041 Why your body thinks work is dangerous (and what you're feeling physically)

It might be hormones. It might be aging. And there's something else going on that nobody has named for you yet.

PRODUCED INTRO

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.

OVERVIEW

Today we're talking about what's actually driving the physical symptoms that attorneys learn to live with, and why the usual explanations don't tell the whole story.

THE PATTERN

It took you forever to fall asleep on Sunday night. And then you woke up at 3am and you couldn't stop thinking about the brief you have to file next week. Or the look your teenager gave you when you told her you couldn't take her shopping next weekend because you're going to have to work.

You've developed good sleep hygiene like your doctor told you to. You get off your screen well before bedtime. You have the same bedtime and wake up time. You have blackout curtains. But you still can't get a good night's sleep.

You've tried writing down what you're grateful for before you go to bed. You've done the breathing exercises a therapist gave you years ago for something completely different. You've assumed there's something wrong with you physically. Something the doctors haven't found yet or can't name. You've never connected the way you sleep to the way you work.

You never fall back asleep after your 3am wakeup. At 5am you decide to get out of bed and work on the brief. Not because you want to. Because you can't stop thinking about it so you may as well work on it.

You take a quick shower and decide not to wash your hair today because you don't want to see another frightening clump of hair in the drain.

You get to work on Monday morning and the tightness in your chest that showed up at 4pm on Sunday is still there.

By 11am you already have a low grade headache that you know is going to get worse by the afternoon if you don't close your eyes and turn off the lights in your office for a few minutes.

Wednesday looks the same. So does Thursday.

And when you finally do stop, a real vacation, a long weekend where nothing is due, you get sick. Every time. You've learned to expect it. You assume it's because you finally relaxed. But something else is happening: your body was holding itself together under internal pressure. The moment that pressure dropped, everything your nervous system had been managing finally surfaced.

THE MECHANISM

The threat your body is responding to isn't happening right now. It's happening in your interpretation of the situation.

Here's what I mean by that.

You might assume that you take in information through your senses and experience it directly, like watching a movie of what's happening around you. But that's not what the brain does. Your brain is constantly interpreting the data coming in through your senses. It's constructing a story about what you're experiencing. And it's doing this automatically, below your conscious awareness.

Your brain takes shortcuts based on what it's learned before. Otherwise it would be working too hard all the time. So it pattern-matches. It makes a quick read of the situation based on past experience.

Think about walking on a path and seeing what looks like a snake. Your heart rate spikes before you've consciously registered what you're looking at. Then you realize it's just a stick. The threat wasn't real. But your body responded as if it was, because your brain had already made a read.

Your lawyer brain does the same thing at work.

A deadline comes in. An email lands from a difficult partner. A client calls upset. Your brain doesn't read those as neutral information. It reads them as threats, to your career security, to your identity as a competent attorney. And it does this automatically, before you're even aware it happened.

That interpretation triggers your stress response. Stress hormones start circulating. Your body begins responding as though it's dealing with a genuine threat.

The threat your body is responding to isn't happening right now. It's happening in your interpretation of what's just a deadline. Just an email. Just a difficult client.

But your brain has been conditioned to read them as something much bigger than that.

WHY IT PERSISTS

Different life experiences shape how your brain learns to read the world as safe or unsafe.

As a woman, you've been socialized to attribute whatever is happening to a personal failing. As a first generation lawyer, you may have learned that you have to work twice as hard to prove you belong. As a person of color, you may have learned that your margin for error is smaller than everyone else's.

Each of those experiences adds conditioning. They don't cancel each other out. They compound.

Which means some attorneys are starting from a higher baseline of threat activation, not because something is wrong with them, but because their nervous system has been given more reasons to stay on alert.

And because the threat response is operating automatically, below your awareness, it can't switch off on its own. It doesn't return to baseline without something interrupting it.

So the usual fixes don't reach it. Vacation, sleep, exercise, eating well, those address the symptoms without getting to what's causing them. You feel better temporarily. Then the symptoms come back. Because the underlying pattern is still active.

You can't interrupt a response you didn't know was happening.

WHAT'S POSSIBLE

There are two things about this that might surprise you.

The first is how much damage stress hormones can do to your body over time. Most attorneys know stress is bad for you in a general way. But the specific physical toll of those hormones circulating in your system for years, in your sleep, your immune system, your hair, your cardiovascular system, is more significant than most people realize. And more connected to your daily experience than most doctors name.

The second is where the problem actually starts.

You've been trying to fix the symptoms. Sleep hygiene. Breathing exercises. Gratitude journals. None of those reach what's actually driving them.

What's driving them is the interpretation your brain is running automatically, every workday. And automatic doesn't mean permanent. Interpretations are learned. And what's learned can be retrained.

That's the work. Not thinking positively. Not telling yourself the deadline isn't stressful. Retraining the automatic read your brain makes when the email lands, the client calls, or the deadline appears on your calendar. Teaching your brain to stop reading those situations as signs that something important is about to go wrong.

When that interpretation changes, the stress response changes with it. When the stress response changes, your body stops producing the same level of stress hormones it's been producing. Your body finally has a chance to recover.

You have more influence over your body's stress response than you've been told. Because the entry point isn't your body. It's the interpretation your brain has been running automatically, without your awareness, every single workday.

CLOSE

The physical symptoms you've been trying to manage for years may not be what you think they are. They may not be aging. They may not be a personal failing. They may be your nervous system's response to the way it's been trained to interpret your work.

Change the interpretation and the nervous system changes what it's carrying. When that happens, the body gets to change too.

