As lawyers, we’re no strangers to stress, it is an inevitable (required?) part of life. But learning how to manage it effectively can significantly improve your mental and physical well-being. In today’s post, I’m sharing some simple yet powerful strategies to help you calm down when feeling stressed — these strategies are tested and proven to work for all busy women but especially attorneys. (We’re keeping it REAL simple around here!)

Trying not to cry? Fighting off a rage quit? These tools are available to you with minimal effort:

Deep Breathing

Deep breathing exercises help you center yourself and reduce the physiological effects of stress. Try one of these popular methods:

Try the 4-7-8 breathing technique:

Inhale for 4 seconds through your nose,

Hold your breath for 7 seconds,

Exhale slowly for 8 seconds through your mouth.

Try Square Breathing:

Also known as box breathing, this is equally simple and effective. It involves structured breathing in a rhythmic pattern that calms the nervous system.

Steps for Square Breathing:

Inhale slowly through your nose for a count of 4.

Hold your breath for a count of 4.

Exhale slowly through your mouth for 4.

Hold for 4 seconds before repeating.

Visualization: While doing square breathing, imagine tracing the sides of a square in your mind. This can help you stay focused and relaxed.

You can repeat the process as many times as necessary, typically for 3-5 minutes, until you feel more relaxed. It’s especially useful in moments of acute stress or anxiety.

Grounding Techniques

Grounding techniques connect you with the present moment, pulling your focus away from stressful thoughts and physical sensations. There are two main kinds of grounding:

Earthing Grounding Based in Physics: This method is a therapeutic technique that involves doing activities that “ground” or electrically reconnect you to the earth. This practice relies on earthing science and grounding physics to explain how electrical charges from the earth can have positive effects on your body.

Try out Earth Grounding:

This can be as simple as walking barefoot on grass, lying down outdoors, or using grounding tools like grounding mats, sheets, blankets, socks, bands.

Psychological Grounding: Engage your senses to bring yourself back to the present. These techniques work by grounding you in the present moment and pulling you away from intrusive thoughts or feelings. In this way, you not only have your “feet on the ground” but also your “mind on the ground.” By turning our attention away from racing thoughts or worries, refocus on the present moment.

Try out Psychological Grounding:

The 5-4-3-2-1 technique:

Name 5 things you can see.

Name 4 things you can touch.

Name 3 things you can hear.

Name 2 things you can smell.

Name 1 thing you can taste.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)

PMR is an effective way to reduce physical tension and psychological stress by alternately tensing and relaxing muscle groups throughout your body, from your toes to your head. When we tense our muscles before relaxing them, you enable yourself to relax them more thoroughly after you release them. This helps to more effectively release pent-up physical stress and leaves you feeling more relaxed overall.

Try out PMR:

Tense each muscle group for 5-10 seconds.

Release and relax that muscle group for 20-30 seconds before moving to the next.

Mindful Meditation

(You knew this coming!) Mindfulness meditation involves training your mind to focus on the present moment. This can help reduce racing thoughts and create a sense of calm. If you are new to meditation techniques, check out my podcast episode Meditation 101: Benefits and Basics to learn more about starting your own meditation practice.

Try out Mindful Meditation:

Sit quietly and focus on your breathing.

When your mind wanders, gently guide it back to your breath or a point of focus. Even a few minutes of mindful meditation can lower stress levels and promote relaxation.

Need help? Check out the Lawyer Life Podcast’s 5-minute meditation series, released every other Wednesday!

Move Your Legs!

Go for a walk. Taking a short walk, especially in nature, can reduce anxiety, depression, and even boost creativity. Studies have shown that just 10 minutes of walking can improve focus and elevate your mood. Try incorporating walking into your daily routine to manage stress more effectively.

Write it Out

Journaling allows you to process and express your emotions in a healthy way. In fact, 2018 research shows that writing down our deepest feelings and thoughts can improve our physical and psychological well-being. Writing down your thoughts can help you gain clarity, identify stress triggers, and manage your feelings.

Benefits of Journaling:

Identify fears and worried thinking that is causing stress or anxiety

Recognize triggers that exacerbate feelings of stress

Practice positive self-talk to build your confidence

Identify and reduce unhelpful thoughts and behaviors

Improves overall mental health by recognizing and addressing unhelpful thoughts.

Try out Journaling:

Write down your thoughts and feelings at this moment. Getting them out of your head and onto paper can provide relief and clarity.

