The Relaxed State

Polyvagal Theory

Polyvagal theory describes our autonomic nervous system and how it regulates our health and behavior. Below is a chart that explains the different nervous system states and some of the hybrid states that we need on occasion:

Isn’t it nice to know that we are not always in a fear/stress state? Whew! This theory uses gentler words than the ones I used in my last post. It also explains that our emotions in these states will be different depending on whether we feel safe. In the mobilized state, for example, if we feel safe, we will feel energetic and motivated. If we are feeling unsafe, we experience the “fight or flight” response and can be anxious and stressed. So we can be mobilized at work if we feel safe, without feeling anxious and fearful. Nice!

In the immobilized state, as you can see, if we feel safe, we can feel blissful and dreamy. If we are feeling unsafe, like in the freeze response, we may feel depressed or hopeless.

The fawn response is noticeably missing from this diagram. The Polyvagal Institute explains that it is still being researched and developed and therefore did not make the chart. If you would like more information about the polyvagal theory, please check it out here: https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/whatispolyvagaltheory

Another Perspective

Dr. Dan Siegal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, came up with the concept of the Window of Tolerance. In this window, you can learn new things, work at your best, and relate well with others. You might occasionally go out of this tolerance in emergency situations, but you are highly regulated and can bring yourself back into that window where you function at your best.

As mentioned earlier, some of these symptoms of dysregulation can be helpful to get emergencies done or thrive in your career. As you can see from the photo, it is natural and effective to sometimes be in these arousal states. However, hanging out in these aroused states on either side is not good for your mental or physical health. Here is a great article about the window of tolerance: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-the-whole-beautiful/202205/what-is-the-window-of-tolerance-and-why-is-it-so-important

Good News

I don’t know about you, but it feels good to me that we do not have to live/work in a constant state of fear and stress to get the work done. You can see the similarities of these two theories: one says that we can get things done in the relaxed state, and the other says that we can get our best work done in the Window of Tolerance. They both say that we need these other states to survive, but we should not spend too much time there as it is not good for our mental or physical health.

So how do we get to these optimum states?

AWARENESS AND PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

Here are some ways you can apply Polyvagal Theory to your life and live in the relaxed state more often:

Recognize your physiological reaction to stress. Is your heart pounding? Do you sweat? Do you go into freeze mode and cannot speak?
Practice self-regulation. When you are feeling stressed, find ways to help you regulate. Not to self-promote, but I did a post on deep breathing. This is one of the ways you can self-regulate when you are feeling stress.
Build social connections. People help us reduce stress? Don’t they cause us stress? Positive social connections can help soothe our nervous system. Call a friend or loved one when you are feeling stressed to help you calm down.
Identify triggers. Pay attention to who or what causes you to have a stress reaction. With this awareness, you can prepare for future interactions that might help you reduce the stress response.
Seek professional support. If you are feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or burned out most of the time, it would help you to find someone to talk to, either a coach or therapist, who can help you identify your triggers and physiological reactions to stress and how to manage them.

Next time I will talk about awareness. I believe it is the key to making positive changes in your life.

Deep Dive into the Four Stress Responses

Stress Response in Demanding Workplaces

Fight

The Fight response is found quite a bit in the legal field as you have seen on tv. (Some of the lawyer stuff on tv is true, but not much.) In some types of law, like litigation, fighting is the core. Someone does not like what someone else has done to them and so they sue, using a lawyer. The lawyers do not engage in hand-to-hand combat (that would be pretty cool), but they are in a battle of words, and the lawyer who knows the law best wins. They may be fighting in court as they tell the judge and jury why their client should be the victor.

Law firms are also very competitive places to work. Not only are lawyers fighting with lawyers outside of their law firm to defend the virtue of their clients, but they are also fighting each other. They are fighting other associates for partnership, trying to get a raise, or striving to make the billable hour requirement. Law firms have a hierarchical leadership structure and the bottom wrung have to fight their way up the ladder.

