This year’s Well-Being Week in Law offers another opportunity to find and explore ideas for reducing lawyer stress, enhancing physical fitness, and improving overall well-being in a demanding profession. With the Institute for Well-Being in Law’s daily recommendations as a guide, we’ll explore some of the simple advice and good practices that can turn small changes into big improvements for your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Get moving and start improving
Many of the benefits of exercise are well known, but regular physical activity is especially important for people in knowledge professions. With many hours spent at desks or in meetings, common challenges for lawyers and other professionals include circulation issues, blood pressure and cardiovascular concerns, soreness or joint pain, and more.
But the physical benefits are not the only great reasons to strive for more exercise and activity in your day. Regular movement can help enhance mood, reduce stress, prevent some symptoms of depression and anxiety, and improve cognition. And whether in person or virtually, physical activity is often better and easier with support from others.
Finally, physical activity has been shown to improve on-the-job performance. And as with the other benefits, this is a compounding improvement that continues to get better over time. Ability to focus on tasks, energy level throughout the day, and quality of sleep are just some of the factors that are increasingly improved with regular exercise or physical exertion.
Rest is rewarded
Speaking of quality of sleep, getting a proper amount of rest regularly is one of the most critical areas for overall well-being. Sleep is important for everyone, but especially for people in demanding, high-stress careers such as law. Both well-being and performance benefit from good sleep and are adversely affected by inconsistent or insufficient sleep schedules.
One of the Institute for Well-Being in Law recommendations for this year is to recruit a sleep squad – a group of colleagues who will all participate in their four-week, sleep-boosting activities. Sharing common goals and communicating about your progress makes it much more likely that people can stick to a plan, and collaborating to improve health outcomes often leads to much better results for both small and large changes.
Healthier happy hours
Socializing with colleagues, networking within your field, and maintaining strong connections with friends and family are all key to improving one’s mental health. But it can be especially difficult for solo practitioners and lawyers at small firms to find the time to meet up or a group to get together with in order to stay connected.
When you do, many of these occasions take place at happy hours or other networking and social events centered around alcohol. But studies show that even moderate alcohol consumption can have adverse effects on mental and physical health. Additionally, the legal profession has a statistically high rate of individuals struggling with alcohol abuse due to a number of factors.
So how can you foster connections and relationships without the alcohol? There are a number of ways to expand the definition of “happy hour” and engage in group activities that provide additional benefits. Some of the Institute’s recommendations include brainstorming group activities and outings, and you can even combine this goal with the physical activity goal above. Group hikes, kayaking, museum walking tours, genuine coffee breaks (like the Swedish “Fika”) – there is no limit to the variety of ways you can make time to converse, connect, and reap the benefits of healthy socialization and comradery.
More to explore in well-being for lawyers
These are just three of the top items under the Institute for Well-Being in Law’s “Stay Strong” theme for Monday, May 5th. There are countless other ways you can introduce well-being practices into your routine, and all of them will pay off with improvements to your mental health, physical well-being, and even on-the-job performance.
One of the best ways to get started is to discuss these options and ideas with your colleagues. You may even discover new activities to try and wellness practices that you can easily and frequently integrate, all working toward improved work-life balance and career satisfaction. And for more resources and recommendations, visit our Florida Lawyers Mutual Lawyer Well-Being Resource Center on the site.
