Need we fail the stress test?

Crisis is a word that is easily used to exaggerate a passing difficulty, but the current scale of mental health issues in the legal profession doesn’t appear to be a passing phase. Because of the magnitude of the disruption during the worst of the Covid years – while noting that it is still prevalent – we have a tendency to blame all issues on the pandemic.

One UK-wide study done before the Covid pandemic wrote of people in the profession as having “compromised wellbeing”, with higher levels of mental health issues and lower levels of wellbeing than the general public.

I teach mindfulness – the original, deep version, not the shallow “tick the box” version that is sadly sold as the real thing – and I have been a director of a medium-sized Scottish law firm. Way back in the early 1980s when my friends at university graduated and moved into the profession, I chose another path but kept in touch with many of them. My friends closest to me quickly left the profession or moved out of the solicitor domain into other, more niche areas of law. Their reasons varied, but much of it was about the relentless nature of the work. Others who progressed in their role as solicitors, instantly commented when we met up that they weren’t happy in their work but felt stuck in the profession, partly because they had become used to the better than average standard of living they had achieved.

It reminds me of a poignant quote from the late Whitney Houston, which I read for the first time in a fascinating – and somewhat related – book called Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough, by Dr Paul L Hokemeyer: “I was talking to [another celebrity] the other night and we were talking about being a regular person years ago and how we wanted the fame and fortune. But then we got it – we lost our lives. He wondered if we’d made the right choice… It’s been more than I bargained for.”

Stuck in the cycle

Change the words “fame and fortune” to “social status and income”, and we might be getting close to how many stressed and burned-out lawyers feel today, and have felt for decades. Of course, for most of us hopefully it’s not quite that bad, but life should be much more than just work, work, and more work, and life should contain enjoyable and fulfilling work rather than your career sliding into just an exhausting way of paying the bills and enjoying a holiday – which we take to try to recover from the stress of working. How ironic.

I won’t even get into the statistics. Google if you wish to know. The figures are there for Scotland, the UK, the USA. Mental health issues above the national average. Why is this so? There is nothing inherently depressing about the law, nor about the work lawyers have to do, nor about the structures that legal firms have to fit within to remain on the right side of the law.

So, it must be an internal but international set of causes. Let’s take my life as an example. I work roughly nine to five during weekdays, but not at weekends except for very occasional exceptions. I don’t accept calls or work on emails after hours unless it is a genuine emergency. My work roughly divides into three areas: helping family businesses deal with complex issues, helping people’s mental health through delivering and teaching mindfulness, and writing things like this article, blogs, books, and poetry.

Inherently stressful?

The last of the three rarely requires exceptional circumstances. Few people require a life-saving poem at short notice. The other two do include moments of crisis; but unlike the real emergency services, most of these issues can wait till the next morning or the start of a week.

I suggest this is the same as legal matters. Relatively few legal matters really require working after hours or at weekends. It’s a failure of management and leadership if this becomes too common an occurrence for solicitors in a firm.

Likewise if working during normal hours creates stress and burnout for employees in the profession. There are always going to be problems and challenges in any workplace, but that is not the same as saying that stress and burnout must also occur. The two are not the same thing. A problem is not inherently stressful. Challenges need not lead to burnout. It is how these things are dealt with that makes the difference, and dealing with things is a leadership and a management matter.

Challenge for our leaders

At the macro level we must ask questions of the profession as a whole. It’s one thing to offer quality care and advice, as I know the profession’s bodies do well; quite another to have a strategy or campaign to prevent such unacceptable levels of stress and burnout from happening in the first place. Where are the targets to reduce the figures? Who is leading any such campaign? Who is representing the profession in talks with client groups to reduce the demands from clients that solicitors must be available 24/7 regardless of the actual urgency or importance of a legal matter?

I suspect that most causes of the long hours, and continuing to answer emails and do paperwork after hours at home, stem at least in part from the mindset of the solicitors themselves. When a profession or a workplace, inadvertently or otherwise, creates a culture or expectation of long hours, working from home in one’s personal free time, most employees tend to slip into that culture and follow suit. Worse is when it is explicitly stated, which is a form of coercion or bullying. People’s mental health is of paramount importance and must be protected from unreasonable expectations of senior partners, clients, or both.

Two levels of treatment

In my own work, helping people help their own mental health through mindfulness, I have often come across the accusation that doing such work is only putting a plaster on a massive wound rather than dealing with the bigger problem. I totally accept that; however, it is better to put a plaster on a wound than do nothing, which is sadly still the most common “response”.

The bigger issue, the continued acceptance of unacceptable stress and burnout among lawyers, can also be addressed through mindfulness, but at a much higher level. Mindfulness can help the senior people in any organisation properly investigate the extent and root causes of mental health issues in their organisation – or indeed in the profession as a whole – in a clear, insightful, and calm way, free from presumptions and prejudiced, out of date ways of seeing things. “That’s just how it is and always will be” is no longer the case in so many areas of work and business, and the same applies to the legal profession with regard to the impact its working traditions have on its members. One way or another the culture and the practices that cause stress and burnout have to change – and will change. Better to do so proactively, clearly, and calmly, than be forced to change.

Mindfulness is simple and practical. Here’s how you can reset your state of mind at any time, (provided you make an effort to develop the skills required).

Let’s say you are feeling stressed because of a work situation.

• Notice that you are stressed.
• Feel the unpleasant experience it creates in your mind, and often in your body.
• Now imagine that you can pause that unpleasant feeling, temporarily freezing it.
• When you have done that, gently slip your attention away from the feeling of stress to the flow of air through your nostrils as you slowly breathe in, then as you breathe out.
• You may feel the stress reduce.
• If it is not fully gone, just continue to notice the breath and become aware that those sensations are fresh and peaceful, clear and calm.
• The longer you do it, the more the stress dissipates.
• The more frequently you do it each day, the less the stress will accumulate, leaving you with little or no stress by the end of your day.

You can do the same for tiredness, just substituting the awareness of stress in your mind and body for the feelings of fatigue.

Doing this simple practice every half hour or so for 30 seconds to a minute can be remarkably effective.

You have a personal responsibility to look after yourself. These mindfulness practices are a very effective way to do so.