Lawyer Monthly - January 2022 Edition

17 JAN 2022 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM COMBATTING STRESS IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION: ADJUSTING TO THE ‘NEW NORMAL’ stress and lay the foundation for a healthy, balanced lifestyle. Understanding stress First and foremost, we need to acknowledge that stress is not all bad. It is our natural and normal reaction to a physical or emotional challenge. It can even be motivating. According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, the relationship between stress and performance can be measured on a bell curve. It is only when stress goes beyond the peak of the bell curve that we suffer from stress-hormone-overload and performance suffers. Sustaining an overload for a long period creates imbalances in our nervous and immune systems, leaving us more vulnerable to illness. As lawyers, we thrive in a fast-paced, challenging, dynamic working environment. We embrace sustained energising levels of stress to reach our potential and excel in our careers. But we need a mechanism to ensure our stress levels do not lower our performance; or worse, damage our mental and physical wellbeing. It can be hard to gauge when things are getting out of hand, particularly if we have a tendency towards feeling anxious or depressed in our normal life. This is why it is important to get to know our own personal stress indicators: our ‘stress signature’. Knowing your ‘stress signature’ Our individual needs and strengths are balanced differently. There is no ‘one size fits all’. Common indicators of stress include (but are not limited to): • Sleep disruption: struggling to drift off, waking up throughout the night; Research suggests that legal professionals generally experience higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress and lower levels of mental wellbeing than members of the general population.