Why you are short with the people you love after a day of being patient with everyone else

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

You were courteous to an opponent who did not deserve it. You were patient with a client who asked the same question four times and did not like the answer any of the four times. You were measured with a partner who was not measured with you. You held your face still through a two-hour meeting in which you wanted, quite badly, to stand up and leave. Then you drove home, walked through the door, and within four minutes had snapped at a child over a schoolbag left in the passage, or at a spouse over a question about supper that did not deserve the tone it got. Later, lying awake, you asked yourself what kind of person is gracious to strangers all day and unkind to the people who matter most.

The answer is a person who has spent eleven hours doing something the profession never names and never records on a timesheet: regulating. And it is worth saying at once that this is true at every level. An associate, whom we will call Annelie, described it as arriving home “with nothing left in the tank and a toddler who wants all of it”. A managing partner described almost the same evening, except that his day had been spent holding a neutral face through a partners’ meeting about fee targets, a client who was threatening to move the work, and a conversation with a senior associate about a mistake that had to be handled gently. Different days, the same door, the same schoolbag. Seniority exempts nobody; it usually adds to the number of people in front of whom the face must stay still.

Restraint is a resource

Holding a reaction in check, choosing the measured word over the true one, keeping the expression neutral while the feeling is anything but neutral: this is work, and the brain pays for it. The research on self-regulation is fairly consistent on one point, which is that the capacity to do it is limited and shared. In a well-known series of experiments, Baumeister and colleagues (1998) found that people who had been asked to exert self-control on one task, such as resisting a temptation or suppressing a reaction, then gave up sooner and performed worse on an unrelated task straight afterwards. The system that keeps you civil with an aggressive opponent at ten in the morning is the same system that is supposed to keep you patient at seven in the evening, and by seven it has been running, without a break, since breakfast.

The mechanism sits in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that manages impulses, weighs consequences and edits what comes out of the mouth. It is the most expensive part of the brain to run and the first to tire. When it is fresh, it intercepts the sharp remark before it leaves. When it is spent, the remark simply leaves. What walks through the front door at the end of a long day is a person whose editor has gone home an hour earlier. The reaction to the schoolbag has nothing to do with the schoolbag and nothing to do with the child. It is the first unguarded moment in eleven hours, and the guard has nothing left with which to guard.

Practitioners who understand this stop reading the evening as a verdict on their character and start reading it as a depletion signal, which is exactly what it is. That shift alone changes the tone of the evening, because guilt about the outburst is itself a further demand on the same exhausted system. A practitioner who lies awake rehearsing self-reproach is spending, at midnight, reserves that tomorrow’s opponent will need.

What helps

The transition matters more than anything else that follows. The commute, or whatever stands in for it, is where most practitioners either arrive home still at the office or arrive home as themselves, and the difference lies in whether that interval was used for the day to end. Fifteen minutes without calls, without the news, without a podcast about the state of the economy, with the window down or music on, gives the nervous system a chance to come down before it meets the family. Annelie now leaves the phone in her bag for the drive, which she describes as the single most useful thing she has done for her marriage. Practitioners who work from home have no commute and must invent one. A walk around the block before opening the door to the rest of the house, so that there is a physical threshold between the study and the kitchen, serves the same purpose and costs ten minutes.

Then say what state you are in. “I have had a day; give me twenty minutes” is a sentence that protects everyone in the house. It is honest, it is not an excuse, and the people who love you would far rather have the twenty minutes than the outburst. There is a version of this for the senior end of the profession too. The head of legal who walks in and announces that she needs half an hour before she can be spoken to is modelling something for her teenagers about how adults handle pressure, and it is a better lesson than the one they would learn from the alternative.

Next, look at the daytime demands that are spending the capacity unnecessarily. Some restraint is simply the job, and there is no removing it: the opponent will still be aggressive, the client will still ask four times. But a good deal of the day’s regulating is spent on things that could be arranged differently. A diary with no gaps between meetings means the face never gets to relax. A habit of answering every email within minutes means the system is on duty even during the intervals that were supposed to be rest. A matter that has been allowed to become a running argument with the other side, with a new exchange of hostile letters every second day, is a standing drain that a firmer early letter, or a telephone call, might have closed. Each of these is a leak in a resource the evening needs, and each is easier to fix than the temper it produces.

Restoring the reserve

And finally, restore it. The capacity for regulation is rebuilt by three things, all of them unglamorous: sleep, physical movement, and time in which nothing at all is being managed. A practitioner who is sleeping six hours, not moving, and managing something every waking minute is running the regulating system permanently below the level the work requires. That practitioner will be short with the people at home, whatever their intentions, and no amount of resolve on the drive will change it until the reserves themselves change. Resolve is drawn from the same account as restraint, which is why resolving harder so often makes the evening worse.

The managing partner, when he understood this, did something simple. He stopped scheduling anything after half past five on two days a week, and used the hour to walk. His household noticed within a fortnight. His partners noticed a month later, in a meeting that he chaired more calmly than he had chaired one in years, because the same reserve that was now available at home was also available at work. This is the point that the profession tends to miss. The evening temper and the afternoon decision come from the same account, and refilling it improves both.

PMRI’s High-Performance Productivity for Legal Professionals webinar deals with the daytime leaks, the diary without gaps and the reflexive email, and how to close them in a legal practice that does not slow down to let you. The Burnout Prevention Framework for Legal Professionals, a recorded webinar with its workbook, covers the recovery side: how reserves are actually rebuilt, how to tell when they are running low, and how to interrupt the slide before it becomes a pattern. Both are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, and both are written for the whole profession, because the schoolbag in the passage does not care whether you are a candidate attorney or a senior partner. If you would like to talk about what this looks like for your firm or your team, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first one.