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When I tell people that I’ve come a long way with dealing with my own anxiety, I can feel the curiosity in their minds and the longing for any wisdom that may come their way. Let’s face it, so many of us have battled with anxiety from time to time.
For some like myself, it has represented a long-standing issue that has come in the way of truly engaging with whatever was going on at the time. Outwardly okay, but inwardly asking myself all sorts of questions that were driven by the unnecessary levels of cortisol and adrenaline spiking in my body. That uncomfortably tense feeling when there is seemingly nothing in the moment that warrants this alert, always ‘on’ feeling, has plagued many aspects of my life since my teenage years. I remember lying awake before relatively ordinary workdays rehearsing conversations that would probably never happen. I'd arrive in the office mentally exhausted, perform perfectly well, and yet spend the journey home replaying every interaction looking for evidence I'd got something wrong.
For many it remains a silent war with themselves, where nobody on the outside would be able to detect the heightened tension on the inside and the relentless inner voices that are constantly on your case. So many of the most outwardly mellow people that I know are the most anxious on the inside. So much mental effort has gone into creating this persona, the pain is all on this inside. They have developed innate advanced techniques to not show the anxiety being experienced internally. But they know it's there, and over time it takes its toll. The anxiety just stays there swimming around in your body making it difficult, almost impossible, to freely enjoy the moments as they come.
When people ask me what has helped me, I’m not quite sure they are expecting the answer I give them. In this world of short term fixes, problems are there to be solved and remedied with quick-fire solutions. It has become so easy to get medicated for anxiety or engage in short-term fixes that can reframe or completely numb the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. That didn’t quite work for me. The more I tried to block the anxiety the stronger it engulfed me when it came. Then eventually it just stayed there all-the-time. If I ignored it during the day by being busy, it caught up with me when I tried to sleep, making me even more frantic. This sparked even more anxiety at a time when I definitely did not need it!
What people don’t always want to hear is that it takes time and conscious effort to reevaluate your relationship with your own anxiety. It’s understandable that people want to fix it quickly. It is seen as this harmful rogue character that pops up, sometimes totally unexpectedly, and sits in your mind just banging on and on. It is, however, trying to protect you and not destroy you (although it may feel that way). The biggest shift occurred for me when I learnt to accept that my anxiety wasn’t actually trying to ruin my life but instead it was trying to help me prepare for numerous situations that my brain had picked up *might* have been threatening. It was actually protecting me and because of that I needed to develop compassion for it.
When you observe your anxiety in this way you might just learn to befriend it and work with it rather than fight against it. Yup, treat it as your friend! A friend that is trying to help you but is a bit overzealous, maybe clingy, with some obvious trust issues.
And that is the part where I get the weird looks from clients, where all the credibility and good vibes leading up to this point evaporate. ”Whaat? Become friends with your anxiety??! Which is why I’ve just snuck that bit in for now. More about that a bit later.
Why does anxiety affect lawyers (and other similar professions) so much?
As a psychotherapist, and in a former life a Big 4 chartered accountant, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with people whose minds are constantly switched ‘on’. In environments that thrive on being attentive, there was a time when I was proud of my ability to work relentlessly, anticipate issues and think about things in so much depth that the worst case scenario was already prepared for, and dealt with, as if it was probably going to happen.
It was part of the territory and I signed up to it thinking that’s what this line of work entailed. I thought I had a good understanding of high standards, deadlines and managing low-level background stress. Then I started working with lawyers.
High-performing, sharp, detail-oriented professionals who can anticipate risk in their sleep (as if they sleep…!) but can’t quite shut that ability off when they are putting their kids to bed or when they are on holiday or doing anything that doesn't require them to be so wired and ready for combat. The partner re-reading an email ten times before sending it, the barrister replaying a hearing for three days afterwards, the solicitor waking at 3 a.m. convinced they've missed a filing deadline, the associate unable to relax on holiday just in case that ‘urgent’ email pops up.