Flight

The work itself is a constant never-ending battle. There are multiple deadlines from the court, clients, and your boss. If you work in a larger office, the work never stops, even if you finish your work, you need to help your neighbor finish theirs. You are always running from one deadline to the next.

I know that I am stretching the Flight response a bit here. Technically, in the Flight response, if you encounter a threat, you would run away from it. You would not get much work done this way if you ran away from every task that threatened you. Running away from your boss if they gave you a tough assignment would not be good for job security.

Chronic stress occurs when you are constantly bombarded with events that your brain and body say you should run away from, but you don’t. After being overly exposed to stress, you might decide to run by quitting your job.

Hyperarousal

If you consistently expose your brain and body to a fight-or-flight response, you might be living in a hyperarousal state. You are on constant alert, easily startled, and might become irritable with angry outbursts. Living in this state for a long time is not good for your health and can lead to health issues such as exhaustion, headaches, high blood pressure, digestive problems, chest pain, muscle tension, aches and pains, and a weakened immune system. I will talk more about this in a later post, but wanted to introduce the concept here.

Freeze

We have all been there. Your boss asks you for that assignment that you forgot to do or did not have time to do, or your partner asks why you forgot the milk. You just remembered something due yesterday. You freeze. You do not know what to say or do. Your brain is telling you that you cannot fight or run.

The freeze response in law firms might occur if you are constantly exposed to deadlines and work and you are becoming overwhelmed. You might start feeling numb or empty, depressed, cannot think clearly, fatigued, and detached from yourself and your environment.

Hypoarousal

This state of shutting down is called hypoarousal. Instead of being in a hyper-response state, we are in a low-reaction state. It has its own set of health issues with chronic occurrence, which might include digestive issues, sleep disturbances, and substance abuse. Again, I will talk about this in more detail in a later post.

Fawn

As I mentioned earlier, the Fawn response is a newer addition to the list of fear/stress responses. It is a reaction of child abuse or neglect victims as a survival mechanism to minimize harm by becoming highly agreeable with the aggressor. Signs of this type of response are overdependence on the opinions of others, having little to no boundaries with other people, and being easily controlled and manipulated.

Where do I see this response in law firms? Well…..let’s just say that some people who work in law firms are not very nice. They are probably living in a chronic stress state themselves and taking it out on those around them. The subordinates who have to work for these people might engage in a Fawn response with them. They are overly pleasant to these people who are being mean to them and do not have boundaries so they might work 60-70 hours a week.

That’s just corporate America you say! We need to Fawn to get ahead in this world! Do we though?

Let’s get positive

Sorry to scare you with all of these fear responses. I do not mean to be negative. I just wanted to give you an idea of the different responses we have to threats in our environment and help you understand chronic stress and its effects. While lions and tigers and bears may no longer be a threat, we have new threats in our world, most of them in our work environments.

There is a solution. There is a middle ground. A place where we are at our best. It is the optimal zone where you can deal with the daily stresses of life. Stay tuned!

Do you want to share some stories of where the fear responses show up for you at work?

What is stress?

The Cycle of Fear and Stress

You have probably heard of the fight-or-flight response. These are natural human reactions to threats in our environment that might put us in danger. Back in the day when humans were trying to stay alive in the wilderness, these responses would help us stay alive by either fighting creatures who were trying to eat us or running from them. We might also be fighting or running from other humans. (There is also the freeze response, not very helpful unless you are an opossum.) The fear response was needed to survive. Our brain releases stress hormones when we perceive a threat that increases our heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, to help us get ready to go.