Visualization

Visualization is a very simple relaxation technique that involves using your imagination to access positive feelings such as peacefulness, confidence, or motivation. Visualization can also help reduce feelings of nervousness.

Visualization involves creating a mental image of a peaceful or positive scenario, such as a tranquil beach, a personal goal, or a feeling of self-compassion.

Try out Visualization:

Close your eyes and imagine a serene scene that makes you feel calm and relaxed.

Focus on sensory details: sights, sounds, smells, and feelings.

Visualization can reduce the flight-or-fight response and ease nervousness, bringing a sense of peace.

Stretching

Stretching helps release muscle tension and improves your range of motion, posture, and overall relaxation. Incorporating stretches into your daily routine, especially at work, can reduce pain by up to 72%.

Try out Stretching:

Simple stretches for the neck, shoulders, and back can have immediate calming effects. A simple search on YouTube can help you find an office stretch routine that suits your needs and/or areas of pain.

Music or Sound Therapy

Confession: I have meditation or targeted hertz level music playing for at least 8 hours every day: my husband hates tolerates it, but I’m obsessed. Did you know that listening to calming music, nature sounds, or binaural beats can soothe your nervous system and reduce stress?!

But let’s take this even farter: Solfeggio frequencies, which range from 174 Hz to 963 Hz, have been found to generate vibrations in the body that promote relaxation, balance, and emotional well-being.

Interesting Fact: Ancient theories suggest that certain frequencies have the power to heal and even affect DNA positively. You can experiment with different frequencies and music styles to find what relaxes you the most.

Try it out:

You can easily search for healing/Solfeggio frequency playlists on Spotify and other music providers. My favorites: Pineal Glad Activation 963 Hz for your third eye chakra & healing + cleansing frequencies.

Hydrate and Nourish

Dehydration can intensify stress and anxiety. Basically, when you’re dehydrated, your body is stressed, and when you’re stressed your brain releases stress hormones, setting off a chain reaction of the stress response in your body.

Drinking water or eating a small, healthy snack can calm your physical stress responses. Staying hydrated helps your body stay balanced and less reactive to stress triggers.

These simple tools can help you manage daily stress and bring you back into a state of balance. Whether it’s deep breathing, grounding, stretching, or simply listening to relaxing sounds, incorporating these practices into your routine can make a significant difference in your overall well-being.

Try it out: Begin each day with a hydration plan — you do NOT need to carry a gallon jug around all day. Calculate your daily water intake goal and determine how many refills you need during your day to get there. Track your daily progress each day — habit tracker, anyone?

Prior to the pandemic, most of my clients admit to feeling like chickens running around with their heads cut off half of the time going from soccer games to PTA meetings to client board meetings to practice group meetings to being screamed at on the phone by angry clients and partners….They were constantly running around juggling 10,000 different things but there was some semblance disconnection. By “disconnection” I mean the time and energy it took to actually get from one of these places to the next. Even though it felt like we were running around like mad women most of the time, there were periods of space between those emergencies — time wasted in the kitchenette talking up a colleague, hopping onto the elevator to grab a quick lunch or coffee, actually walking (or even driving!) from meeting to meeting. There was a transitional moment or moments (if we were lucky)…not that we appreciated them at the time.

What I’m seeing now with my clients is that the time it took to transition from one of those things to the next whether it was the five minutes you spent in the car or the five minutes you spent walking from meeting to meeting, there was breathing space available to us.

Little did we know how valuable that time actually was.

For many of us who have been working from home for the past 30+ months, we are finding that those transition periods have completely disappeared. There is no opportunity to clear our heads or return text messages walking from meeting to meeting. There are no 15-minute breaks to walk outside (READ: breathe fresh air) and go pick up something for lunch. No more chit chatting with your girlfriend at the coffee bar. Instead, we click from meeting to meeting without breaks and without a moment to catch our breaths.

In this remote work environment, we have conditioned ourselves to be 100% connected with our work and our clients 100% of the time.

Keeping office hours seems unusual given that our office is now our homes where we spend 100% of our time.

In a pre-pandemic world, many of my clients struggled to disconnect when they were home. They had that nagging itch to check their email every time they sat down with their partners to watch a movie. While they were waiting for the pasta to boil and cooking dinner, they would absentmindedly scroll through their emails to see what was happening. We did these things automatically and without thinking. But now it seems the desire to check in and remain connected has become even more extreme as expectations around our availability have changed.