So many of the qualities that make someone excel at law (and finance) are the very same qualities that can quietly drive anxiety:
These are actually professional assets. But like many assets, they need care and maintenance. Otherwise over time they start to degrade, become overextended and can actually become quite problematic. The qualities that make high-performing professionals thrive in their jobs are the same ones that can cause burnout and the inability to switch off.
In my experience anxiety represents the biggest issue that lawyers complain about. If I were a betting man (and therefore not an accountant!) anxiety would likely come up in the very first client session even if that is not the presenting issue which has brought them to therapy in the first place. It is always there, doing its dance in the background, desperately trying to grab your attention.
Let’s start by saying something that often gets lost: anxiety is not a design flaw. It’s merely a feature.
Anxiety is, at its core, a physiological response to perceived threat. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do; scan for danger, mobilise energy, and help you respond quickly.
In the right context, anxiety is incredibly useful:
In many professional environments, particularly in law and finance, a certain level of anxiety is totally necessary. It’s part of what makes people good at what they do.
If we removed anxiety entirely, many of us might feel briefly liberated… and then miss a filing deadline, prepare half-heartedly for a key negotiation or struggle to find the motivation to apply the rigour that is needed for an important task. How would life actually be? Ask someone who has recently retired from a stressful all-encompassing job without an idea of how they are going to spend their time or where they will get their purpose from?
Anxiety gets things done, so no, it isn’t quite the villain of the story. Some might say it is trying to help you, maybe even protect you, by giving you the impetus to direct your attention. In this way it is that loyal but annoying friend that keeps banging on about things that you know they're right about; but you just don’t want to hear about it all the time.
The difficulty arises when anxiety stops being proportionate, time-limited, and context-specific. These are times when there is nothing meaningful going on but you might feel anxious a lot of the time and can’t quite switch it off. You may have completed that piece of urgent work, delivered that presentation, had that difficult conversation. Now it’s time for downtime but that is not what our annoying friend is allowing you to do.
Or it escalates into something more acute:
At this point, anxiety is no longer functioning as a helpful alert system. It’s more like a smoke alarm that goes off when you make toast!
Anxiety also presents differently for different people. For some it arrives in dramatic episodes that become unbearable. For others like me, it is more like a constant background hum which is enough to make switching off difficult, but not enough to stop life altogether. In many ways, that quieter form can be harder to recognise because it becomes so normal that you assume it's simply part of who you are. I just told myself that I’m just a secretly anxious person. Obviously I tried not to show this to others (accountants don’t have feelings do they!). But over time it was stopping me from truly enjoying the parts of my life that I really valued. Either not being entirely present or avoiding situations that could heighten the anxious feelings.
One model I often find helpful with clients is the Window of Tolerance, originally developed by Dan Siegel. The idea is surprisingly simple: we all have a range within which our nervous system functions at its best.
When we're inside that window, we can think clearly, regulate our emotions, stay connected to other people and respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively. Stress still exists, but it's manageable. In fact, many high-performing professionals do some of their best work here. There's enough adrenaline to stay focused without tipping into overwhelm.
The size of that window varies from person to person and is influenced by genetics, life experiences, trauma and chronic stress. It can also expand or narrow over time.
When anxiety pushes us above our window, we move into hyperarousal – the familiar fight-or-flight state. Racing thoughts, restlessness, difficulty sleeping and the sense that you always need to be doing something become the norm. Looking back, I can see I spent years living in this state without knowing there was even a name for it. I simply thought I was driven and conscientious.
The irony is that hyperarousal can feel productive. Deadlines get met, emails get answered and adrenaline keeps you moving. For a while, it may even become part of your identity. But eventually your nervous system pays the price.
At the opposite end is hypoarousal, the freeze response, where overwhelm gives way to shutdown, brain fog, emotional numbness and withdrawal.
Neither extreme is where we do our best thinking or our best living. The goal isn't to eliminate stress or anxiety altogether; it's to spend more of our time within that window where our mind and body can work with us rather than against us.
The Professional Mind: Strengths and Side Effects
There is no doubt that anxiety helps us to get things done and often brings the best out of us when we need it the most. This is especially valuable for those in highly professionalised fields where there is near constant judgement of the quality and efficiency of their work output.
