Good health – mental as well as physical – being enjoyed and maintained by every barrister in practice is at the forefront of the Bar Association of Queensland’s policy program. The Association conducts the “Bar Care” scheme providing to members, among other things, several sessions of free, confidential counselling by a psychiatrist or psychologist selected by the member from a panel.
The link to Bar Care may be found here.
While effort is required to succeed in practice as a barrister, effort is also required to maintain good health by embracing life outside practice. As a well known American leisure clothing brand extolls: “Work hard, relax harder!”. In this article, Gareth Beacham KC, Chair of the Association’s Bar Care Committee, addresses this critical issue. Gareth presents his perspective on stress and how to handle it. As he emphasises, what works for one will not necessarily work for another; that is, there is a raft of valid and effective ways to manage work stress, and the individual should search for that which best suits them.
The feature image in this issue of Hearsay is a painting by local artist AJ Taylor of a scene at Carnarvon Gorge. If your reaction was like mine, it was “wow, I wish I was there, looking at this view”. You might have the same reaction when someone you know posts their holiday photos on Instagram, or even when you look out of your chambers’ window and see a beautiful clear sunny day.
My contention is that we should act on these thoughts far more than we actually do.
But, first, let me explain where this fits in, at least in my way of thinking.
The starting point is twofold. First: our job is stressful.
The following quote is regularly attributed to Lord Atkin:
“[being a barrister] is the only occupation in which one goes off to work each day to resist the attempt by one very intelligent person to prove to another very intelligent person that one is a congenital idiot”
The Honourable Pat Keane KC said, in a similar vein:[1]
“Nevertheless, it has always struck me that what we do is singularly stressful ….
The closest analogy with the kind of contest in which we engage is bullfighting. That is a contest in which an individual tries to dance elegantly in the presence of bulls and knives. We do the same except that the contest is all in the mind and emotions; and our greatest wounds come from the overdoses of our own adrenalin.
Putting on the robes before court is like the matador putting on his suit of lights before he meets the bull – this is not an image you should dwell upon before going to court, at least not if you are trying to de-stress.
But what barristers do is so stressful that it is possible over the long term only because of the support we give each other every day”
Secondly: we cannot avoid stress entirely, and still do our job well. I don’t have a quote for this, but I doubt that any practicing barrister will challenge this proposition. There is a bit of science behind the notion that some stress is beneficial[2], and our own experience is likely to be that the pressure of deadlines, or court dates can often help us to get things done.
These starting points are important, because they set realistic expectations about what we can achieve. We cannot avoid stress entirely; so, we must manage it, and recover from it. Some stress may be helpful, but too much, for too long, is debilitating and unhealthy.
I would state our aims as: (1) to manage stress at work; (2) to recover from stress outside work; and (3) to have interests other than work to look forward to and enjoy. We need to address all three aims – if we are not doing one, it makes the others harder.
Managing stress at work is about awareness, and being deliberate. Identify the things that particularly trigger your stress (a particular Judge, short deadlines, hard cases, tricky witnesses), and identify the way in which you feel and react when you are under a lot of stress (scattered thoughts, poor sleep, that slightly fatigued feeling that won’t quite go away). This allows you to act, and to be more specific about what you do to deal with the ‘trigger’; to some extent, just identifying the source of your stress can be helpful.
There are also things that you can do more generally. There is a lot of scientific backup for the benefits of breathing exercises in reducing stress – look up the ‘physiological sigh’ or ‘square breathing’ or the 4, 7, 8 breathing pattern. Look at the way that you work, and include things like ‘micro-breaks’.[3]
To recover from stress, outside work, we need to look after ourselves. Andrew Huberman (a Standford professor and podcaster) proposes these 5 pillars of wellbeing:[4]
- Sleep (quality, timing and duration).
- Viewing sunlight (even with clouds).
- Movement (cardio & resistance & mobility training; not necessarily all on the same days).
- Nutrition (content, quality, amount).
- Social connection (incl. to self).
Each of these could merit a paper by themselves, and we have covered some of them in Bar Care seminars.[5] Points 2, 3 and 5 link in with the point of this paper – the third aim.
However work-oriented we are, our role as a barrister cannot supply all of our fulfilment and joy. Perhaps, at a basic level, this is because, as much as it is a great job, it is also regularly disappointing – we lose cases we think we should win, we have a bad day in Court, Judges or opponents are grumpy with us for no good reason. I think it is more likely because, although our job supplies something that is essential to us, it is unlikely to be what truly makes us ‘happy’. Even for the most work-oriented person, work-life balance is important.
You will notice that none of the 5 pillars above have much to do with work. Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. It is the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and its conclusion is this: good relationships lead to health and happiness, and the trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.[6] Pillar 5 is important. While some of our relationships will be formed at work, many won’t. They are family, and they are the friends that we see when we go running or swimming, with whom we go to dinner on a Saturday night, or to coffee on a Sunday morning. These relationships are only nurtured by time away from work.
In addition, relationships are often built by doing things. It might be exercise, it might be dinner. Or it might be a nice walk through Carnarvon Gorge. As it happens, with at least some of these things, we get outside into the sunlight, and we exercise as well, ticking off pillars 2 and 3. Again, they are only available to us if we take time away from work.
There are innumerable things that could be listed here as a pursuit of the third aim. The point is to find yours. It won’t necessarily be hard – start with the phrase “if only I had more time, I’d…” and the answers will probably come pretty quickly. Then, the harder part. Start making time to do those things, and to see your people, and work on entrenching this in your life as a priority; even over work. You might say “easier said than done”, and you would be right. But, I invite you to think of it this way – we refuse work all the time, whether it is a court appearance we can’t do because we are in another court that day, or a case where we have a conflict, or simply a deadline that we cannot meet. Refusing work to go on holidays is just another, very good, reason.
At the risk of ending on a mournful note, we have, sadly, over the recent years, lost colleagues and friends in untimely ways. If anything positive could come from this, it would be to remind us to make as much time as we can for the things that we love, and the people that we love. As actor and comedian Ben Stiller recently said, “your kids are not keeping score on your career”.
So, get out there!
[1] Hearsay, Issue 42; July 2010
[2] See for example: Huberman Lab – Dr. Alia Crum: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance | Huberman Lab Podcast #56
[3] See BAQ2330 “How to look after yourself during long trials”; 31 October 2023. The suggestions in this talk are not just applicable to long trials, but could be applied to anyone’s practice.
[4] You can find this, for example, on YouTube, see: The 5 Pillars of Health and Performance | Dr. Andrew Huberman | The Tim Ferriss Show
[5] Eg BAQ2203 The Art of Sleeping Well; 22 March 2022. See also Hearsay, Issue 89; September 2022 https://www.hearsay.org.au/the-art-of-sleeping-well/
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/harvard-happiness-study-relationships/672753/