How, in a world where our homes are now our offices, do we find space to breathe?

I recently had a client who was struggling with this very same thing and wanted to spend some time learning how to disconnect. She wanted to be able to step away from her computer for periods of time to have lunch, go for a walk, turn over the laundry, or simply take a break. She was craving those small pleasures that we all overlooked when life was in person. Who knew that the 20-minute commute into the office would now be seen as a luxurious moment of peace?!

In a digital world, boundaries have become essential.

The primary struggle as I see it is how to best communicate those boundaries when people are not actually seeing whether you are in your office or away. While we can implement certain strategies like setting clear office hours and communicating those to your team, over utilizing out-of-office messaging (no matter who it annoys!), and updating your status on digital messaging platforms, the real work to disconnect is internal. I can give my clients all sorts of tools to implement better boundaries at work and to seek some separation from their professional lives, but if they’re not doing their own inner work, none of the tools that I offer will work.

To illustrate this point, I asked my client to start conducting a simple experiment. First and foremost I asked her to set clear office hours that she would commit to honoring every day. When people called her outside of those office hours she wouldn’t answer — in the same way we didn’t answer our office phones after hours while driving the car pool. We also established a schedule for checking her email. We agreed upon using a timer on her phone to remind her every two hours to check her email. In between those time frames of checking her email, she was free to focus on research and actual projects on her plate. She was to close all email platforms during those two hours. Last, I asked her to start paying closer attention to how much this whole set up freaked her out. Specifically, I asked her to write down all of the nasty thoughts and worst case scenarios playing out in her head as we implemented this plan.

Someone is going to be mad at me. I’m going to miss something. Someone is looking for me. People are going to think I’m not available. I’m going to get reprimanded. If I remain unavailable I’m going to get fired.

While it’s certainly possible that some of those wild scenarios could have become reality, it was also equally possible that none of them would happen. Is it really unacceptable to be away from your email for two hours? We all go to the doctor. We all have continuing education requirements. When life was in person we would often attend 2-hour lunches or meetings. Why is it that our brains are OK with being absent for blocks of time in those scenarios but not OK with us doing it to actually do the job we are being paid for? Because we allow all of those nasty thoughts to carry such weight that it compels us to run to our emails every 30 seconds to confirm that the sky is not, in fact, falling.

If this sounds familiar. Do this. For your sanity and for the good of your long-term career.

The panic that this plan elicited in my client and the discomfort that she experienced as she stepped away from her email for short periods of time really brought to the forefront of her awareness what a critical problem this had become. How checking her email had almost become an obsessive addiction to confirm that she wasn’t messing up. To assuage her concerns that people were upset with her. Now that she had some space, she could see how toxic her relationship with connectedness had become. While she was making dinner she was thinking about her email. While she was talking to her husband, she was thinking about her email. While she was eating her lunch, she was worrying about her email. The anxiety was constant.

She saw those worries build and compound during her day as we conducted the experiment. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t comfortable for her but at the end of it all, she saw that none of her worst case scenarios happened by stepping away from her email for two hour blocks at a time. She was more productive. She was more present. The experience allowed her to foster the belief: I can step away to focus and do my job and nothing life-altering will happen in a span of two hours.

In a world where everyone is so connected and the lines between our home and our professional lives have become so blurred, the need to set boundaries and start paying attention to our automatic impulses to constantly check our email and be available are critically important.

How are those impulses serving you?

If this is to become our new normal, we need to start re-employing the small daily treasures that can make life so much more enjoyable. Taking breaks. Disconnecting. Stepping away. And honoring a set work schedule. Your professional world will not come crumbling down if you are away for two hours. I would even posit to say that your professional world will not come crumbling down if you step away from your email for as long as three or even four hours. What would you gain have if you were able to eradicate the thinking that is gluing you to your phone and your email all day long? More peace? More happiness? I encourage you to conduct your own experiment to find your own answer.

Photo by İsra Nilgün Özkan

It’s 4:30 on Friday you are just starting to timidly believe that you are going to get out of the office before 6pm, you start to allow yourself to get excited because you are meeting your law school friends for happy hour and your significant other will be joining you later and taking you out for dinner at your favorite restaurant. Finally, a fun Friday night with the people you love. It’s been a long week!

