039 When stress starts feeling like proof you're not cut out for this

Something hard happens at work. A feeling follows: anxiety, shame, dread. And then, almost immediately, your brain does something you didn't choose and probably aren't even aware of. It decides what the feeling means.

Welcome to the Lawyer Burnout Solution, for women attorneys who are still performing at a high level and want to understand what's driving the internal pressure that won't turn off. I'm Heather Mills.

That decision about what the feeling means usually sounds something like: I can't handle this. Everyone else is fine. I'm not cut out for this.

Today we're talking about where those thoughts actually come from, and why they feel like facts instead of thoughts.

Let's imagine that something causes you stress at work. Maybe you had a meeting with one of the partners and she didn't like one of the arguments you made in the brief. Or you have three big deadlines this week and you're wondering how you're possibly going to get everything done. Or a client is upset. Whatever the situation is, you're feeling stressed or anxious about what's about to happen. Or you feel bad about what just happened.

But instead of the feeling just passing, your brain does something with it. It starts criticizing you for how you're feeling. So then you think to yourself:

Other attorneys don't feel like this.

This is normal stuff that happens to a lawyer every day and they just keep moving forward.

But not. Me. I shouldn't be feeling bad or anxious. The fact that I do means I'm not cut out for this.

Or maybe it sounds more like this: every lawyer is dealing with stress, I'm just really bad at managing it. There's something wrong with me. I'm doing it wrong. But I don't know how to do it any other way. Maybe everyone else is handling this better than I am.

Or maybe it sounds like this: the fact that I'm feeling this way means I'm failing.

When your internal voice is telling you this, you're not really aware of it. It's just part of the running commentary that goes on all the time in your head. But just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't affect you. It does affect you. In a big way. Because this self-criticism creates the worst feeling of all. Criticizing yourself for feeling bad or stressed creates shame. And shame is unbearable. So most of us try to get away from that feeling by numbing out.

There are two things happening here.

The first is your body's stress response. It's your brain's natural response to a stressor. You can think of it like neurological heartburn. Your brain is programmed to respond to a stressor this way, and it's one of those automatic bodily responses that is just happening. It's outside of your own awareness. You don't decide to have it. It's already happening before you know it.

The second part is your brain's interpretation of that neurological heartburn. Your brain says: you shouldn't have heartburn. That makes you a bad lawyer.

Lawyers are trained to treat discomfort as a signal. If you're uneasy about an argument, investigate it. If something feels off, check your work. That instinct makes you a good lawyer. It also means that when your nervous system fires, your brain does the same thing. It investigates. It looks for what the signal means. And what it often finds is: this shouldn't be happening. Other attorneys handle this better than I do.

The reason attorneys are particularly vulnerable to that interpretation is legal industry conditioning. In law school, the Socratic method meant that if you didn't have the right answer, you were exposed in front of your peers. So you learned that not knowing is a liability. That uncertainty is a problem to solve quickly. That you need to be someone who is composed and certain at all times.

Then when you start practicing, that gets conditioned again. Malpractice, bar complaints, client trust. The stakes are genuinely high. There are good reasons the profession demands competence.

But the nervous system doesn't distinguish between "I need to be competent in my work" and "any internal experience of struggle means I'm incompetent." Those two things become one and the same. So the stress response, which is just your nervous system firing, gets interpreted as a failure in competence.

And then the culture does the rest. The attorneys around you don't appear to be struggling. They appear perfectly competent, as though they're not struggling at all. You compare what they're showing on the outside and assume it reflects what's happening on the inside. You think you're the only one struggling. Everyone else appears to have figured out something you haven't.

When you tell yourself that having heartburn makes you a bad lawyer, that cuts deep. The criticism lands hard. When you tell yourself that you shouldn't be having a feeling, and that having it makes you a bad lawyer, that creates another feeling. Usually shame. Shame is one of the most challenging emotions humans deal with. We don't want to feel it. We want to run away from it. So we do.

Some of us distract ourselves: watching TV, eating, drinking, scrolling. But a lot of attorneys do something different. They work harder. Stay later. Check email again. Revise the brief one more time. Overprepare for the deposition. Anything that might make the feeling go away or prove it wrong. The exit looks different but the function is the same: get away from the feeling.

And then we criticize ourselves for doing that too.

You can see how the sequencing creates a continuous cycle that is hard to get out of.

So how do we exit this cycle?

You have to go back to part one: the neurological heartburn. Instead of treating the feeling as evidence, you treat it as a stress response. That's it. It's just a stress response. It's going to pass.

If you actually had heartburn, you wouldn't beat yourself up and think there's something wrong with you. You might do things to try to prevent it: eating differently, taking Prilosec. Or you might take some Tums when you do get it to help ease the symptoms.

So you might try to prevent the stress response by changing your thoughts about the situation. You might not take that criticism about the argument in your brief personally. You'd choose different thoughts that allow you to see that the feedback is one person's opinion, and now you have more insight into what that partner thinks, and what they subjectively consider good or bad. You might tell yourself that you've handled three deadlines in one week before and done it well. You might not make the client's upset feeling mean anything about you.

And even if you do feel a little stressed or anxious or embarrassed, you notice it. You take the time to notice that you're having sensations in your body. Your cheeks are feeling warm. Your chest feels like there's a little red balloon inside it and the balloon is expanding and then getting smaller and then bigger again. And as you're noticing it, you see that eventually it keeps getting smaller.

And while you're noticing those sensations, you offer yourself the same read you'd give a junior associate who just got torn apart in their first deposition. You wouldn't tell them there's something wrong with them. You'd tell them that happens to everyone. You'd tell them that making sense of feedback takes time. Something like: that makes sense. Of course you're feeling this. You stay with it until it gets smaller.

That awareness, that you're experiencing part one, a stress response, and responding to it the way you'd respond to someone you actually wanted to help, that's what interrupts the cycle. It stops your brain from going into part two: the self-criticism that creates shame.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The stress response isn't the problem. What your brain does with it, automatically, without your awareness, that's where the cycle starts. And that's also where it can be interrupted.

When that interpretation changes, and it can change, the stress response stops becoming a verdict. It becomes information. Something that moves through you instead of something you have to escape.

If this sounds less like a hypothetical and more like a Tuesday, there's a link in the description to book a conversation with me. I work with attorneys on exactly this. So that the feeling can just be a feeling, instead of proof of something.

I'll see you next time.