In our modern world, most people do not have the same threats. While humans can still be a threat, we have created new threats in our world: work deadlines, tests, scary movies, roller coasters, bosses. Our body has the same chemical reaction to these new threats as it did with the old ones. In the old world, once the threat had been vanquished, our bodies would go back to their natural state. Our new threats can be continuous (in highly demanding work environments for example), and our bodies are in a continuous state of fear/stress, which leads to chronic stress.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, chronic stress can lead to serious health issues such as exhaustion, headaches, high blood pressure, digestive problems, chest pain, muscle tension, aches and pains, and a weakened immune system. Mental and emotional symptoms of chronic stress are anxiety or irritability, depression, panic attacks, and sadness.

Here are the steps from fear to chronic stress:

Step 1: The initial threat triggers a fear response.
Step 2: The brain prepares the body by releasing stress hormones.
Step 3: If the stress or fear is continuous, the response can become chronic.
Step 4: In this state, fear and stress are interchangeable.

A story of fear and stress in a law firm

As I mentioned in my first post, I have worked in law firms for more than 30 years and have experienced the continuous demands and stress of that work culture. Here is an example story of a stressful event, that happened quite often. I also thought it would be fun to share what different stressors we had back then., before e-filing. This happened about 20 years ago in a large law firm in Portland, Oregon.

It was a Friday and a motion for summary judgment was due. For those of you who do not work in law firms, it is a document filed with the court that can sometimes get your client entirely dismissed from the case. There are usually multiple documents filed with the motion itself, such as declarations, exhibits, etc., all in an attempt to get a judge to agree to dismiss the case before it goes to trial. The deadline for filing this type of document was set in stone. If we missed the deadline, we could not file the document. This could mean a malpractice claim against the attorneys if they had a way to get a client out of the case and they did not do it.

Back in those days, e-filing did not exist. We had to provide a copy to all parties (or their attorneys) by mail or in this case, hand-delivery. No e-mail service was allowed, so you had to make sure all pages of this huge document (and its accompanying documents) were copied for everyone. That was part of the deadline. Luckily the courthouse was not too far away because we had to hand-deliver the document to the court as well. We also had to fill out these postcards for each document for the court to mail back to us as proof of filing.

Three attorneys (and their assistants) were working on the same document at the same time. Sometimes they would make changes to the same paragraph and it was hard to know whose changes to use. The senior partner made the final changes. Earlier in the day, the senior partner asked when we had to get the latest version so we had time to make copies for everyone and get it delivered on time. Knowing his habit of doing everything until the final minute, we gave him a final deadline 30 minutes before the actual time. Somehow he figured it out and did work up until the final minute.

When we finally got the last revision, someone put it in final and ran off to make multiple copies. We had prepared the other documents so they were ready to go. We were an assembly line as we stuffed all the envelopes for the court and all the other attorneys on the case. We missed the messenger’s deadline, so one of the attorneys ran the document to the court himself.

By some miracle, we were able to get the document filed with the court on time and all of the parties/attorneys were delivered their copies on time. Whew!

Can you determine the different fears that might release stress hormones in this event? The fear of not making the correct changes or missing the changes from each attorney. The fear of the upcoming deadline and missing it. The fear of doing something wrong so that it is kicked back by the court. The fear of not getting enough copies or not serving the other parties on time. The fear of getting fired if you did miss the deadline. The attorneys are also worried about the context of the document and whether it will work with the judge. They might also be fearing malpractice if they miss the deadline. All these different fears produced stress hormones in our bodies so we were in fight mode, getting this document ready to go. Many of us wanted to run. If any of us had gone into a freeze-fear response, then we would not have made the deadline.

These types of deadlines happen DAILY in law firms. Court deadlines, client deadlines, boss deadlines. We do not have to worry about running the document to the court like we used to or making enough copies, but there are still plenty of deadlines to worry about. It is hard to keep up, especially when it is a common battle. It is no wonder that many who work in these environments are experiencing chronic stress. It is not a lion chasing us, but it might as well be.

Do you have a workplace stress story you would like to share? Please leave a comment.

Do you know how to breathe?

