I have a high stress job ( trial lawyer). For most of my 28 years on Earth, I have gotten stressed easily and I am by nature a worrier. Two years ago this stress led me to an anxiety disorder.
I really need to avoid taking on so much tension. But, I am good at what I do, and frankly I at most times enjoy the pressure.
What should I do?
Practice meditation. Here is a good place to learn… Headspace.com
relax, you’re not on trial.
Get a dog or cat or both. At least for me, animals bring comfort and humor to life. I totally believe in therapy animals. Not sure if that is up your alley…if not, travel to remote and quiet locations for a sense of calm?
I had a friend who swore by heading somewhere remote and shouting at the top of his voice as a means of stress relief.
Obviously works best in privacy.
I’d say to visit a cognitive behaviorial therapist, with the goal of handling stress better.
In a nutshell, what they’ll teach you is ways to be aware of what unreasonable/unhealthy/etc… things you’re thinking, and more importantly, why you’re thinking it, while you’re actually in the moment, and strategies for dealing with these things right then, rather than getting all wound up and stressed out, and only decompressing later on.
I will tell what helps me:
->try n believe that nothing bad can ever happen. even what we perceive as bad(loss, failure, suffering, embarrassment etc) is actually good for us it makes us more humble, mature, appreciative and aware of ourselves.
->try n believe that self-realization(through meditation) is the ultimate aim of human life. so getting anxious, fearful about worldly things is not worth it coz you either you succeed or not in them doesn’t really matter, just put your best effort.
->I used to listen to Sant(saint) rajinder singh ji maharaj. I visualize his face (with open eyes or closed eyes) which gives me peace in testing times.
For my money, this is the sort of advice that actually addresses the root problem. Yelling, puppies, and rationalization are band-aids. Just get in there and deal with the problem.
Caffeine can magnify anxiety, stress, nervousness, etc., in other words, all of the bad stuff. You may want to consider reducing/eliminating caffeinated beverages, if you drink any, and see if you notice a difference on the anxiety scale. I have tried to quit drinking all caffeinated beverages, and have always gone back to it, but I did feel less stress when I was not drinking any caffeinated beverages. I think slow and steady wins the race in caffeine withdrawal.
A beer and a cigar work for me. Ymmv.
Working out has helped me, and now there’s even proof of exercise helping with anxiety. See here.
No shortage of very good books on this subject and no shortage of junk books on the subject as well. I like to approach where I examine what I have done to alleviate the problem that is stressing me. Get all my ducks in a row, examine my motives and then simply wait for the results. Knowing we have done all we can reasonably do is all we can logicaly expect from ourselves and accepting that some things are simply beyond our control.
Is there something you enjoy doing, that you could stop at on the way home from work, where you’re likely to win? (Pinball, go-karts, batting cage.) Physical exertion with a “victory” along with some self-examination (:p) might help.
Anxiety is an occupational hazard of trial lawyers. Practically everyone gets it to some degree, but it is treated as a dirty little secret we don’t like to talk about. It is a many headed beast. You naturally want to be very good at what you do, and at 28 it can feel as though every case is a career breaker. You are not yet at the peak of your powers. There is also the risk of internalising the client’s problems as your own. Remember that as time passes, your skills and confidence will grow. That growth, and increasing success, will tame the anxiety in great measure. You don’t want to be completely free of anxiety. That is as pathological as being too anxious. It makes you careless about detail, which is disastrous.
I remember seeing those famous Irwin Younger videos years ago where he tells you you have to think about the trial every possible moment in the lead up to it. This sounded to me at the time like heroic total commitment. I eventually learned that it is totally insane advice, and should be actively challenged.
Anxiety often manifests itself in destructive preoccupation - you are always devoting never less than 20% of your thought resources to thinking about trial related things even when it is not appropriate. Your family will experience that as you never quite being there with them, and it can make you irritable and unreachable. Moreover, after a certain point you discover that you are not actually thinking productive new thoughts, just going over the same things again and again. It can feel, at its worst, like you are in a vortex of swirling thoughts all chasing each other that you try to grab for but can’t.