If this sounds like your experience, there's a link in the description to book a conversation with me. I work with attorneys on exactly this. So that your nervous system isn't running on a setting that's making you sick.

I'll see you next time.

It might be hormones. It might be aging. And there's something else going on that nobody has named for you yet.

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.

Today we're talking about what's actually driving the physical symptoms that attorneys learn to live with, and why the usual explanations don't tell the whole story.

It took you forever to fall asleep on Sunday night. And then you woke up at 3am and you couldn't stop thinking about the brief you have to file next week. Or the look your teenager gave you when you told her you couldn't take her shopping next weekend because you're going to have to work.

You've developed good sleep hygiene like your doctor told you to. You get off your screen well before bedtime. You have the same bedtime and wake up time. You have blackout curtains. But you still can't get a good night's sleep.

You've tried writing down what you're grateful for before you go to bed. You've done the breathing exercises a therapist gave you years ago for something completely different. You've assumed there's something wrong with you physically. Something the doctors haven't found yet or can't name. You've never connected the way you sleep to the way you work.

You never fall back asleep after your 3am wakeup. At 5am you decide to get out of bed and work on the brief. Not because you want to. Because you can't stop thinking about it so you may as well work on it.

You take a quick shower and decide not to wash your hair today because you don't want to see another frightening clump of hair in the drain.

You get to work on Monday morning and the tightness in your chest that showed up at 4pm on Sunday is still there.

By 11am you already have a low grade headache that you know is going to get worse by the afternoon if you don't close your eyes and turn off the lights in your office for a few minutes.

Tuesday looks the same. So does Wednesday and Thursday.

And when you finally do stop, take a real vacation, or have a long weekend where nothing is due, you get sick. Every time. You've learned to expect it. You assume it's because you finally relaxed. But something else is happening: your body was holding itself together under internal pressure. The moment that pressure dropped, everything your nervous system had been managing finally surfaced.

The threat your body is responding to isn't happening right now. It's happening in your interpretation of the situation.

Here's what I mean by that.

You might assume that you take in information through your senses and experience it directly, like watching a movie of what's happening around you. But that's not what the brain does. Your brain is constantly interpreting the data coming in through your senses. It's constructing a story about what you're experiencing. And it's doing this automatically, below your conscious awareness.

Your brain takes shortcuts based on what it's learned before. Otherwise it would be working too hard all the time. So it pattern-matches. It makes a quick read of the situation based on past experience.

Think about walking on a path and seeing what looks like a snake. Your heart rate spikes before you've consciously registered what you're looking at. Then you realize it's just a stick. The threat wasn't real. But your body responded as if it was, because your brain had already made a read.

Your lawyer brain does the same thing at work.

A deadline comes in. An email lands from a difficult partner. A client calls upset. Your brain doesn't read those as neutral information. It reads them as threats, to your career security, to your identity as a competent attorney. And it does this automatically, before you're even aware it happened.

That interpretation triggers your stress response. Stress hormones start circulating. Your body begins responding as though it's dealing with a genuine threat.

The threat your body is responding to isn't happening right now. It's happening in your interpretation of a deadline. an email. a difficult client.

But your brain has been conditioned to read them as something much bigger than that.

Different life experiences shape how your brain learns to read the world as safe or unsafe.

As a woman, you've been socialized to attribute whatever is happening to a personal failing. As a first generation lawyer, you may have learned that you have to work twice as hard to prove you belong. As a person of color, you may have learned that your margin for error is smaller than everyone else's.

Each of those experiences adds conditioning. They don't cancel each other out. They compound.

Which means some attorneys are starting from a higher baseline of threat activation, not because something is wrong with them, but because their nervous system has been given more reasons to stay on alert.

And because the threat response is operating automatically, below your awareness, it can't switch off on its own. It doesn't return to baseline without something interrupting it.

So the usual fixes don't reach it. Vacation, sleep, exercise, eating well, those address the symptoms without getting to what's causing them. You feel better temporarily. Then the symptoms come back. Because the underlying pattern is still active.

You can't interrupt a response you didn't know was happening.

There are two things about this that might surprise you.

The first is how much damage stress hormones can do to your body over time. Most attorneys know stress is bad for you in a general way. But the specific physical toll of those hormones circulating in your system for years, in your sleep, your immune system, your hair, your cardiovascular system, is more significant than most people realize. And more connected to your daily experience than most doctors name.

The second is where the problem actually starts.

You've been trying to fix the symptoms. Sleep hygiene. Breathing exercises. Gratitude journals. None of those reach what's actually driving them.

What's driving them is the interpretation your brain is running automatically, every workday. And automatic doesn't mean permanent. Interpretations are learned. And what's learned can be retrained.

That's the work. Not thinking positively. Not telling yourself the deadline isn't stressful. Retraining the automatic read your brain makes when the email lands, the client calls, or the deadline appears on your calendar. Teaching your brain to stop reading those situations as signs that something important is about to go wrong.

When that interpretation changes, the stress response changes with it. When the stress response changes, your body stops producing the same level of stress hormones it's been producing. Your body finally has a chance to recover.

You have more influence over your body's stress response than you've been told. Because the entry point isn't your body. It's the interpretation your brain has been running automatically, without your awareness, every single workday.

The physical symptoms you've been trying to manage for years may not be what you think they are. They may not be aging. They may not be a personal failing. They may be your nervous system's response to the way it's been trained to interpret your work.

Change the interpretation and the nervous system changes what it's carrying. When that happens, the body gets to change too.

If this sounds like your experience, there's a link in the description to book a conversation with me. I work with attorneys on exactly this. So that your nervous system isn't running on a setting that's making you sick.

I'll see you next time.