Then your office phone rings and it is your best work friend in the middle of a complete pre-working-all-weekend cataclysmic meltdown. Just as you are about to begin telling her not to quit, you can do this…. “that” partner darkens your doorway. You quickly get her off the phone, promise to call her back, and internally cringe as the partner asks you if you could take a look as these “few sections” of this Stock Purchase Agreement blah blah blah, “I just emailed you with a link to the diligence room”, hands you a 60 page SPA and promptly exists. You glance at his email and it asks for a response by tomorrow morning (Saturday for those of you not tracking…). Then your phone lights up, it’s your boyfriend asking you where the dog food is and could you make sure to put milk on the grocery list. Also, what should he wear tonight? As you are just starting to process what just happened, your paralegal shows up and jumps right into discussing a project you gave her a week ago that she is “struggling with” as she launches into a long and detailed explanation and plants herself in your office chair and you sit there, dumbfounded wondering what the heck she is talking about, how can I get her to stop talking without screaming…and what the F just happened?

Then it sets in.

For me, overwhelm feels like hot compression of my chest and a ringing sound, like after a bomb goes off and your ears are trying to adjust. It’s the worst.

We’ve all been there. In the moment, it’s easy to believe that all of these “things” happening to us are what is causing that sickening, tight feeling. The truth is that none of that is true. That feeling is caused 1000% by your thoughts. You are doing this to yourself.

The email saying “I need you to respond by 11am Saturday” is not making you feel that way. In fact, that circumstance alone is not particularly anxiety-inducing. It’s just words. On a page.

What is anxiety inducing is the thought “There is no way I’m going to get this done in time…I’m going to have to cancel all of my plans…I really needed tonight, I really needed this break, it’s been such a long week…I’m so tired of this BS…I can’t believe you did this to me, AGAIN!…I don’t have time for all of this…how am I going to get all this done?!…you didn’t even think to ask me if I have time!…“

THOSE nasty little sentences are what get your heart racing. It’s not the events going on around you. It’s not the email.

Add to it, thoughts about the other circumstance “C’mon Karen, you have a meltdown every week, I don’t have time for this…if I don’t call her back when she needs me, I’m a terrible friend…I have to call her back, she is so upset…I don’t have time to call her back, I need to figure out what I’m going to do…I can’t deal with her right now…she is so dramatic…she is going to hate me if I don’t call her back..” and then the thoughts about the boyfriend “Seriously, why can’t he find things on his own?! I’m at work, I don’t have time to tell you where everything is, look for it yourself, GDI!…can’t you pick up some milk and while you’re at it, get the other groceries, why do I have to do everything!?“

You end up with a ton of emotions racing through your body at the same time: fear, anger, guilt, anxiety, judgment, shame, indignation. These ingredients cause overwhelm, like a pot boiling over, your brain can’t handle the sudden influx of feels!

This cacophony in your brain is what is creating that feeling of overwhelm. It is not your boyfriend, your tearful colleague, the partner, or the email. You are doing it to yourself.

So how do we turn down the noise and sort through overwhelm?

First, recognize that it is your thoughts doing this to you. It is not the circumstances. That email does not reach out of the screen and make your heart palpitate. It’s impossible. So let’s look at the real cause: you have to get the thoughts out. This leads us to step 2:

Step 2: Exercise the demons.

If you had a bat in your attic, you wouldn’t simply close the door and continue to let it bang around up there. You would get it out and then figure out how the F it got in there. Take 5 minutes to breathe and write down every single thought that is banging around up there — get them out. Do not judge them. Do not censor them. Just get them into black and white.

Step 3: Look at them! Separate the thoughts from the facts. You are lawyer, you know facts when you see them. Cut out all the adjectives, adverbs and subjective statements and isolate the facts. Highlight them. Then look at all the lovely thoughts you are having about those facts.

Step 4: Lawyer them to death. Challenge each of those thoughts. Argue it. Question it. Present the opposite side. If you are thinking “If I don’t respond to that email by tomorrow at noon, I am going to get fired,” ask is that true?

Argue with yourself–If I don’t respond by tomorrow at 11am, I am NOT going to get fired and here’s why…. 

For each thought, ask “how is this thought serving me right now?”  Is it helpful for you to think, If I blow this off he is going to be pissed! What’s point?!

The majority of these thoughts are not serving you. Sure, some of them might be true but what is the upside of thinking them and focusing on them?! What is that getting you?

Is it helping you get the work done? Is it helping you triage the situation? I doubt it.

You don’t wander around telling everyone about that time you completely missed the deadline on that IRS filing for a client. It might be a fact but what is the point of carrying it around with you?

Just because it might be true, doesn’t make it useful.

