By Joel Kosman, Esq., LCSW
This is the final post in a six-part series on stress, anxiety, and the pressures of legal practice. In earlier posts, I looked at how stress and anxiety differ, why lawyers are especially susceptible to anxiety loops, how interpretation shapes the experience of stress, and how building agency through concrete steps is more useful than pursuing control. This post gets more practical: what do you actually do when a loop starts?
The Scenario
Sometimes the trigger is clear. You’re deep in a brief, in the middle of a string of 12-hour billable days. The phone rings. You pick it up, and a partner tells you she needs your research on a separate matter — right now. And suddenly, without quite choosing to, your mind is off and running. Why won’t she leave me alone? This will never end. There’s too much. I can’t do all of this.
Other times there’s no apparent trigger at all. Your thoughts simply start running away with themselves, looping around the same worries without resolution, each circuit feeding the next.
As I wrote about earlier in this series, this is the anxiety loop in action: the more you try to think your way out of it, the deeper you go. And when this happens, the first order of business is to break the cycle. How to do that? Simply put, don’t think, move.
Get Out of Your Mind
Literally. Get up from your chair. Breathe. Walk around your office. Take a few minutes outside if you can. The goal is to interrupt the loop by shifting your attention from inside to outside of your head, whether that’s your physical body or your surroundings.
Augment your movement by intentionally directing your attention away from your thoughts. (It doesn’t work to just tell yourself to stop thinking about something.) For example, anchor your attention on your breathing or on your feet as they take each step. Or focus on things you see in front of you. If you’re walking outside, note the names of the stores you pass. Notice the colors of people’s clothing. Pay attention to whatever catches your eye — it doesn’t matter what it is. The point is to give your mind something concrete and present to attend to, rather than the looping thoughts it keeps returning to.
This is not distraction in the passive sense — it’s an active redirection of attention. You are deliberately moving your focus from an internal loop that is generating anxiety to your external environment, which is simply there, requiring nothing from you. The loop requires your attention to sustain itself. When you withdraw that attention — by moving and observing — it loses momentum.
What to Do When You Feel Settled
When you feel the loop beginning to loosen — when the thoughts slow down and the physical tension starts to ease — take a moment before going back to work. Tell yourself, simply and without drama, that you’re okay. That this kind of thing happens. That it passed.
This matters more than it might sound. One of the things that makes anxiety loops harder to break is the self-criticism that accompanies them: frustration at losing focus, embarrassment at being derailed, judgment about what you believe the loop says about you as a lawyer or as a person. That self-criticism adds another layer of activation on top of the original anxiety and makes the cycle harder to interrupt. Letting it go — not getting angry at yourself for having experienced the loop — is part of the technique, not a soft optional add-on.
This Gets Easier With Practice
What I’ve described here is a starting point. Over time, as you become more aware of your patterns — what tends to trigger loops, how they typically develop, what your early warning signs are — you’ll likely find that the cycles are less powerful or more easily broken. Some people find they can redirect their thinking without needing to leave their desk. Others develop a focus on breathing that achieves the same result. What you use matters less than that you use it and use it consistently. In other words, practice.
The underlying principle stays constant: an anxiety loop is sustained by attention. Withdrawing that attention — actively, deliberately, through movement or observation or breath — breaks the cycle. The more you practice doing this, the shorter the loops become and the faster you can exit them.
Beyond Technique
The techniques in this series are genuine and useful. But they address the symptoms of stress and anxiety more than their sources. Understanding why certain situations reliably trigger loops for you, what the underlying beliefs are that make them difficult to exit, and how those patterns connect to your broader experience as a lawyer and as a person — that is the deeper work. It is also work that is considerably more tractable with a good therapist than alone.
That’s what this series has been building toward. Not a self-help program, but an honest account of what is actually happening when stress and anxiety take hold — and an argument that understanding it clearly is the first step toward addressing it effectively.
For more on how stress and anxiety affect professional life, visit the Work Stress and Anxiety pages.
If what you’ve read in this series resonates, and you’re considering whether working together might help, I offer a complimentary 20-minute phone consultation.
Call 914-295-2764 or email [email protected] to arrange a consultation.