Nervous System Regulation for Professional Success
Gabriela Brunner
February 19, 2025
In this next post of the Wellness in the Legal Profession series, I discuss nervous system regulation for professional success. Although this may seem like an unusual topic for a blog post dedicated to nurturing success for women in the legal profession, I assure you that it will have you thinking about your definition of success through a different lens.
It is no secret that law students and lawyers experience stress. Stress is a word that receives a lot of attention, but what does it mean? Is all stress bad? Can stress be good?
Some Key Definitions
Let’s begin by defining stress, which is “the natural reaction your body has when changes or challenges occur. It can result in many different physical, emotional, and behavioral responses. Everyone experiences stress from time to time.” (Source) Stress can also be defined as a series of physiological responses and adaptations to a real or imagined threat or demand. Eustress is a positive or healthy response to stress, and Distress is a negative or unhealthy response to stress.
You may experience acute or chronic stress depending on what is happening in your life. Acute Stress is short-term, comes and goes quickly, and can be positive or negative, like competing in a sporting event or getting in a car accident. Chronic Stress is long-term stress that goes on for weeks or months and if left untreated, it can lead to health issues. A recent example of chronic stress could be the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let’s now define what the nervous system is and how it relates to stress. “Your nervous system plays a role in everything you do. The three main parts of your nervous system are your brain, spinal cord, and nerves. It helps you move, think and feel. It even regulates the things you do but don’t think about like digestion. It contains the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.” (Source) Your nervous system’s main function is to send messages from various parts of your body to your brain, and from your brain back out to your body to tell your body what to do. These messages regulate your:
Thoughts, memory, learning, and feelings.
Movements (balance and coordination).
Senses (how your brain interprets what you see, hear, taste, touch, and feel).
Sleep.
Heartbeat and breathing patterns.
Response to stressful situations, including sweat production.
Digestion.
Taken together, the goal is to have a strong nervous system so we can regulate our responses to stress (acute or chronic) and navigate the ups and downs of life with more resilience and flexibility.
Stress in the Legal Field
Law school and the practice of law involve stress. You may experience acute eustress when sitting for a law school exam or being called on in class. You may experience chronic distress when working with a difficult, long-term client or working non-stop to prepare for an upcoming trial. Regardless of the type of stress you may experience, your nervous system must be able to return to a state of equilibrium or neutrality so you can have periods of rest and rejuvenation. Living in a heightened and prolonged state of stress will impact your ability to think clearly and sharply, your sleep may suffer, your digestion may slow down, and you may be more prone to getting sick. The longer this goes unchecked, the higher the potential for chronic illnesses to develop. Without periods of rest, your work and ability to study may suffer, too.
How can you strengthen your nervous system? There are many ways to improve your nervous system’s ability to respond to stress. For example, physical activity, focusing on what was done (not what is left to do), setting short-term and long-term goals, practicing gratitude (more on this in the next blog post!), setting and keeping boundaries, meditation-yoga-Thai Chi-breathwork, good and consistent sleep, proper nutrition and fluid intake, and making time for meaningful social connections. Just like you are entering into or engaging in a profession that requires education and practice, so too does learning how to strengthen your nervous system.
I invite you to try different modalities and see how you feel when placed in situations that cause you stress. For example, if you decide to pick up a meditation practice, notice how you feel during a time of acute or chronic stress compared to how you felt before starting your meditation practice. Meditation won’t eliminate stress in your life, but it could help your nervous system regulate and return to a state of neutrality more quickly after the spike of stress.
Stress and Success
As you evaluate what professional success means to you, I invite you to consider how reactive your nervous system is to stress. From personal experience, I now understand that the calmer and more grounded I feel (as a result of a strong, flexible, and resilient nervous system) the more I enjoy what I do. And, the better I show up for the person in front of me. If I am tired from chronic lack of sleep, over-caffeinated, under-nourished, and feeling scattered and anxious, the less I enjoy my work and the less I show up for the person in front of me.
I also want to note that sometimes the thing that is affecting us may be medical in nature, and I encourage you to seek appropriate support from a medical professional. For example, I recently learned that I suffer from moderate to severe sleep apnea and likely have for decades thus contributing to my chronic, poor sleep. Meditation has helped me improve my sleep since my diagnosis, but I do need special medical equipment to have a level of adequate sleep to begin with. Sometimes, no amount of meditation, jogging, or water will help you improve a condition for which medical intervention is necessary.
If you are interested in experiencing meditation, I invite you to consider my Gratitude Meditation for Legal Professionals found on InsightTimer and YouTube. If you’d like to try a more active meditation, here’s one of my favorites. I also like to strength train, drink water, spend time with friends and family, and go for walks to nourish my nervous system. I hope this post has given you a different way to evaluate success in your life. I’m also sharing some resources below if you’d like to learn more.
Resources:
Heal Your Nervous System: The 5 Stage Plan To Reverse Nervous System Dysregulation, Dr. Linnea Pasaler
Harvard Health Publishing, Understanding the Stress Response
The New Firm, Regulated Nervous System + Career Success
Kundalini Research Institute, Neuroimaging Research on Yoga and Meditation: EEG Studies
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.
