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Three Ways For Lawyers To Reduce Substance Abuse That Actually Work

Being a lawyer does not make you a drug addict or an alcoholic. But legal pedagogy and practice do set you up to be more susceptible to the appeal of drinking and drug use.

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Disclaimer: This post is not medical advice nor a substitute for medical advice and I am not a medical professional. If you are physically dependent on drugs or alcohol please consult a medical professional before attempting to reduce or eliminate your use. This post is aimed at people who are not physically dependent on drugs or alcohol, but would like to reduce their recreational substance use. 

It’s well-known that lawyers suffer from higher than average rates of substance abuse. While most of the attention is focused on lawyers and drinking, there is some evidence that drug use is on the rise among lawyers and significantly underreported on surveys of the profession (for the obvious reason that lawyers are loath to disclose illegal activity).

Now I want to be clear: Being a lawyer does not make you a drug addict or an alcoholic. But legal pedagogy and practice DO set you up to be more susceptible to the appeal of drinking, drug use, or any other activity that promises you a respite from your stress and anxiety.

The normal CLE-type advice you get is to go to AA, consult your local “lawyers helping lawyers” group, or take a nice bubble bath. But if those solutions always worked, we wouldn’t still have this profession-wide problem.

Here’s the essential truth about substance use, especially when you’re not dealing with a genetic predisposition:

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Humans use substances to tune out of their current reality.

It can be booze, it can be drugs. It can also be food, Netflix, shopping, sleeping, sex, or gambling.

If you don’t know how to deal with stress, you’re going to eventually get desperate to escape it. And when you’re desperate to escape it, you’re going to turn to a substance to help you do that. The worst unintended consequence is that substance use produces neurological dis-regulation which contributes to stress and depression, so you’re making it even harder for yourself to feel normal much less better.

So if stress and the lack of an ability to manage your stress is what produces substance use and abuse for many lawyers, understanding how to manage your stress is part of what will help you stop using substances so much. When you know how to deal with your stress as it comes up, you don’t have to just power through on adrenaline and end up at home at night, desperate to escape your own brain or exhausted and looking for comfort.

I talk a lot about how to manage stress in my other columns on this site. So today what I want to teach you is how to extend these concepts to drinking.

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The core of every concept I teach is that external circumstances don’t cause our feelings. Instead, our thoughts cause our feelings.

And the desire to drink, or take drugs, or gamble, or impulsively shop – desire is just another feeling. You might also call it an urge. Same difference. It’s a physical sensation in the body that is caused by a thought you have about drinking, taking a pill, smoking a joint, or betting on a baseball game.

Your thought might be something like:

“It would be relaxing to have a glass of wine.”

“I deserve this beer.”

“Smoking pot is the only way I can stop worrying about work.”

“I’ve earned this.”

“Fuck it, who cares.”

There are all different thoughts that produce the urge or desire to drink in different people.

So if you want to reduce your drinking or drug use, there are three things you can practice.

#1. Get really familiar with your favorite “go ahead” thoughts. The thoughts that create the urge to drink for you are going to be pretty consistent, if you just pay attention to them. Before you even start trying to change your behavior, just practice writing down what you’re thinking when you pour a glass or roll a joint or take a pill.

#2. Get really familiar with what an urge feels like in your body. You’ve habituated yourself to always answer an urge by using the substance. It can be booze, drugs, sugar, shopping, whatever it is – you’ve formed a habit loop. You have the thought, you feel the urge, and then you satisfy the urge with the substance of your choice. Being able to change your habit means getting comfortable feeling an urge without answering it. You can hear the call and not take the action. But that requires being willing to feel the urge.

Now an important note: Allowing an urge is totally different than white-knuckling through it. When you are white-knuckling, you are resisting the urge. You wish the urge wasn’t there and you want it to go away as soon as possible. When you are allowing an urge, you are not resisting it. You are being curious about it. You allow it to exist without wishing it would go away or distracting yourself. A good practice is to get really curious with yourself about what it feels like in your body. Describe it to yourself. Does it feel fast or slow? Hot or cold? Big or small? Heavy or light?

#3. Start tracking your urges. In particular track how many times you are able to let them exist without answering them by taking the action. I like to have clients keep track until they get to 100 unanswered urges. It doesn’t have to be 100 straight in a row. You don’t start over if you answer the urge with the drink or the joint or whatever. But every time you feel the urge to drink or use, and you practice allowing the urge and being curious about it, you strengthen the neural pathway that can experience the urge without using or drinking. So keeping track helps you see that you’re capable of doing this. And by the time you get to 100 you’ll know so much more about your triggers, your thoughts, and your ability to make a conscious choice about how and when to use.

Here’s the last thing I want to say about this topic. If you’re concerned about your use, you’ve probably tried to stop before, and it hasn’t worked, or it only worked temporarily. So your brain is going to want to make this another opportunity to set an unrealistic perfectionistic goal, and then beat you up if you don’t achieve it.

That’s way too much pressure.

Your past does not predict your future. The most powerful thing you can do when it comes to any substance use is to entertain the idea that your future could be different from your past. You’ve learned new ideas and tools just reading this article. You don’t have to repeat your past actions or reactions.

Practice being curious instead of judgmental. Watch your brain when it wants to imagine the worst case scenario and tell you that if you ever drink or use again you can never succeed in cutting back. That simply isn’t true. This isn’t a zero-sum game. The more you practice these skills, the more you’ll be able to start to make different choices. The only thing that will keep you from changing is believing that you can’t.

Kara Loewentheil is a former litigator and academic who now runs a boutique life coaching practice for law students and lawyers. Intimately acquainted with the unique challenges lawyers face in their professional careers and personal lives, Kara teaches her clients cognitive-based techniques for dealing with stress, anxiety, and lawyer brain so that they can build the lives and careers they want. She is also the host of the only podcast that teaches lawyers concrete solutions to their unique lawyer problems, The Lawyer Stress Solution, available on iTunes. To download a free guide to taming your anxious lawyer brain, go to www.thelawyerstresssolution.com/guide.

 

 

 

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