I always knew I left Big Law because of stress.

“To solve my own stress problem,” I pithily stated in my corporate-lawyer-turned-meditation-teacher bio. “So I could help others solve theirs too.”

I started with myself: my first, best, and lifelong client.

Truly, to heal from real burnout. To reset my nervous system. To get off the hamster wheel of fight and flight and relax into my life instead. To quit abandoning myself for every deadline, ping of an email, or pressure of a billable hour. To come back to myself.

But it took me YEARS (7 to be exact, because I had this next realization just 3 years ago): I didn’t only leave Big Law to solve my own stress problem, I left because I needed to quit completely “Stress Culture.”

Stress Culture, as I’ve come to define it, is created when the collective nervous system of which you are a part (your family unit, your office, an entire industry like Big Law) is so chronically and acutely stressed out, strung out on adrenaline, pumping with cortisol, always hovering on the brink of burnout (or beyond it), the characteristics and behaviors of fight, flight, and freeze calcify into values and norms and even praise songs of that system.

Flight becomes rushing and busyness as a badge of honor.

Fight becomes “sleep-when-you’re-done-not-when-you’re-tired.”

Freeze becomes numbing out at the afterwork happy hour, where the law firm foots the bill!

The thing about Stress Culture is that when you’re doing it RIGHT — when you’re swimming the proper strokes in your designated lane in the pool of Stress Culture — you’re still suffering beneath the surface.

In fact, you’re drowning.

You can make all the right moves in a Stress Culture setting, check all the right boxes, hit all the right milestones, and STILL, at the end of the day, be burnt out, unhappy, disconnected, disillusioned, and just plain exhausted.

Here’s one example of what Stress Culture felt like in Big Law.

Days felt like they were meant to “get through,” rather than live.

There was always a deadline (usually many, often competing) that we were limping toward on any given day.

The pace, the fury, the pressure felt like it was always “finals period” but the actual test never came. The end-in-sight-finishline kept getting nudged out, farther and farther away, and we continued to cram and pull all nighters.

It was a lot of “when / then” thinking in Big Law’s Stress Culture.

“When this case settles, then I’ll take a vacation.”

“When I make partner, then I won’t work nights and weekends.”

“When I pay off these loans, then I’ll move to a more life-style-friendly law job.”

It was a lot of delayed living.

Merely solving my own stress problem and then diving back into the pool would have felt like half-way weeding, snapping off the invasive plant somewhere in the middle, but not the root.

To fully heal, I needed to get to the root of Stress Culture.

And like facing a whole overgrown garden of weeds, you have to start one by one.

So I took that “when / then” value and inquired whether it was one I actually wanted to align my life with?

Whether I wanted to spend all of my foreseeable days in delayed pleasure, relief at the end of a deadline instead of fulfillment and connection to meaningful work, always hustling yet always exhausted.

Or actually have the capacity to be present and attentive to each day as it unfolds? To be intentional with my days. To have the bandwidth to choose how I shape my days and what I place in my schedule, my list of to dos, my priorities.

It’s what Annie Dillard states so simply and stunningly in her book The Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

The least sexy and also the most extraordinary, ordinary reason I quit Big Law: I did not want to spend my days cooped up in an office, with forced air conditioning and windows that didn’t open, billing another hour to another billion-dollar client. I wanted to be barefoot and in the garden, weeding and writing. Owning my own time again. Setting my own pace. I wanted to fling the windows wide open and eat my meals outside. I wanted to take my time. And hop on my yoga mat at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Be there to chaperone my kids field trip or happily have lunch or a walk with a friend once or twice a week in the middle of a “work day.”

I am still and always learning the lessons I teach. I promise you that. The roots of Stress Culture run deep and grow fast, and I still often get snagged by it all.

We just celebrated the Fall Equinox (& you could feel it in the air and see it in the light immediately here in the Hudson Valley) — a threshold moment, as good as any, to pause and consider — to check in with the quality of our days and how we spend each of them.

On that note here’s today’s journaling prompt:

What’s a typical 24-hours like for you right now? If your weeks and weekends are very different, you can do two sketches of two different days. Write this down stream of consciousness, don’t judge or hold back. It’s all information. Take these sketches “on a walk” or sit with them in your meditation for the rest of your week. If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives, how you living these days?

BONUS — share a reflection from your journaling prompt on your typical 24 hours below. Be brave, be bold, be vulnerable. It’s going to help someone else on this path feel more seen, I promise.

Ok. So much more to come. Just enough for now.

I’ll see you right back here tomorrow morning,
Cath

Take a look at my calendar & book your first 1:1 session (or all 3!) — send a message if you’re having trouble finding a time that works.

& in case you missed it Sunday —