To talk about lawyer burnout in a meaningful way, we have to mention the finish line problem. It’s the common element in every lawyer burnout story I’ve heard.
So imagine you’re running a marathon and arrive, gasping for air, at the final hundred yards. Onlookers cheer. Digging deep for that last ounce of energy, you can almost feel the relief of crossing the finish line.
Then some guy emerges from the crowd with unsettling news.
“Did we forget to mention there’s another marathon, starting right now? We need you to run that one too.”
You process these words. You don’t scoff, or laugh, because this isn’t a joke. He means it, and you’re going to do it. First of all, because you’re a trooper, and a team player. Second, (setting aside our metaphor for the moment) because you’re a lawyer and so you don’t have a choice in the matter, not merely because you’re a born pleaser and deeply risk-averse and highly competitive and ambitious (and maybe never asked yourself in any meaningful way what else you might want to do with your life) but also (perhaps) because you owe a fortune in school loans.
In an attempt to pull yourself into a frame of mind suitable to running another 26 ½ miles without a break, you tell yourself that, after this second marathon, there’ll be another finish line, and this time there will be an end, a respite, some rest. Might as well look on the bright side – you are young and smart and capable and filled with an unstoppable go-getter spirit. You’ll pull off the impossible.
Sure enough, you make it to the second home stretch. Once again the crowd cheers. You can just about taste the sweetness of slowing down and resting.
Then someone else steps out of the crowd. Her tone is matter of fact: “It turns out there’s another marathon, and we’re short-handed. You’ll have to run it.”
You feel numb, or maybe like screaming, or maybe just numb – it’s hard to tell. Another marathon, with no break. You have to keep running.
So you do. But at some point, while running, you’re also crying. Still running, just crying at the same time. And there’s anxiety, that comes in waves, leaving you gasping. Weirdest of all, there’s also a persistent fantasy of tripping and twisting your ankle, and you contemplate how nice it seems like that would be, to twist your ankle. Not to die or anything like that, just limp off to the hospital and lie down and sleep and not run anymore. That would be better than this.
But that doesn’t happen. You don’t trip, or twist your ankle. You do find yourself hurling a cup of gatorade at a race official, which almost gets you kicked out. But you cool it, because you can’t get kicked out (although part of you wants very much to be.) You have to think about your career. You have to keep your cool. You have to keep running.
All you want in the world is to stop running, which is the one thing in the world you’re not allowed to do.
This, in a nutshell (a metaphorical nutshell – and yeah, the nutshell itself is also a metaphor so wow, we’re getting meta here) is lawyer burnout, a phenomenon that’s all about denial, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, by the time you realize burnout might be coming, it’s already here, and a whole lot worse than you think.
How bad does lawyer burnout get? On a reasonably regular basis, lawyers arrive at my office, sit down, and burst into tears. That happens. And these aren’t people with much history of bursting into tears.
If there’s one infallible indicator of lawyer burnout, the sign you’ve reached the (lawyer) point of no return, it’s when you’re someone who doesn’t usually break down in tears, but you find yourself breaking down in tears – and it’s starting to happen every week. Maybe, every day.
Temper tantrums are another indicator something’s amiss. Are you kicking the wall of your office, throwing things, screaming in frustration? Could be an issue. One of my clients smashed his fist into the computer monitor in his office…then realized he needed a computer monitor. He concocted an excuse for the help desk: It “got knocked over.” When your computer monitor “gets knocked over,” it might be time to ask if you’re suffering from lawyer burnout.
Anxiety attacks are a common side effect, too. A lawyer recently texted me to say she’d fled her firm’s offices, panting for air, after receiving yet another long list of requests from a partner. She wound up in a pew at the back of a church, waiting for her heart to stop pounding so she could pull herself together sufficiently to contemplate returning to work. That’s burnout, too. You start to lose your resilience, so everything and anything can knock you off balance into emotional chaos. And if, like a lot of workaholic lawyers, you’re also drinking gallons of coffee every day (and/or abusing Adderall), then no, that isn’t going to improve matters.
First irony of lawyer burnout? It tends to affect good lawyers. The old pie-eating contest paradox (you know, the prize is more pie!) comes into play: The better you are, the more they use you. The more they use you, the more they keep moving the finish line so they can keep using you more.
The scenario tends to go something like this: There’s a young litigator who’s so sharp and capable she’s indispensable at the firm – everyone wants to use her. And so they do. And so she goes to trial, and does great. And then another case blows up and she goes to trial on that one, too. Then a managing partner lands another case that’s so huge and important to the firm that they really need the best senior associate they can find, so they pull her into that one as well, despite the fact that she’s now the highest biller in her entire group and hasn’t had a weekend off in months. And since they’re working all their lawyers like galley slaves, attrition at the firm is high – which means more work for whomever hasn’t quit.
