I know your life is a battlefield.
As a trial attorney, you're living in a CONSTANT fight-or-flight mode, and your nervous system is paying the price.
THIS IS WHY YOU ALWAYS FEEL SO FUCKING TIRED.
So, I’m here to teach you short-term and long-term strategies to reclaim your focus, and find your inner calm amidst the chaos.
Listen up, take notes, and start implementing these strategies today.
Xo,
Sari
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“Taking meticulous good care of yourself, eating nutritious food, drinking lots of water, getting a lot of rest—these are not things that you should hope that you do one day. These are ESSENTIAL for being a trial lawyer. The more you push yourself, the more you get less sleep, eat crap food, don't drink your water, and subsist on coffee, the more you're going to be in your fight or flight response because that is a biological reality. So taking excellent care of yourself will also help you reduce that fight or flight response, put your parasympathetic nervous system online, and give you more access to that prefrontal cortex.”
sari de la motte
EPISODE 255 TRANSCRIPTION
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of From Hostage to Hero. We're going to start with two reviews because they are very short. They're both for the book. Five stars, one says, "She's awesome," all caps. Thank you Robert. And the other one says, "This was a great read." Thank you Sabrina. So thank you for those reviews. If you haven't reviewed the book, you can do so at trialguides.com or the podcast. Please do so wherever you listen to your podcast. That's how we get this into the hands of more attorneys. All right, today we're talking about-- Is your nervous system under attack? I'm going to say yes before we even talk about this and before we go into why I think that is, let's talk about your nervous system. So there's really two parts of your nervous system. There is the sympathetic nervous system and there's the parasympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system gets activated when you are in danger or when you think you are in danger.
So it is the one that activates your fight or flight response. So if you are being chased by a bear, if you're crossing the crosswalk and you barely make it out of the way before a car almost hits you, that's your sympathetic nervous system. It ramps everything up. It tells you to jump before your brain can even make sense of what's happening. It makes you move fast, it does all of the things.
Your parasympathetic nervous system, though, is the one that's activated when you're breathing, when you are calm, and it's the one that gets the prefrontal cortex back online after your sympathetic nervous system has been activated.
Now, the problem with the sympathetic nervous system is that when you are in fight or flight, and we now know there's also freeze and there's a couple other ones too, but basically your prefrontal cortex goes offline, which means you do not have access to your more rational, logical thinking. You are literally in survival mode. The only thing that your body, it's not even your brain necessarily, it's mostly your body is thinking, I don't know if your body can think, but you get what I'm saying is like, "How do I get out of here alive so I can run for it, I can fight it, or maybe if I freeze, they'll ignore me and move on to something else." It's a primal brain wiring. It's the oldest part of our brain that literally kept us safe. And the problem with that is it works great in those scenarios, but most of us are not being chased by a bear.
By the way, did you see all that stuff last month about a situation where if a woman is in the woods alone, would you rather meet a bear or a man? And that most women are saying, "Yeah, a bear because bears are not going to force me to carry a child that I didn't want. If I get attacked by a bear, no one's going to blame the victim and ask me what I did to provoke it." So on and so forth. I thought it was amazing. It was a very, very interesting conversation.
Anyway, the point is that it comes in handy in those situations, but what's happening is most of you are living in fight or flight all the time and that is definitely not a good thing for a couple reasons. One- is that again, you don't have access to your prefrontal cortex, which you absolutely need if you want to do your best work, if you don't want to be reactive with the people around you, all of that.
But two, it's really not good for your system to consistently be in fight or flight. It can lead to something called adrenal fatigue where you're consistently tired because your hormone levels are out of whack because cortisol gets activated when you're fight or flight system.
Too much cortisol, as we know, is not good for the body. It really gets everything out of whack, and it causes a chain reaction you having adrenal fatigue because you're always in fight or flight. So you're always tired, but then you take caffeine in the morning because that will then pump you back up, then that creates more cortisol and rinse and repeat. And this is why so many of you feel unhealthy, are unhealthy, are not living your best lives. So today I want to talk about how to know whether your nervous system is under attack and what to do about it both short term like right when it's happening and long term to prevent it from happening all the time.
