www.loubar.org 20 Louisville Bar Briefs Know What You’re Feeling — It Might Be Your Most Underused Professional Skill May is Mental Health Awareness Month and this year the LBA Health & Wellness Committee is turning attention to something that rarely comes up in legal circles: emotional awareness. Not emotional expression — just awareness. The ability to recognize what you’re feeling, name it and understand what it might be signaling. For people who spend their days managing other people’s crises, arguing under deadline pres- sure and carrying the weight of high-stakes work, that’s harder than it sounds. Suppressing or ignoring emotions doesn’t make them disappear — it makes them surface elsewhere, often as burnout, physical symptoms or friction with colleagues and clients. Emotional awareness is a learnable skill. Here are six ways to start practicing it this month. 1. Name it to tame it. Before your next stressful call or difficult meeting, take 30 seconds to identify what you’re actually feeling. Stressed? Frustrated? Anxious about a specific outcome? Simply labeling an emotion reduces its intensity and gives you room to respond deliberately rather than react on instinct. 2. Notice where stress lives in your body. Legal work is cognitively demanding and it’s easy to lose touch with physical cues. Tight shoulders, a clenched jaw, shallow breath- ing — these are your nervous system’s early warning signals. Catching them before they escalate gives you more options for how to respond. 3. Keep a brief end-of-day log. It doesn’t need to be a journal. A few words about what triggered a strong reaction, what the emotion was and what you did with it can help you spot patterns over time. Knowing your triggers puts you ahead of them. 4. Pause before you reply. Whether it’s a tense email from opposing counsel or a frustrated client, the space between stimulus and response is where emotional awareness does its work. Even a 60-second pause — or drafting a reply and sitting on it before you send — can change the entire tone of an exchange. 5. Reframe “negative” emotions as information. Feeling angry after a meeting doesn’t mean you’ve lost your professionalism — it might mean a boundary was crossed worth addressing. Feeling anxious about a case doesn’t mean you’re not competent — it might mean you need more preparation or support. Emotions are data. Use them. 6. Check in with yourself the way you check in with clients. Lawyers are trained to ask probing questions and listen carefully — to everyone but themselves. Once or twice a day, ask yourself the same question you might ask a client in distress: How are you actually doing? And mean it. n The Billable Hour and the Burned-Out Brain The legal profession has a mental health problem it has been slow to name. According to the American Bar Association, lawyers experience depression at rates nearly four times higher than the general employed population. Anxiety, substance use and suicide are all elevated in the profession. And at the center of much of it sits a deceptively simple concept: the billable hour. The structure itself isn’t the villain. Billing time is a practical way to measure and price legal work. The problem is what happens to the person doing the billing, particularly when the metric of a good day becomes hours produced rather than work done well, clients served or problems solved. Time pressure is one of the most reliable predictors of burnout. When work expands to fill every recoverable hour, the nervous system never fully disengages. Recovery — genuine cognitive and emotional recovery — requires periods of low demand. Without them, the brain doesn’t restore. It degrades. Decision-making suffers. Attention narrows. Irritability rises. The skills that make a lawyer effective erode quietly, often long before anyone notices or says anything. There’s a second layer that gets less attention: the relationship between billable hour pres- sure and help-seeking behavior. Attorneys who are struggling often don’t reach out because stepping back, for therapy, a medical appointment or a mental health day, feels like it costs something measurable. Every hour not billed is visible on paper. Every hour spent on well- being is not. That asymmetry shapes behavior in ways that accumulate over time. The billable hour isn’t going away. But the assumptions underneath it is worth examining. A few reframes worth trying: 1. Treat recovery time as non-negotiable. Lunch away from your desk, a walk between calls, a hard stop at a reasonable hour, these aren’t indulgences. They’re the maintenance that keeps the work sustainable. 2. Separate your worth from your output. A slow billing month doesn’t mean you’re failing. Difficult cases, demanding clients, compounding pressure — all of these affect pace. Hours are a measurement, not a verdict. 3. Talk about it. Billing pressure is one of the most universal stressors in private practice and it is almost never discussed openly. Finding even one trusted colleague you can be honest with changes the experience of carrying it. Or join the LBA’s Health & Wellness Committee for a safe space to talk about this and other issues affecting attorneys. 4. Know what help looks like. The Kentucky Lawyer Assistance Program (KYLAP) provides free, confidential support to Kentucky lawyers and law students dealing with stress, burnout, mental health concerns and substance use. Reach them at kylap.org or (502) 226-9373. n Wellbeing Special Section
