Health / Wellness

It's Lonely Being A Lawyer

It makes sense that lawyers would avoid taking steps to break the loneliness because it would require vulnerability.

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Ed. note: This post is by Jeena Cho, a Legal Mindfulness Strategist. She is the co-author of The Anxious Lawyer (affiliate link), a book written by lawyers for lawyers that makes mindfulness and meditation accessible and approachable. She is the creator of Mindful Pause, a self-paced online program for creating a more sustainable, peaceful, and productive law practice in just six minutes a day. Jeena offers actionable change strategies for reducing stress and anxiety while increasing productivity, joy, and satisfaction through mindfulness.

I was at a conference in a breakout session and one lawyer shared, “Even though there are 300 lawyers in my building, I feel so lonely.” Loneliness can come in many flavors. You can feel lonely from physical isolation — being locked in a room, doing research for 12 hours with little human interaction except for the steady stream of emails and Facebook breaks. You can feel lonely because you feel different — which can lead to feeling as though you don’t belong. (This is the particular flavor of loneliness I often struggle with.)

You can feel lonely because you don’t have a significant other. You can feel lonely because you don’t have people you can trust and confide in at work. You can also feel lonely because you’ve been working way too much and you feel disconnected from yourself.

When we feel loneliness, it’s easy to continue on the path to more loneliness rather than to do something about it. It makes sense that lawyers would avoid taking steps to break the loneliness because it would require vulnerability.

Also, we may engage in self-criticism for feeling lonely. We might tell ourselves it’s a sign of weakness, to suck it up, to get over it, etc.

Yet, to be lonely is surely proof that you’re human. As humans, we are subject to human emotions, including loneliness.

If you are feeling lonely or isolated, there are lots of ways to break the cycle of loneliness. Here are some suggestions.

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Continue reading over at Jeena’s website…

 

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