So some key ways to know that you are in fight or flight really are to go to the body. You'll notice that you're not breathing very well, you're going to breathe very shallow, and you're not going to take as many deep breaths. You might also notice that you're jittery, that your heart is beating very quickly. You may feel tension in your neck or your shoulders. You may have a weird queasy stomach, you might get a headache. Any of these things sound familiar? Those are all telltale signs that you are in a fight or flight response. You may be very jumpy if somebody comes and taps you on the shoulder, you may jump right out of your seat. You might be very reactive, yelling at people around you, being rude, unkind. Those are all telltale signs of being in fight or flight, also being super, super fatigued all the time.
That's another side of the fight or flight response. So how do you calm this down first when you're in the moment? Then we'll talk long-term. So when you notice that you have this response, you may not notice honestly because this is where you live. Some of you, you may notice again when you get off the phone with opposing counsel, or you had a beating in court, something didn't go the way you wanted it to. So you're noticing it in the moment and those of you who are like, "I don't notice," maybe take a moment to notice. Just take a breath and that really is the first thing that I'm going to suggest is that you breathe.
Breathing is the number one way to bring down your nervous system.
So when you have been activated for whatever reason, and it could be again external things, arguments, an email you got, whatever it may be, try and breathe, that's literally going to change the chemicals in your body.
Now, I say that as someone who finds it difficult to breathe when I am triggered or in a reactionary space. And so you will definitely want to find some ways that you find that are for you specific to you that calm your nervous system that might help you breathe. Because as all women know, being told to calm down and take a breath, that rarely works. So oftentimes, we need something else that will then facilitate the breathing. So for me, what I have found is number one off the bat is touch. Physical touch is my number one bringing down my nervous system. Kevin knows that and he will either come over and give me some shoulder rubs, or he'll have me lay on his lap and he'll play with my hair even when I didn't have any hair. He'll play with my scalp. But that touch is a huge for me way to help me start breathing again and get my nervous system under control.
Now, for other people that could be a trigger. For me, it's calming. I've also found that baths are very calming for my nervous system because of my CPTSD and the trauma that I've had in my life, I do tend to live a lot in fight or flight. It's part of this work that I'm doing to manage my triggers. And so nearly every day, I take a bath just to bring my nervous system back down, get my prefrontal cortex back online. I can't necessarily do that in the middle of the day, but I always do it the end of night. Exercise is another one for me that gets my nervous system back down. For some reason, walking on the treadmill, lifting weights, or just doing yoga, helps me get access to my breath. Again, for me, it's not as easy to go right to the breath.
I have to go to something that helps me access the breath and exercise helps me do that. For other people, that might be music, it might be drawing. I do coloring now all the time with the adult coloring books. That really helps, taking a nap sometimes just to reset my nervous system.
You're going to have to find out what it is for you.
Maybe it's opening and reading a little bit in a book. Maybe it's having a cup of tea, maybe it's taking a walk outside. But these are the things I want you to start noticing when you're doing them, "My nervous system seems calm right now," and remember those as a thing that you can reach for in the moment when you need to bring your nervous system back online.
Long-term, there are some things that you can do so that you don't have these big long stretches of being in fight or flight. One thing that Kevin and I both have found and we've talked a lot about, is rituals. So having a morning ritual and an evening ritual is a really great way to calm your nervous system because one of the things that puts us in fight or flight is surprises or when things get out of order. Both Kevin and I have ADHD, and so it's a real big thing when we're like, "Oh my God, this thing happened in the middle of my day and it wasn't supposed to happen." So having things that always happen that we can rely on is really helpful to calm down our nervous system. So my morning ritual, as many of you know, the first thing I do is my morning pages, then I exercise, then I meditate, then I have some time for coffee and I plan my day.
Kevin has a different one that involves drums and humming and it's so crazy, but he loves it. So having that ritual in the morning and then again in the evening. He tends to spend some time by himself because he's much more of an introvert and he just needs to be by himself to recharge. So he takes that time nearly every night for about an hour in his man cave, where I do some spiritual practice, I take my bath, so on and so forth. But those are things that we can rely on that we know are there to calm our nervous system down because from our backgrounds, our ADHD, all of the things, it is easily activated and because of the work that you do, your nervous system is easily activated. Obviously, mindset work can help here too. Not always when we have a trauma response will mindset help work.