“Of course! I’ve been doing it all my life!” We breathe automatically (thank goodness) and can control our breath, but I suggest that you may not breathe efficiently, and your brain, heart, and lungs need more oxygen. Why am I bringing this up in a blog about law firms and stress? BECAUSE one of the ways that you can reduce stress and therefore overwhelm and burnout is by changing your breathing.

The benefits of deep breathing (according to the American Heart Association):

Stress and anxiety reduction: Deep breathing initiates the parasympathetic nervous system, which triggers the rest response.
Improved focus and cognitive function: Wouldn’t that be nice at work?
Better sleep: Wake up refreshed before you go to work.
Lowered blood pressure and heart rate: A wonderful long-term health benefit.
Improved digestion: Fewer tummy aches.
Increased immunity: More oxygen to the body means less illness.
Muscle relaxation: Less tension and pain.
More energy: Another benefit of having more oxygen flowing through your system.

A brief test

To determine how you breathe, place one hand on your chest and the other hand on your belly. Now take a deep breath. Does the hand on your chest rise, or does the hand on your belly rise? Test over.

Before I explain how to breathe with your belly, let me tell you the story of how I learned this technique.

Post-exercise panic attack

Once upon a time, I was trying out a new gym. I had not worked out in a while, but I was motivated. I don’t remember my exact age, but I was in my late 40s. I took a step class and I was feeling good. I got this! I was stepping up and down like a pro.

After the stepping part ended, the instructor asked us to lie on the floor and do some floor exercises. I obediently lay on the floor, but my heart was still beating very fast and was not slowing down. I was still breathing rapidly. It was not stopping! I decided it might be good to walk around. I was not ready to stop abruptly. I walked around the edge of the class, but it was not helping. My instructor noticed and became concerned.

Then some weird things started happening. My hands and fingers went numb and started turning into old witch hands, and I couldn’t move them. My face went numb. I was panicking now. I went out of the classroom and sat down, but my heart and breathing were still very rapid. I lay on the floor in the lobby (embarrassing), and then someone asked if there was a doctor in the house. The doctor seemed to know what was occurring immediately. He told me to take some deep breaths. He told me that the numbness was temporary and asked me if I wanted to call an ambulance. I remember thinking that he wasn’t taking me seriously and saying, “Of course I do, my face is numb!”

They called an ambulance, and I went to the ER. After hanging out in there for hours without a doctor’s visit (I guess I wasn’t much of an emergency), they told me I had a post-exercise panic attack that was triggered by a lack of oxygen to my appendages. They did not prescribe any medication but said I should consider an anti-anxiety medication. The doctor said to take it more slowly next time when I exercise, and I will be fine.

What? That’s it? My face and fingers went numb! I could not believe they were so casual about it. I admit that it was difficult for me to exercise at the same gym again, and I managed to cancel my membership before my contract year was up—a miracle.

If I knew how to breathe correctly, this would not have happened.

The cure?

A couple of years later, I went to a chiropractor for an unrelated injury. After manipulating my neck in strange ways, he asked me about my breathing. He said that I was breathing incorrectly, only from my chest. He said that I needed to breathe with my belly. I thought he was crazy. I’ve been breathing all of my life, thank you very much. He told me when we also expand our bellies when we breathe, we bring in more air and oxygen. Then he showed me how. I learned how to breathe again.

After that appointment, I practiced breathing using my belly. It changed my life. The benefits mentioned at the beginning of the post are true!

Back to learning how to breathe

When you are stressed, you might find that you are breathing mostly from your lungs and your breath might also be shallow. You might even be hyperventilating. Simply learning to breathe from your belly can help you bring more air into your lungs and therefore reduce stress. Don’t be a chest breather!

My theory is that part of the problem is we humans like to suck in our bellies to appear thinner and expanding them does not feel right. It is difficult to overcome this habit, but once you do, the health benefits will overcome the need to look skinny.

