You’ve already been at the office for nine hours. The senior partner is on your case about a research memo you haven’t had a chance to begin. That difficult client who insists on calling several times a week to complain about everything under the sun is at it again. Oh, and you’ve got a brief […]
Practicing law is stressful. Practicing medicine is stressful, too, but there is a difference, as illustrated in this example we often use in our CLE presentations: As a lawyer, you are like a brain surgeon. Imagine the patient is laid out on the table in front of you. It is your job to operate and […]
The emerging scientific field known as positive psychology helps us understand how the brain can change, and that we can purposefully change it to create more positive emotions. Positive emotions, in turn, broaden our cognitive capacity, allowing flexible, open-minded thinking for creative problem solving and building of personal resources such as skills, knowledge, and relationships. […]
The legal profession has a problem. Lawyers are suffering and, far too often, they are taking their own lives. Lawyers, as a group, are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from depression than the average person. A John Hopkins study found that of 104 occupations, lawyers were the most likely to suffer depression. Further, according […]
Social scientists have researched and examined the relationship between material well-being and emotional well-being or happiness. For most of the world, greater levels of material wealth have led to greater levels of perceived emotional well-being—most everywhere, that is, but in the United States. (The Atlantic, January/February 2003). In the United States, the total numbers of […]
I am a wife. I am a lawyer. I am the wife of a lawyer. My father is a lawyer. My husband’s father is a lawyer. My first cousin on my mother’s side is a lawyer. If you have ever seen the movie My Cousin Vinny, you know where I am going here. Despite all […]
Over the years I have heard from hundreds of you who have read this column and taken the time to say thank you for something that I said that was helpful to you. This column is my time to say thanks to you. Thank you for reading the column and thank you for reaching out […]
In September 2005 I was driving down I-95 to a Florida treatment center for what I believed would be a 90-day stay in beautiful South Florida. I really did not know much about where I was going or what I was going to do, but Ed Ward of the North Carolina Lawyers Assistance Program had […]
The legal profession is a helping profession. Most days lawyers find themselves trying to solve problems for their clients. We are paid to have answers and to fix situations that have gone awry. One of the difficulties for professionals who are supposed to have the answers for others is that it is difficult for them […]
The heart is the literal and metaphorical center of our lives. We have either an open heart toward life or we may be closed hearted. Our response toward life may be one full of heartache or heartfelt joy. All of us have issues and challenges from time to time. How we respond will tell us […]
Jacques Lusseyran was born in 1924. At school one day when he was seven, as classes ended and he was rushing for the door, he was accidentally shoved. He fell, hitting his head on one of the sharp corners of the teacher’s desk. He was wearing glasses and the blow drove one of the arms […]
In a previous column Dr. Mooney and I looked at the link between genetics and the disease of alcoholism and the neuropharmacology that leads to the compulsion to drink. We saw that once there is the onset of the disease that certain neuro-chemical sequences occur in the brain each time alcohol is introduced into the […]