I think I have a podcast on the limits of mindset work, but if you're constantly having the same thoughts like, "I'm so stupid, I should have seen that, I didn't prepare enough," that's definitely a place where you can start playing with, "Okay, I'm going to stop talking to myself that way. I'm going to start telling myself the things that I want to believe even if I don't believe them right now, which is I'm human, I make mistakes, I'm doing the best I can." And that's some of the mindset work that you can also do when you're dealing with how to calm your nervous system down. Again, most of the things we're talking about nervous system have to do with body things. But that's one place where you can also start with in terms of are you activating your nervous system from your thought processes? Mindset training can absolutely help.
And I have got tons of podcasts on mindset that you can start with.
Another one is to actually feel your feelings.
We talked about this in the last podcast or a couple of podcasts ago, where part of the reason why we're always in fight or flight is our body is reliving something and trying to protect us from ever feeling that thing again. And oftentimes, the answer is to feel that thing and recognize it's not going to harm us now. And so when you give yourself the opportunity to really sit with something that was upsetting, a phone call, an email, and just feel it and let it pass through the body, it doesn't get stuck. So that prevents further trauma from happening. That will not necessarily help the trauma that you have or may have from being healed. It won't help that necessarily, but what it can do is help you manage future trauma by feeling your feelings now and processing them through, that in itself will help.
All right, another thing that you can do, and again, related to our last podcast is self-care. Taking meticulous good care of yourself, eating nutritious food, drinking lots of water, getting a lot of rest. These are not things that you should hope that you can one day do. These are essential for being a trial lawyer. The more you push yourself, the more you get less sleep, eat crap food, don't drink your water, and subsist on coffee, the more you're going to be in your fight or flight response because that is a biological reality. So taking excellent care of yourself will also help you reduce that fight or flight response, put your parasympathetic nervous system online, give you more access to that prefrontal cortex. The last thing, long-term that you can do, it's going to maybe surprise you, and that is avoid things. So I just told you to feel your feelings and now I'm telling you to avoid things.
Here's what I mean by that. Sometimes, many times, well, I'll say recently. Recently, I have recognized that I have a limit for stressful things that I can manage right now in my life. And so we're going through, for example, a very stressful thing right now with our neighbors and this thing that they caused... Okay, take a breath. Lawyers are involved in, legal fees and all the back and forth. And I recognized when this all started getting really crazy that this is not something that I could manage right now. So I talked to Kevin about it and we designed together and he said, "I am not going to tell you about anything going on there unless it's something that you really need to know about. I will handle this." So that's what I mean by avoiding is designing with your partner or your team that, "Because I live in constant stress and craziness in this job as a trial lawyer, I'm going to need you to handle this thing emotionally for me and I'll have your back on another thing."
So for example, I have a client who when she's preparing for trial, she does not partake in settlement conferences. She's like, "Call me when they get close to the number. But those pre ones, I don't want that in my head. I don't want the numbers in my head. I don't want the back and forth. I'm preparing to take this to trial. Call me when there's something I need to know about." That's another way of avoiding. I probably shouldn't call it avoiding, but it's kind of what you're doing. Maybe there's someone who consistently calls you, a client or people that want your attention all the time at work. And because you're such a people pleaser, you keep taking those calls. Tell your assistant to just deal with it and not even tell you, so you don't have the guilt that you didn't get back to that person.
"Listen, whenever this person calls back and they're talking about going to my 30th reunion and I have no plans to go to that and I feel kind of guilty about it, I don't even want to know they called, can you just handle it?
There are things that you can take off your plate that will help you regulate your nervous system.
Listen, this is a huge health issue for trial attorneys because you're consistently put in a situation that ramps up your sympathetic nervous system. So this is very important work for you to learn how to calm that down when it happens and to put in some long-term strategies to help avoid it happen.
Okay. Kevin's going back to avoiding. He doesn't want me to call it avoiding, he wants me to call it creating healthy boundaries.
For me, it's like some shit I'm just going to avoid and that's my self-care. So you choose the language that works for you. Coach K's language, which is probably better because he's master coach and knows these things. I'm a coach too. But if avoiding works for you, you can use that one as well. All right, hope that helps. Go get your nervous systems under control. Talk soon.
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Ready for the address? Go to sariswears.com/jury. Enjoy.
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