But many of the traits that serve people well professionally can also fuel anxiety. When does attention to detail become over-analysis? Or managing risk turns into catastrophising? When taking responsibility translates into not being able to switch off? Ultimately when does operating to high standards actually become perfectionism? When you judge yourself as either sh!t or perfect? Nothing in between.
In legal and financial professions, these traits are often reinforced. You’re rewarded for spotting what could go wrong. For thinking several steps ahead. For not missing anything. Then you might yourself associate your identity and self-worth with these qualities (but you can’t be ‘perfect’ all the time, no matter what you tell yourself!).
The challenge is that your nervous system doesn’t always distinguish between a real, immediate threat and a hypothetical, future one (that may have been invented in your mind!)
So the same mind that protects you professionally can keep your body in a near-constant state of alert. Useful in a high stakes negotiation but far less useful at bedtime.
There’s no single solution (and anyone offering one is probably oversimplifying), but there are some consistent themes.
Before trying to “fix” anxiety, it’s often more helpful to understand it. What is it trying to tell you? So “something is wrong with me” instead turns into “something is happening in me” which creates an important distinction.
When people begin to recognise:
The last one is important because our brains are constantly scanning for risks and dangers (it’s not just lawyers that do this!). This is innate to our survival instinct but the problem is that it can also return some ‘false positives’ and release a disproportionate amount of adrenaline for the situation at hand.
Your anxiety is ‘trying’ to protect you from what your brain has picked up as a potentially harmful situation. It wants to be helpful and considering it this way immensely helped me to be compassionate with my anxiety when it came. Instead of trying to act on it or fight it, which only increased the adrenaline in my system, I found myself gently acknowledging the anxious feelings and sitting with them.
I found myself talking to it like an old friend; “hello, it’s good of you to pop by, but I don’t need you right now” or “thank you for trying to look after me and warn me of danger, I think I’ve got this”. When it came to bedtime, and my anxiety was at its worst, I would internally say something like “thank you for checking in, it’s time for me to sleep, there is nothing that needs my attention right now, I’ll see you in the morning when I definitely need to get going”.
I know it sounds silly. Imagine explaining this to a serious well put-together senior lawyer, it doesn’t go down well. But by doing this you are no longer fighting with your anxiety but recognising what’s happening and reasoning with it. Over time, you are rewiring the mechanisms that ignite your anxiety and giving it information about when you need it and when you don’t.
The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety because you really can’t! We need anxiety, it’s a natural bodily response. The objective is therefore to increase your capacity to stay within your window of tolerance. Or to bring you swiftly back into the window when you’ve ventured too far out of it.
This can include:
Over time, the window can widen. This doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and a willingness to engage with the process to observe what’s happening with your anxiety rather than feeding or fighting it. Therapy helps to understand what may have caused the trigger in the first place - or why the window has become narrow.
Anxiety often involves predictable cognitive patterns:
These are learned mental habits over a lifetime, usually coping mechanisms to manage uncertainty and risk. They could have emanated out of childhood or adolescent experiences or in response to external pressures. Again, therapy may help with understanding these better because like most habits, they can be worked with. There may have been a time in your life when you had to think like this……but do you still need to think like that in your life right now?
This one sounds simple, but it’s often the hardest.
Many high-performing professionals operate with an internal rulebook that looks something like:
Which adds a secondary layer of pressure on top of the anxiety itself. But this can be worked on by gently challenging those assumptions and by asking yourself; “how are these thoughts actually helping me right now?”. I have asked this question to many of my clients and sometimes it stops them in their tracks. The instinct is to defend the internal critic, and some try very hard to do this, but eventually the realisation comes that believing everything your internal voice says is very dangerous. All it does is reinforce the anxiety engulfing your nervous system further.
Because being competent, capable, and successful does not make you immune to having a nervous system. Unfortunately.
For years I thought getting rid of anxiety was the goal. Ironically, the biggest change happened when I stopped treating it like an enemy. It still visits from time to time. It probably always will. The difference now is that it no longer gets to run the show.
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