Like the test, put one hand on your belly and one on your chest and take a breath. Do you feel your belly expand, or is it just your chest that expands? Now intentionally try to take a breath and expand your belly, “filling it with air.” I know you are not really filling your belly with air, but by expanding your belly, you are giving your lungs more capacity. Keep trying. It does take practice. Your hand should be moving up and down with your belly. Trust me, the more you practice, the less you will worry about how your belly looks and the more you will like the experience of having more air in your lungs.

Next time you are at your desk feeling stressed, take 3 deep breaths using your belly and see how that feels. Focus on your breathing and not any other thoughts in your head.

Other times to use it

Take 3 deep breaths using your belly before you go into a meeting with your boss, a client, a deposition, or a court hearing. Take deep breaths before you go on a first date, meet with your child’s teacher, or are stuck in a traffic jam and are late. Your brain will appreciate the extra oxygen which will help you calm down. Try it!

Box Breathing

If you have more time and privacy, box breathing is recommended. WebMD does a good job of describing the technique:

Step 1: Breathe in, counting to four slowly. Feel the air enter your lungs.
Step 2: Hold your breath for 4 seconds. Try to avoid inhaling or exhaling for 4 seconds.
Step 3: Slowly exhale through your mouth for 4 seconds.
Step 4: Wait for another 4 seconds before you breathe in again.

Stress Relief

We will talk more about the body’s reaction to stress in future posts, but I wanted to give you a quick way to relieve stress before we go into more detail. If you practice deep breathing regularly, not just daily, but throughout your day, you will experience the benefits.

Transform Stress into Success: A Survival Guide for Law Firms and Other Demanding Workplace Cultures

If you are here, I imagine that you: (1) work in a law firm; (2) are stressed at work; or (3) stressed from working in a law firm. You are stressed enough that you are starting to worry about your mental and physical health because you feel overwhelmed and are on the verge of burnout. You are here because you are looking for solutions. Pat yourself on the back for choosing to take care of yourself!

The Law Firm

I am writing this blog because I have been where you are, found the tools to succeed, and wanted to share them. You can read my whole story later if you are interested, but I have worked more than 30 years in law firms so I know what it is like to work in a high-pressure, demanding workplace with multiple deadlines from multiple sources (court, bosses, clients). The work is NEVER ENDING; even if you finish the work on your desk, there is probably work your neighbor needs help with. The laws and rules are constantly changing, so even if you think you have a handle on the current rules, there might be rules you haven’t considered. Oh yeah, every county, state, and federal court has different rules. The law firm culture is hierarchical and you better know who your boss’s boss is, because they might give you work too.

If you are an attorney or paralegal, you have the extra added pressure of billing your hours with billing quotas for the month so 9 to 5 is more of a dream than your daily schedule. Oh yeah, there is that malpractice thing, so you better do everything right, no pressure. The competition with your peers both within and outside your firm is fierce.

For legal assistants, there is the added pressure of working for multiple bosses (sometimes assigned five at a time), and hoping that all five of them do not need something done at the same time. You also calendar all the filing deadlines (knowing all the rules for each county, state, and federal court, of course) and hope you are doing it right.

If you do not work in a law firm but made it to this site, your workplace probably has its own brand of stress, but it is very similar. The deadlines are different, but you are feeling overwhelmed and near burnout from all the work you have to do.

Bringing Calm to Chaos

This blog will look at ways to help you transform that stress into success, avoiding the overwhelm and eventual burnout. Here are some of the topics I will cover:

Quick techniques to help you calm down and focus when you are feeling overwhelmed with work;
Different types of stress;
Time management strategies that will work for you;
Motivation reboot;
Communicating with difficult people;
How to build resilience;
Emotional regulation;
The “M” words (stay tuned to find out what they are); and
Other related topics you bring up that you would like to discuss.

Before I go any further, I ask you to please seek professional help (like a therapist or counselor) if you have been feeling overwhelmed and burnt out for a while and can’t seem to rise above it. The techniques and strategies I will be discussing are helpful, but sometimes we need additional support.

