stove too long can cause it to burn, leaving stress unchecked can cause you to burn out. You are smart, capable, committed, passionate, and a whole host of other amazing qualities. You chose to pursue a career in law for a reason, and we trust that you have something valuable to contribute to it. And that is why we care so deeply about this work. The legal profession needs lawyers who are grounded, clear, focused, sharp, caring, and WELL to fight the good fight.
We need you.
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We invite you to continue this conversation in the next two blog posts of the series. In June, we will touch upon physical strategies for stress-resilience, including understanding and managing the brain-body connection. In July, we focus on applying what you’ve learned to the workplace, paying special attention to confidence, setting boundaries, and connecting (and re-connecting!) to your values, especially in times of challenge.
Gabriela Brunner holds a JD from Chicago-Kent College of Law and a MS in Higher Education Leadership from Western Illinois University. Prior to becoming a prelaw advisor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gabriela practiced law for ten years in business litigation and immigration law. She has a passion for mindfulness and meditation, particularly as it applies to pre-professionals.
