Beating Burnout Part 2: Own Your Emotions (and ONLY your emotions)
In writing about burnout, I want to make one thing clear: this is no academic endeavor. I learned what I know about burnout by burning out. I’ve quit practicing law twice because I was emotionally and physically fried.
I reached peak emotional burnout probably around the same time as a lot of other people: March 2020. I tried a lot of things to feel better. I quit my job as a family lawyer and went back to school in a different field. That didn’t help and I needed money, so I went back to being a lawyer. I still felt like shit, so I quit again, and decided to be a life coach (as one does). This is actually what changed everything for me, including, paradoxically, the ability to commit to being a lawyer and owning my own firm.
From learning to coach others, I learned the one thing I needed:
My thoughts create my feelings.
Okay, this is oversimplified life-coach-speak, but it’s true enough that if you apply it, it can change your life. Seriously. (If you want receipts, read Lisa Feldman Barret’s How Emotions are Made.)
This simple truth shattered my feeling of being stuck and helped me finally tackle my anxiety and burnout. My emotions are not caused by things that happen in the world, or even things that happen to me directly, they are caused by my brain and the meaning it makes of those things. This allowed me to shake all semblance of victim mentality and gain control over my life.
The whole chain of causation that is the basis for the life coaching industry is this:
Things happen out in the world that you cannot control.
Your brain creates thoughts about the things that happen out in the world.
Your thoughts create your emotions.
For me, step two and three had been completely outside of my awareness. My experience was that things happened out in the world, and I had emotions directly in response to them. Believing that my emotions were caused by the things that happened to me left me wholly at the mercy of the world.
Once I learned this model, I was able to start observing my thoughts and questioning them, which evened out my emotional experience substantially. I was also able to recognize when the world was trying to elicit an emotional response from me and to be the one to decide how I was going to think and feel about a certain set of circumstances.
The next layer of this for me was the realization that other people’s thoughts create their feelings.
I had spent decades and kilocalories’ worth of energy trying to manage the emotions of people around me with very little success, which caused me substantial consternation. Learning to let go of the need to control other people’s emotions was profoundly impactful on a personal level, and absolutely necessary in a profession that happens to run pretty high on the emotional drama scale.
One of the benefits to me as a professional is that this has improved my ability to experience and show empathy for my clients, and to brush off the occasional histrionics of opposing parties or counsel. Because I’m less personally affected by the emotions of people around me, I’m able to maintain my equanimity in the face of drama regardless of the flavor.
Understanding and applying this lesson has been the key to ditching my lifelong people-pleasing habit, and generally made me a better lawyer, business person, and human.
