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Lawyer Well-Being & Mental Health: Massachusetts LAP Blog

Perfection is not your friend

Let’s be honest, everyone would like to be perfect at what they do. After all, if you were perfect, no one could ever criticize you for anything. And let the honesty continue, we all hate being criticized and judged. It just doesn’t feel good. But I assure you, you too can survive criticism (even harsh criticism). The first place to start is to reject the idea that you need to be perfect. You don’t. You’re not. No one is. And somehow we all find a way to go on surviving despite lacking perfection.

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Increase your resilience and reject scapegoating

Resilience is the ability to adapt and learn from any situation you encounter. Often it is described as the ability to thrive despite the barriers life throws at you. There are many ways of increasing one’s resilience (for example: here, here, and here are previous posts that address this). One common temptation that we all have to reduce tension, which prevents us from developing resilience, is the tendency to blame or find a scapegoat. Scapegoating makes us feel good because it removes the tension we feel that is caused by realizing that we need to make changes to what we are doing. Taking responsibility for our actions or our contributions to a situation often feels vulnerable. Blaming others makes us feel safe in the short term, but in fact it only perpetuates the lack of learning and growth. You cannot learn from a situation and develop resilience by avoiding the discomfort.

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Asleep at the Wheel

My latest Q&A column in Massachusetts Lawyers Journal, “Asleep at the Wheel,” I think, captures what can be the downside, for lawyers and others, of only “living in the moment” – sometimes people find themselves on the verge of losing…

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If only there was an “Off Button” for my mind

One of the most common issues I hear about when it comes to difficulty sleeping is the experience of trying to shut down your mind in order to relax and fall asleep, only to have your thoughts start speeding up and preventing sleep. It is often the case that busy people keep mentally busy throughout the day, holding anxious thoughts at bay due to focusing on other concerns. Only when they start to relax, and stop the mental busyness, do the simmering anxious thoughts in the background heat up to a full boil. Much like when you try to drown out your neighbor’s obnoxiously loud music by turning your stereo up to 11 (Spinal Tap anyone?), only to be berated by that obnoxious music once you turn your stereo off right before bedtime. Instead of continuing to block out the anxious thoughts, there are ways of addressing them proactively.

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