My Story

I started in the legal industry way back in 1987 as a temp receptionist in Los Angeles, and then quickly moved into a legal secretary position (that is what we were called back then). Did I mention that I was a temp? I had no intention that this was going to be a career move, but next thing you know, I have been a legal assistant for more than 30 years. I have also acted as an office manager in a law firm.

I moved to Oregon in 1995 and found work in the legal field easily enough. The second firm I worked in promoted me to become a trainer so I created the position and trained other legal assistants, paralegals, and attorneys on Oregon state and federal court rules and procedures. I also onboarded new employees.

When federal court went to electronic filing (the first court to do so), I learned the procedure and trained the entire firm on the process. I created a litigation training manual for Oregon rules and procedures and every assistant (we are being called that now), had the manual on their desk (paper version, old school). I reminded my manager of this when they laid me off in 2008 after 11 years (I still do not know why).

I managed to find a legal assistant job about 6 months after the layoff. It was not easy, as the rest of the world had also been laid off in 2008. It was a part-time position that I found on Craigslist. It quickly turned into a full-time position and then my boss and his partner decided to split off from the larger firm. I helped create a law firm from scratch, with all the necessary payroll, bookkeeping, billing, insurance, and HR procedures. I also continued to be a legal assistant and manager of our Oregon and California offices.

In my workplace travels, I worked for five different law firms (including some temp jobs thrown in there). In all those law firms, the culture was the same: way too much work, multiple deadlines from many sources, competitive employees, and difficult bosses (there I said it). The hierarchical structure existed in all of them and billing minimums were required for timekeepers. I saw many attorneys and staff who were stressed, overwhelmed, and eventually burned out. Turnover was high in all of them.

For some reason, I continued to thrive in this arena and I started examining why. I was assigned to attorneys who could not work with anyone else, and I got along with them fine. As I grew older and wiser, my stress levels in this culture became less as I learned some of the techniques I am going to share. There is a way to be successful in this business, and also not be continuously stressed and overwhelmed. You can increase focus and therefore persevere. I’m excited to share these techniques with you.

My Qualifications

While my kids were in high school, I admittedly got a little bored when they locked themselves in their rooms to study (hopefully that is what they were doing). I decided to start going back to school myself. I found a program online at Capella University and obtained my Master of Science in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. I had already obtained my BA in Psychology many moons before in 1987, and I wanted to get back to it. I figured with my extensive experience in the work industry, that this degree was perfect for me.

I gravitated toward the organizational psychology side of the degree because it examines successful work cultures (and not successful) and the psychology of the employees who work there. Perfect! I had worked in a difficult work culture most of my career and I looked at the research conducted on them. I believe that I looked at every research study that was ever conducted with law firms (not as many as you think). Most of the results were grim. Law firms are not easy places to work. You and I could have told them that!

I joined the Organization Development Network of Oregon to get more experience in this area because they had an awesome hands-on program that assisted non-profits with their organization development needs. I worked on multiple projects helping with executive development, decision-making, and board functioning. Then I was asked to be on the Board and I accepted. Then the next thing I knew I was co-president and then President. I gained so much experience and education from some incredible OD practitioners who had practiced for years.

I wanted to go back to counseling or working more closely with people and discovered life coaching. I obtained a certification in Whole Person Coaching from Coach Training World where I learned how to help people find their strengths and develop awareness so that they could reach their goals and thrive. I am currently working on obtaining my ACC certification with the International Coaching Federation and should have that shortly.

Let’s Do This!

I am excited to start this blog and am happy you are here. I am confident that I can help with some of the stress you are experiencing so that it does not reach the point of overwhelm and eventual burnout. Like I said, I have been there, and have a good idea of what you are experiencing. I also know that there are solutions. It just takes a little awareness and a little practice.

See you soon!

Transform Stress Into Success

Welcome to my blog!