Trust your unconscious mind to process that background shit. It doesn’t have to be in the forefront of your thoughts every waking hour. Carry a small digital recorder with you so whenever an original thought pops up, you can be confident it doesn’t get forgotten. Keep it by the bedside - I found that I could use it more easily than waking up, turning on the light and making a note, because all that pen and paper stuff would wake me up. Part of the anxiety of the 2.00 am inspiration is that you fear you will forget it. Tape it, you will be confident it’s safe, and you haven’t disturbed yourself enough not to get back to sleep. Sleep is a resource you need to marshal, too.
Have some discipline about your practices. I would draft a final address in my own handwriting, then read it once on the morning before I delivered it so I could remind myself of all those squiggles and what I meant them to be. Typed words were a dense block of text that I was too tempted to simply read out loud; no read-throughs left me underdone as I tried to decipher my notes on the fly, and too many read-throughs killed my spontaneity. My system worked for me…find out what works for you, and follow it as a discipline. Then you are not reinventing a work structure all the time.
Similar ideas are true for XX. Over rehearsing it in your head can actively mislead you. Witnesses never give the answers you’ve planned in your head. I found it helpful to pick my three best points (not to limit your XX to that, just to have them handy.) One you use to start your XX with, and the other two you decide on the run to use either to finish with, or to use as a get out of gaol card if the witness seems to be getting the better of you.
You figure your own system for these kinds of things, but once you’ve got it, follow it and it will give you confidence, and that is a great anxiety killer.
Try to find a hobby that requires total concentration. Playing a musical instrument works well. I am a terrible pianist, but at least concentrating on something else gave my brain a holiday for an hour or so, and let the good ol’ subconscious shuffle things into shape. Purely passive things like gardening or walking didn’t really work for me, because they are not intellectually distracting enough to get you out of your own head.
Actively practise thought-stopping for those times when the vortex of thoughts gets out of control. Mentally say STOP. Then identify what specific thing you actually need to do next. And do it.
Don’t self-medicate. Alcoholism is a lawyer’s occupational hazard too, and for largely this reason.
If the symptoms are too difficult, see a shrink. He or she may prescribe meds so that you can learn the skills more easily to tame the anxiety with CBT or some other therapeutic mode while the anxiety is muted.
Best of luck. It helps to remember that the other guy is shitting bricks like you, even if he doesn’t appear to be. He’s just learnt to hide it better.
Another thought. Before and during a trial, we have to believe, as a matter of highest faith, that there is some form of words capable of being identified that will capture the heart and soul of our audience and win them over handsomely. If you didn’t believe that, you’d just be rolling the arm over.
But when it’s all over, you have to be able to change mental gears and realise that in reality, there probably wasn’t anything that was going to save the day. Most trial results go according to the evidence. By all means examine your work after the event for active mistakes, but don’t lacerate yourself for not finding the magic formula, or beat yourself up with “if onlys”. There is usually no good reason to think that if you’d said X instead of Y, it would have made any difference.
Noel Prosequi, thanks a lot. And also to the rest of you.
I do think that lawyers tend to be too self critical. We all win against the run of play sometimes and I feel that ( for me at least) tends to make one think if that as a standard rather than exceptional result.
Buy this book: How To Stop Worrying And Start Living, by Dale Carnegie.
Actually, buy several. Keep one on your night table, one on your desk at the office, and one in the bathroom.
Don’t read it like a novel; read it like a workbook. Highlight it. Refer back to it. Read it again and again.
If you follow the techniques it recommends, I promise you, your life will be entirely different.
Promise.
A capacity for critical self appraisal is essential. Those who don’t have it tend to be the clueless tools at the bottom end of the profession, who think they are Lord Denning and…aren’t. It’s good to strive for the wins against the current, and while it is all going on, you can’t let self doubt corrode your confidence that you might pull it off, or let yourself fall into the trap of making excuses for losing before it happens. But afterwards you need a different mindset that’s more forgiving and has perhaps more realistic expectations.
Something I learned in sports is you have to have a short memory. If you get burned on a play, you have to immediately forget it.
This translates well in real life. You’re probably not going to be very anxious when things are going your way. It’s the failure you have to learn to cope with. If you don’t, and instead dwell on it, it will consume you.
How to make stress your friend - very useful Ted talk
