3 Ways Family Lawyers can improve mental health and well-being

This week is Mental Health Awareness week–and few people are more aware of how important positive mental health and well-being is than family law practitioners.

Heavy workloads, dealing with sensitive and often emotionally difficult cases, and long work hours can all contribute to stress and burnout for family law solicitors.

While there is no silver bullet for ensuring that your mental health and well-being are protected, there are a few things you can do to improve mental wellness today. Here are three things you can do today:

1. Talk to someone

While this may seem obvious, it’s easy to forget when you’re overwhelmed or stressed: The simplest first step to improving your mental wellness is to speak with someone we trust about your experience. Take a walk in nature if you can with a friend and use the time to chat. For more work-specific issues, you might talk to a colleague or a peer or to a trained and trusted coach or counsellor who will listen and offer guidance. For the latter, consider contacting LawCare, an independent, registered charity that provides help and support to those in the legal profession.

2. Stop trying to multitask

When you have a heavy workload, the temptation to try to multitask is strong, but research shows that it is impossible for the human brain to focus on multiple things at once. Worse, multitasking actually causes harm to our brains, weakening both our brains’ short-term memory and long-term memory.

To improve mental wellness, stop trying to do it all at once. Use a timer to block out times for specific tasks, group similar tasks together during your day, and try to work on one task for an extended period as much as possible. Using a timer can help you stay focused, and there is a benefit to your work too: tracking your time in real time ensures that billable work isn’t lost. Technology can help with this. For example, Clio’s easy-to-use Timekeeper makes it simple to track time from wherever you are and immediately assign time entries to a case. (Don’t worry—it’s easy to add any time entries you’ve missed at the end of the day too).

3. Consider mindfulness

The practice of mindfulness has gained increasing popularity in recent years among legal professionals. Using simple daily techniques to increase your mindfulness has been shown to improve overall mental health and well-being and to make practitioners more resilient to stressful periods.

To discover more about the benefits of mindfulness for solicitors, register for Clio’s Innovate Legal Online Workshop: Introduction To Mindfulness.

In this free one-hour session, available to view on demand at a time that suits you, you will learn:

• What mindfulness is and why it is important
• How to understand the origins of stress
• How we can train our minds to master our inner states—our emotions, reactions, and responses to change and difficulty
• How to scientifically understand mindfulness
• How to practice experiential mindfulness
• How to apply mindfulness and mental health techniques

Watch now by registering here.

This article was submitted to be published by Clio as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Family Lawyer. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Family Lawyer.