Ask any lawyer and she will tell you that practising law is hazardous to your health, and that the guilty party is stress.
Studies show that out of 28 professions, lawyers are most likely to burn out.
Stress is linked to high blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, and anxiety among other health problems.
There are effective ways to master stress, however, and a growing number of lawyers are responding to this endemic health hazard by enrolling in stress management courses that feature meditation.
Ray Lopez, director of the Lawyer Assistance Program for the New York State Bar Association, is a strong advocate of using meditation to deal with stress.
“When you slow down for a short time on a regular basis, you reduce stress, which is helpful both physically and mentally. When people are stressed, they may think they can do a lot, but they’re limited — they’re impaired. That’s what lawyers have to realize. If you don’t take care of your health, you’re going to be undone.” Lopez wrote in a New York Law Journal article.
Harvard and others join lawyer meditation movement
A number of leading American law schools, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, are now offering meditation courses to their students in an effort to provide budding lawyers with tools to fight the stress they will face in their careers.
Retired California judge Ron Greenberg is also among the advocates of meditation for law students, lawyers, and judges. He gives presentations throughout the United States on topics such as “The benefits of meditation and how it can play a role in the student’s success in law school and beyond.”
He also stresses the connection between meditation and mediation and how each influences the other.
In a May 2006 Legal Times article, Greenberg’s colleague, Charles Halpern of UC Berkley, said, “meditation helps judges achieve empathy.”
In an SFGate.com article titled “Zen and the Art of Lawyering,” Professor Leonard Riskin of the University of Missouri at Columbia School of Law said: “I believe that mindfulness can help mediators and other dispute resolution professionals feel better, get more satisfaction out of the work, and do a better job for their clients.”
Riskin’s work has had a snowball effect since the Harvard Negotiation Law Review published his article, “The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Contributions of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers and Their Clients.”
The article resulted in several prestigious law firms in Boston, including Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, offering on-site courses in mindfulness meditation.
Long Island lawyer Arnie Hertz meditates 15 to 60 minutes every day. He says it reduces and effectively channels the emotionally charged feelings his clients feel for their adversaries.
“Rather than being a gladiator for someone’s heightened emotions, there’s a more effective way of lawyering: Help your client get centered, and get them to look at their long-term life interests away from the immediate problem they’re facing,” he told SFGate.com.
Stress, health, addiction, and lawyers
Lawyers are always switched on. They require almost superhuman energy to stay focused and on their game. Nothing short of utmost dedication to the firm and the client is expected of the practising lawyer.
Stress creates cortisol, which ramps up the heart rate and blood pressure. If stress is chronic, and the body is in an almost constant “hyper” state, the health of the individual declines.
High blood pressure, chronic migraines, heart disease, depression, anxiety, and other health problems then make their unwelcome appearances.
Some lawyers deal with stress by self-medicating, drinking too much, or using drugs. Some drink too much coffee or smoke too many cigarettes. These activities mask the problem and compound it with addiction.
Legal Business recently published a survey which concluded that throughout the United Kingdom, alcohol abuse was “endemic” and the use of hard drugs such as cocaine was “becoming more prevalent, particularly in big city law firms.”
The same survey said cocaine abuse is common on the job and law partners even admit to using it with their clients in basement poker games.
