o begin this discussion on the topic: Are You A Healthy Lawyer?, we sent each professional we interviewed a copy of an op-ed article from The New York Times entitled “Our Sick Society.” (May 5, 2006, Editorial Desk, Paul Krugman) The columnist commented on a recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association that said, and we summarize:

• There’s something about American society that makes us sicker than we should be.
• The richest third of Americans is in worse health than the poorest third of the English who are not known for their good health.
• One possibility is that Americans work too hard and experience too much stress; what the columnist calls our “workaholic economy.”
• Finally, being American seems to damage your health regardless of your race and social class.  

We then offered this quote from psychologist Martin Seligman who wrote the  book, Authentic Happiness: “Lawyers are trained to be aggressive, judgmental, intellectual, analytical and emotionally detached. This produces predictable emotional consequences: he or she will be depressed, anxious and angry a lot of the time.” 

Then we asked each interviewee to ponder these questions: 

• In your experience, are lawyers a healthy group overall? Why? Why not?
• Do you agree with Dr. Seligman’s assessment? Why? Why not?

Len:  There seems to be a lot of empirical evidence that there is a higher incidence of depression among lawyers than members of other professions. I also see anecdotal evidence of unhappiness, even despair, among lawyers.

Len:  Well, I agree with what he said, as a generality—but it surely does not apply to all lawyers. Many are quite happy in their work. What many lawyers do involves adversarial practice, which, in some people, causes stress that they don't know how to manage.   In many lawyering situations, in order to help your client you may have to hurt someone else.   In some other professions, such as medicine, helping one patient doesn’t ordinarily hurt another one.  Of course there are some kinds of law practice situations that don't explicitly involve that kind of adversarial win/lose relationship.  For example, many transactional lawyers try to make deals that work for everybody. 

Len:  For a lot of law students the experience is very demoralizing.  It shakes their confidence and they begin to think less of themselves. Sometimes this is due to grade competition.   

In most law schools you get a class ranking that is determined entirely by your grades.  If we are classmates at many law schools and if my average is just a shade higher than yours, I may get interviews with certain elite law firms that would be unwilling to consider you. The point is the grades at most schools have huge significance for students in terms of their opportunities for getting the first jobs.  And so, if you and I are classmates, I may feel ambivalent about whether I want you to get good grades.  Most of the grades are based on a final exam so there’s a huge amount of pressure.  Grades in many courses depend not only on what you know and how well you can think and write, but also how fast you can write.  On a time-limited exam, if I am faster at writing answers I may get better grades even though you would have done better if we had had more time.    

And then the work is very analytical.  The reasoning process that we teach in law school is focused on seeing potential problems.  In fact, a big part of the grade a student will get in most exams is based on how many issues they can see.   

I think that  people who are pessimistic may do better than cheerier people in law school because they see all the problems that might arise. 

Len:   That sounds right to me. 

Len:   I can’t say that I can discern any kind of pattern because I don’t have any systematic information

Len:  Well it’s sort of a long story.  I got into Eastern thought at Yale Law School, when I read Ram Dass’, The Only Dance There Is. It really affected my thinking.  Then I moved to Texas to teach at the University of Houston and took TM, transcendental meditation.  When I moved here to Missouri in the mid 1980’s I joined a Zen group and then in 1990 I went to a mindfulness meditation retreat.  And so I got very involved in that and always had the idea that I should introduce it into law school, but I never actually had a rationale for doing it or a plan for how I would do it.  In 1998, I was talking with a friend in New York and he told me he was planning a mindfulness meditation retreat for Yale Law School students, sponsored by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. I was able to attend.   It was there that I got some insight into how and why this practice could be especially useful for law students and lawyers.

Len:  Let me give you some background. First, I’ll give you three names for this kind of practice.  One is mindfulness. That’s usually the word I use. The other one would be insight meditation.  The third one, vipassana comes from an ancient language, Pali, which the Buddha spoke.   

Mindfulness meditation is quite different from Transcendental Meditation, in which one silently repeats an assigned mantra, from Sanskrit. Ultimately, this practice clears your mind or puts you into "cosmic consciousness."     

Mindfulness meditation is almost the opposite. Instead of trying to clear the mind, mindfulness means opening the mind so that you notice everything—thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations—but try not to judge it.     

Mindfulness meditation does a lot of the same things TM does.  Both, for example, will lower your blood pressure and give rise to a feeling of calm, which may enhance performance on many tasks.    

Mindfulness, however, also helps a person be "present" with whatever is going on, and it gives insight into how the mind works and includes specific techniques for improving concentration.  

Len:  Well that’s in the context of mediation training.  I also train law students and lawyers in other settings.  In the law school, I teach a non-credit course on mindfulness-based stress reduction, a particular method of mindfulness training developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center under the leadership of Jon Kabat-Zinn. I also teach a law school course called Understanding Conflict in which students meditate as part of learning to understand the relationship between internal conflict and external conflict.  And then I also teach meditation not only to mediators, but also to lawyers and executives.   

The overall goal is to improve performance and enhance satisfaction with work (and sometimes with life).  And so we are addressing two different kinds of things.  One is the kind of despair or stress reactions that a lot of lawyers have.  And the other is--and they go together--to actually negotiate better or to mediate or advocate better because (1) you are more relaxed and (2) you’re more present so you can really pay more attention and (3) and maybe most importantly, you can get yourself out of the way so you can be less preoccupied with yourself and be more able to attend to what the situation calls for.

Len: Thank you, Don.   

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RESOURCES 

For further information on mindfulness for lawyers and dispute resolvers, see the following websites:  

Center for Contemplative Mind in Society Law Program. Http://contemplativemind.org  

Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.  Http://www.pon.harvard.edu/hnii  

Initiative on Mindfulness in Law and Dispute Resolution, University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law. www.law.missouri.edu/csdr/mindfulness.htm