Anxiety

A Revealing Survey Sheds Light On The Well-being of Lawyers

Close to ten years ago, the members of the Consortium for Professional Recovery Programs began discussing a collaborative project to survey North Carolina professionals. This consortium, comprised of representatives from medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, psychology, nursing, and social work, met regularly to discuss methods to improve the behavioral health issues experienced by their professionals. The […]

Exorcising Your Depression Through Exercise

In a recent column, I mentioned the results of Mary Howerton’s doctoral research.  Mary is the former director of the Mecklenburg County Bar and a member of the Lawyer Assistance Program Board.  Her doctoral research, concerning the quality of well-being of lawyers in North Carolina, revealed that over 27% of the lawyers in her study […]

Seven States of Being Stuck

Keith Yamashita is the hot item right now in advising corporations that have hit a brick wall.  He is a 37-year-old principal in a business consulting firm on the West Coast known as Stone Yamashita Partners.  His skill has been in identifying structural and systemic problems in a company or its leaders. His firm has […]

How Stress Affects Your Body (Part II)

In our two previous columns we have shown that having the body’s response to stress continually turned on is like living in a mosquito infested swamp. Stress may not give you malaria, but having the stress-response turned on all the time can make the body vulnerable to a number of diseases. We reviewed how the […]

How Stress Affects Your Body (Part I)

In the last issue of the Journal, this column explored the silent revolution that has occurred in the past few decades regarding the contexts in which diseases arise. We used malaria as an example of one of the many diseases that now rarely occurs in this country and we contrasted malaria with the diseases that […]

The Unhappiness Paradox

The unhappiness paradox is one lawyers share, as much or more, than any other group in our culture. The richer we have grown as a society, the more dissatisfied we have become. The 1950’s were the happiest decade of the century. Since then the divorce rate has doubled, the teen suicide rate has tripled, recorded […]

There’s No Shame In Being Treated for Mental Illness

One out of five Americans experiences mental illness each year; however, the majority of those who need treatment do not get it. This is the conclusion of the first-ever US Surgeon General’s report on mental health which was released by Surgeon General David Satcher in December 1999. That there are so many of our nation’s […]

Worry: A Bad Habit

What is the difference between being a conscientious lawyer and a worrier? While they may at first blush seem to be similar, an understanding of the physiology of worry shows how different they really are. Worrying involves spending a lot of time thinking about negative possibilities. Worrying becomes a problem when the excessive thinking of […]

Living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Not too long ago, a client whom I was treating for prescription drug abuse, looked at me and said, “It’s my desperate need to silence my feelings that drives me to want to use.” She went on to describe what it felt like to live in her skin. “It’s as if the people in my […]

12 Symptoms of Inner Peace

By Saskia  Davis, ©1984 Be on the lookout for symptoms of inner peace. The hearts of a great many have already been exposed to inner peace and it is possible that people everywhere could come down with it in epidemic proportions. 1. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on […]

Worrying One’s Way to Distraction

I come from a family of worriers, and I’ve done a lot of worrying in my life. I now do it less than ever, but there was a time when I thought I was a “worry addict.” Of course, a feeling of any kind can be “addictive”—we can use one feeling or mood to alter […]

Anxiety: “I Thought I Was Losing It”

It was like any other Monday morning. I got up and got in the shower and began planning the day ahead. After a few minutes I started feeling dizzy while I was shaving. My heart started racing, my breathing became short and erratic, and an unexplainable sense of fear overcame me. The anxiety seemed to […]