Performance Under Pressure for Legal Professionals
The night before court: what anticipatory anxiety does and how to bring it down
Sep
An advocate with twenty years at the Bar describes the night before an opposed application: the argument is ready, the heads are in, and at two in the morning the mind is running the cross-examination for the fourth time, inventing objections nobody will raise, and composing answers to a question that will not be asked. In the morning the argument goes well. The night is the price, and it has been the price for twenty years.
The profession treats this as a personal quirk or a sign that the practitioner cares. It is neither. It is anticipatory anxiety, a well-described state in which the brain treats a future event as a present threat and prepares for it as if it were happening now.
What the brain is doing
The threat system does not have a good sense of time. When the mind rehearses tomorrow’s hearing, the body responds as though the hearing were under way: alertness up, heart rate up, muscles readied, sleep pushed away because sleeping in the presence of a threat is unsafe. The rehearsal feels like preparation, and a little of it is. Past a certain point it is the threat system running on a loop, producing the same worry each time with no new information, and depleting the very resources the hearing will need.
Experience does not switch this off, because the system is responding to stakes, not to competence. A senior practitioner has more to lose in reputation than a junior, and the body knows it.
The twelve hours before
The most useful thing is to give the loop somewhere to end. Before you stop working for the evening, write down, on paper, the three things you are most worried about in tomorrow’s hearing and, next to each, the one thing you will do if it happens. The brain keeps rehearsing because it has not confirmed that a plan exists. Once the plan is on paper, the worry has an answer, and the loop has something to close on. Practitioners who do this consistently describe the night improving within a week or two.
Then stop preparing. There is a point in the evening after which further work makes the argument worse, because tired preparation introduces doubt and rewrites things that were right. Decide the stopping time in advance and keep it.
The body needs a signal that the day is over. A walk, a shower, a meal eaten away from the file, anything that is physically different from working. The signal matters more than the activity. What does not work is screens in bed, because the light and the content both tell the brain to stay alert.
If the mind starts again at two in the morning, the instinct is to argue with it, which keeps it going. The alternative is to let it run while lengthening the out-breath, slowly, for a few minutes. This engages the part of the nervous system that brings arousal down, and it does so whether or not you believe in it. Many practitioners find they are asleep before they have counted twenty breaths.
In the morning
A little anxiety on the morning of a hearing is useful; it sharpens attention. The aim is to arrive with enough of it and no more. Eat something. Walk to court if the distance allows. Read the plan you wrote the night before, and notice that the three things you feared have answers. Then leave the file closed until you are called.
This is the kind of skill PMRI teaches in its sessions for advocates and litigation departments: the mechanism, then a method that fits a legal week. The Goal Setting and Burnout Prevention webinars both cover the stress response in detail.
If this was useful, there is one like it every month.
One idea, one practical habit, and the month's articles from the PMRI Library. Written for legal professionals under pressure.