Or there’s an M&A lawyer who’s detail-driven and hard-working and stays up all night every night to get every document right. The partners love him and keep throwing deals his way, telling him what a great job he’s doing…until he’s billed 1400 hours in six months and finds himself sobbing in his office alone at sunrise, wondering why he feels like he’s losing his mind.
You know you have lawyer burnout when you no longer remember having hobbies:
“I used to play golf and cook and read books,” one lawyer reminisced. “Now, when I get home at 10 pm on an early night, I tell my wife, no, I can’t get the kid ready for bed. I need my ‘stare into space with a blank expression of horror’ time.”
There’s also the “if I could only get sick” syndrome. It starts out small:
“I remember going to the dentist to get a crown replaced,” one lawyer recalled. “He was telling me, ‘this might sting a bit,’ or whatever, and I told him not to worry about it and realized I’d been looking forward to the appointment all week. That dentist’s appointment was nearly an hour during which I had an excuse not to work. I didn’t even have to check email – just lie back and let someone else worry about screwing up.”
One lawyer told me she heard about an associate at another firm who was hit by a city bus while riding his bike. He broke a bone or two and had some stitches and scrapes.
“I fantasized about how great it must feel to lie in a hospital bed and not worry about anything,” she mused. “Of course, knowing me, even in a body cast, I’d wind up on a conference call. And, by the way – that’s a weird thing to fantasize about, huh?”
If you’re that burned out, why not quit? Some lawyers pull it off – head to another firm where things might be better. But even at that mythical alternative, the mid-law firm with “lifestyle balance,” the same old problems can crop up. The issue is, they figure out you’re good, and start using you, and, as the eager-to-please new hire, you might not be able to say no. They might start promising you partnership or special bonuses, and even if the partnership is “non-equity” and the bonuses, calculated by the hour, work out to minimum wage…you can still get sucked back into the finish line problem.
The real cure for burnout is a finish line that actually finishes. In other words, a proper vacation. The definition of a “proper” vacation is one that you actually take, where you stay somewhere pleasant long enough, doing nothing vaguely related to law (including checking email), to remember who you are. That means remembering who you used to be before this madness consumed your life.
A proper vacation must last long enough that you get bored of doing nothing.
Bored of doing nothing? Most lawyers struggle with the concept. Try this one on for size: You get so bored of doing nothing you actually look forward to doing law.
I know – impossible to conceive of that happening. But, as I’ve said, lawyer burnout affects lawyers not because they hate law and are bad at it, but (ironically) because they like law and are good at it. These are the same lawyers whom firms most covet. Which is why, if the firms knew what was good for them, they’d command each and every burnt out lawyer to lie on a beach in Maui with instructions to come home whenever they feel like it.
Because they will. Eventually, even a beach in Maui grows dull. You start hankering to litigate. Or close a billion dollar pharma merger. Seems impossible, but that’s the miracle of a proper vacation – at least for people who want to be lawyers because they’re good at it.
I recently worked with an attorney experiencing some of the worst lawyer burnout I’ve ever seen. The first few sessions were largely dedicated to him weeping and muttering “I don’t know what’s come over me – this isn’t how I am.”
He’d just finished going to trial on three cases in a row – complicated commercial litigation with lots of weird caselaw, annoying opposing counsel, surprise motions, all the bells and whistles. He did great. Then, after eight months of non-stop working around the clock, he found himself throwing tantrums at baristas at Starbucks, crying uncontrollably, seizing up with anxiety attacks that left him hunched up, trembling, on the floor of his office, running fantasies through his mind of contracting a serious illness so he could just, finally, rest.
We decided he had to enforce a boundary, and tell the assigning partner he needed a break. Luckily, his firm valued him enough to take serious action. The managing partner pulled him off any new matters for the time being, and temporarily excused him from all summer associate and diversity and recruitment committees, too. He was under strict orders to do nothing until he felt himself again. And so, for two full weeks, he hung out with his sister at her home in a bucolic rural locale on the other side of the country, spent quality time with his newborn nephew, read sci-fi, and played guitar.
It worked. There was a scare, after he got back – he almost filed the wrong type of motion in some minor case (the sort of mistake every litigator makes, that doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, especially since someone caught it.) He started to feel a scary panic attack coming on after that, and I talked him down (he also did some talking of himself down, since his head was in a healthier place after our work together and some time off.) The partner told him not to worry about it, and, to his own surprise, he took her advice, and moved on.
Now he’s back at work, starting to take on real cases again. He’s learned his lesson, which is to say, a healthy respect for lawyer burnout.
A race, by definition, has to have a conclusion. A final sprint must be final. And everyone needs a rest after a major exertion.
There must be a finish line – or nothing’s ever going to end well.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
And now there’s a new Sequel: Still Way Worse Than Being a Dentist: (The Sequel)
I’ve also written a comic novel about a psychotherapist who falls
in love with a blue alien from outer space. I guarantee pure reading pleasure: Bad Therapist: A Romance
