By Joel G. Kosman, Esq., LCSW
Most people have at least a general sense of what stress is. At its most basic level, stress can be understood as the challenge that you face when trying to do something. For lawyers especially, that challenge may arise from the nature of the task itself, the meaning or importance of the task, or both.
So, for example, the first time you mark-up a contract of sale, you will experience more stress than you will the 10th time. However, even if you’ve marked-up a document many times, the first time you do it for a new partner will generate more stress. There, it’s not the nature of the task that presents the challenge, it’s the meaning of the task — the challenge of making a good first impression.
What is less widely understood is that stress, properly approached, is not inherently a problem. When you encounter an obstacle, your body activates in a way designed to help you deal with it. Your attention narrows, your focus sharpens, and your capacity for problem-solving and information processing can actually increase. A lawyer performing well under the pressure of a hearing or a tight deadline is, in part, benefiting from exactly this response. In other words, stress arises as a response to a test, and you may use that response to help you mobilize to meet the challenge of that test.
Far more often than not, the stress response should be manageable. People often say they are “stressed out” when it’s actually anxiety that is causing their distress. Stress and anxiety, though often treated as the same thing, are meaningfully different. Confusing them makes both harder to address.
Stress and Anxiety Are Different Things
A useful way to think about the distinction: stress arises externally, anxiety arises internally. Stress is about what is happening around you — a deadline, a demanding partner, a difficult negotiation — and about the objective challenge those things present. Anxiety, by contrast, is about the thoughts you bring to the situation: “What if I fail?” “What if I look foolish?” It tends to be rooted in a fear of something you experience as threatening and out of your control — and it can intensify even when nothing external has changed.
I want to be careful here, because saying anxiety is something that happens in your own mind is not the same as saying it’s your fault. It isn’t. It is about understanding how you are responding to a situation, so that you can begin to shift that response. That distinction — between blame and understanding — matters enormously.
When Anxiety Starts to Loop
Anxiety tends to build on itself in a recognizable pattern. You think about a situation. The more you think about it, the more anxious you become. The more anxious you become, the more you try to think your way through it. And that process reinforces itself, with anxiety ratcheting higher at each pass.
You may feel increasingly trapped in your own thinking — unable to step back from it and unable to resolve it. It can feel almost literally as if you want to jump out of your own skin, like you need to escape from yourself. If you’ve experienced this, you know exactly what I mean.
Why Lawyers Are Particularly Susceptible
Lawyers, both by training and disposition, are especially vulnerable to this pattern. The legal profession trains you to rely on thinking as your primary tool for solving problems. When you encounter difficulty, the natural response is to analyze more carefully, think more completely, and keep working at it until you arrive at an answer. That approach works extremely well in most of legal practice.
But anxiety is not that kind of problem. Thinking harder about anxiety doesn’t resolve it — it feeds it. The instinct to double down on analysis when you haven’t figured something out may serve you well when you’re working on a summary judgment motion. When you’re caught in an anxiety loop, the same instinct works against you. The effect is more like quicksand: the more you struggle, the faster you sink. And ironically, the more you focus on a feared outcome, the more likely you may be to bring it about.
This is one of the reasons that lawyers who are struggling with anxiety often find that the strategies that work everywhere else in their professional lives — more analysis, more preparation, more thinking — simply don’t help. They’re applying the right tool to the wrong problem.
A Different Approach
A more useful starting point is not to think harder, but to notice when thinking has stopped helping. If you find yourself going over the same ground repeatedly without getting anywhere — the thoughts looping, the anxiety climbing — that is useful information. It is a signal that more analysis is not what is needed.
The first step is learning to recognize that pattern as it is happening, rather than simply being caught inside it. From there, it becomes possible to begin to step out of it — not by forcing a solution, but by changing your relationship to the loop itself. That is a learnable skill. It takes practice, but it is not out of reach.
The next post in this series will look more closely at what drives anxiety at a deeper level — the thoughts, assumptions, and internal narratives that sustain it — and how becoming curious about those patterns, rather than simply trying to suppress them, is often where the most useful work begins.
For more on how anxiety and stress affect professional life, visit the Anxiety and Work Stress pages.
If 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.