Ask yourself “So what?”

If I have to cancel my happy hour with my friends, they will be disappointed….so what? Will they stop being your friend? Can they handle being disappointed? Will it kill them to be disappointed? Will it kill you to allow them to be disappointed? Asking yourself “so what?” forces you to examine the worst case scenario and look at all the drama your brain is offering you. Stop with the drama and start really looking at the reality of the situation. Your friends will understand. They will get over it. They might be sad. They are grownups and they can relate. So what if your perfectly planned Friday night doesn’t work out? So what?

For each thought in your head argue the opposite. If you are thinking “I have to call my friend back, she was in tears!” Challenge yourself to argue the opposite. Do you really have to call her back? What if you didn’t? Do you really need to spend all night working on the SPA review? Can you make an argument that you can do it more efficiently (once you clear all this junk out of your brain)? Do you really need to cancel all your plans or are you just being dramatic?

Whenever we are feeling overwhelmed it’s because we have a series of competing thoughts in our brain that each are causing some form of negative emotion. Those thoughts and feeling converge and we lose our $#!+.

Stop blaming the circumstances around you for those feelings.

Own your role in this. Recognize the source of your feelings and get to work watching and questioning your thoughts. You are lawyer. People pay you to argue. Put that fancy degree to work and start arguing with the ridiculous statements in your head.

Don’t be a pawn to your own drama. You got this.

Whenever you’re ready, there are three great ways to take your work on your career and your brain deeper.

1. Sign up for one of my 6-week programs that will take you from overwhelm to happiness.
2. Sign up for free coaching consultation.

The markets will never recover

I could lose my job

I will never be able to retire

Thousands of people are going to die

We haven’t seen the worst of it yet

We are swimming in it. (Drowning in it might be a more apt description.) There is something magnetic about the negative news these days. Why is it that so many of us are drawn to it?

As with all things, I consulted, the Google box on this one:

“Negativity bias” also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one’s psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things.

When I think about our tendency to focus on the negative while giving lesser weight to equally significant positive data points, I can’t help but think about our motivational triad.

Our brains are designed to keep us alive. Historically, that meant one of three things: seek pleasure, avoid pain, expend the least amount of effort (be efficient!). What does that have to do with COVID and news-binging?

News-binging and catastrophizing fall into the category of avoiding pain (i.e., keeping us safe). Our brain believes that this information is keeping us safe. When we read about the latest coronavirus catastrophe, our brain is stimulated, our nervous system is excited. Our brain reacts more strongly and pays more attention to this stimuli. Why? Because our brains are wired to keep us safe; to avoid danger. Hence, negativity bias.

Ever noticed that when you read bad news you get this frenzied little buzz going on? You feel stimulated, compelled to consume more. Gather more data. Understand the situation better. Learn how to protect yourself better.

Why did that happen?

What would I do differently?

Am I similarly at risk?

We are biologically wired to scan the horizon for signs of crouching tigers. We are programmed to look for danger so that we can avoid it. Stay safe.

Our brains are looking at the news this same way. It is providing data that we need to understand to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Does that mean it’s the best decision for you?

That’s for you to decide.

Is the amount of news you are consuming helping you?

How is it impacting you?

How is it negatively impacting you?

When you find yourself bogged down in negativity bias, I recommend that you acknowledge your biological efforts to keep yourself safe. I also recommend examining the positive inputs you might be overlooking.

Give both the positive and the negative equal air time.

Feel free to examine that worst case scenario swirling around your brain BUT also consider the best possible outcome. Aren’t they both equally possible? We don’t know what is going to happen or what these next few months will bring. What we do know is that our brains tend to focus on the worst possible outcome. Given that, shouldn’t we also give equal attention and energy to the best possible outcome?

If you are able to examine both the best possible outcome as well as the worst possible outcome and accept that reality will likely end somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, you can approach the days and your life with more perspective.

If you can come to terms with both the worst possible outcome and the best possible outcome, you will be able to accept anything in between those two. You will be mentally and emotionally equipped to deal with the most likely outcome, somewhere in the middle.

Help your brain identify the balance of possibilities that it is overlooking. Help yourself find some balance between reality and the full range of possible outcomes. Recognize your natural tendency toward the negative.

For more support finding balance during times of chaos, schedule a free consultation. I am helping my clients find more peace and balance despite the world’s current uncertainties. I am helping my clients move forward despite the fear. Sign up and get your life back on track.