Resiliency and the Happy Lawyer

A recent post on What Makes Lawyers Tick?, a blog written by a lawyer-psychologist, catalogs a disconcerting list of symptoms common to many lawyers.  Lawyers are prone to burnout, feelings of hopelessness, irritability, defensiveness, thin-skinned-ness, passivity, incapacitating perfectionism, diminished creativity, cynicism, and the list goes on. The author asserts that these and similar symptoms are the classic signs of “learned helplessness”—an emotional reaction to a sense of loss of control in the face of constant change. What’s worse – with their negative mindset and high need for autonomy (i.e. control), lawyers seem predisposed to suffer from learned helplessness. To combat this negativity, lawyers should try bolstering their resiliency through cognitive strategies like realistic optimism and positive engagement at work.

If you are interested in optimizing your lawyerly happiness, but feel the need for some professional guidance, you might want to explore the area of positive psychology, which is essentially the scientific study of happiness. Two excellent all-purpose books on the topic are “The How of Happiness” and “The Myth of Happiness” by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, both easily requested through OhioLINK. You can find law-specific titles of interest like “The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law” and “Lawyers, Anger, and Anxiety: Dealing with the Stresses of the Legal Profession” in our Law Career Resources guide under the Work / Life Balance tab.