The night before court: what anticipatory anxiety does and how to bring it down

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

An advocate with twenty years at the Bar, whom we will call Thabo, describes the night before an opposed application. The argument is ready. The heads are in and have been in for a week. The authorities are tabbed. And at two in the morning the mind is running the cross-examination for the fourth time, inventing objections nobody will raise, and composing careful answers to a question that will never be asked. At some point he gets up, reads the founding affidavit again, finds nothing new, and goes back to bed to do it all once more. In the morning the argument goes well. It nearly always does. The night is the price, and it has been the price for twenty years.

He is not alone, and the pattern does not respect seniority. The candidate attorney sitting behind him tomorrow, with a single instruction to hand up a document at the right moment, spent the same night rehearsing that moment. The attorney who briefed him lay awake over whether the client will hold up under cross-examination. The general counsel whose company is the applicant did not sleep either, and will spend the morning refreshing her email for news from a court she is not allowed to attend. The profession treats all of this as a personal quirk, or as evidence that the practitioner cares. It is neither of those things, and it has a name: anticipatory anxiety, a well-described state in which the brain treats a future event as a present threat and prepares for it as though 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, and sleep pushed firmly away, because sleeping in the presence of a threat is, to the older parts of the brain, 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 in the morning: attention, working memory, and the capacity to think on your feet when the bench asks the question you did not expect.

The engine of the loop is uncertainty rather than difficulty. Grupe and Nitschke, reviewing the neuroscience of anxiety, describe how uncertainty about a future event drives the brain to over-estimate its likelihood and its cost, to keep scanning for it, and to prepare for it repeatedly. A hearing is a concentrated dose of exactly that kind of uncertainty. You do not know which judge you will draw, what the other side will lead with, or which point in the heads the bench has fastened on. The mind fills the gaps with rehearsal, and rehearsal without new information becomes worry.

Experience does not switch this off, because the system is responding to stakes rather than to competence. A senior practitioner has more to lose in reputation than a junior, and the body knows it. Thabo’s nights got worse, not better, once he took silk, because the matters got bigger and the room started expecting more of him. What experience can do is teach a practitioner to manage the loop, and that is a different skill from knowing the law.

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. Masicampo and Baumeister found that simply making a plan for an unfinished task was enough to stop it intruding on the mind, even though the task itself had not been done. 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 of starting.

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 the first time. Decide the stopping time in advance, tell someone what it is, and keep it. For a leader, this is worth saying out loud to the team: the partner who is seen to close the file at eight has given the junior permission to do the same, and the junior will be better in court for it.

The body needs a signal that the day is over. A walk, a shower, a meal eaten away from the file, a conversation about anything other than the matter: anything that is physically different from working. The signal matters more than the activity, because what the nervous system is waiting for is evidence that the threat has, for now, receded. What does not work is screens in bed. The light and the content both tell the brain to stay alert, and an email from the instructing attorney at half past ten restarts the loop from the beginning.

If the mind starts again at two in the morning, the instinct is to argue with it, to reason the worry away, which keeps the reasoning brain awake and the loop turning. The alternative is to let it run in the background while lengthening the out-breath, slowly, for a few minutes. The out-breath engages the part of the nervous system that brings arousal down, and it does so whether or not you believe in it, because it is a reflex rather than an attitude. Many practitioners find they are asleep before they have counted twenty breaths. Thabo, who was sceptical, now describes it as the only thing that has ever worked at two in the morning.

In the morning

A little anxiety on the morning of a hearing is useful; it sharpens attention and keeps the voice from going flat. The aim is to arrive with enough of it and no more. Eat something, because a brain running on no fuel and high adrenaline is a brain that loses the thread. Walk to court if the distance allows, since the movement burns off some of the readiness the body has built up overnight. Read the plan you wrote the night before, and notice that the three things you feared have answers written next to them. Then leave the file closed until you are called.

For the head of a litigation team or the general counsel waiting for news, the same logic applies at one remove. The waiting is its own uncertainty, and it responds to the same treatment: a written note of what happens under each outcome, and a morning that has something in it other than the refresh button.

The longer pattern

Where the night before court has become the night before everything, where the loop runs on Sunday evenings and before ordinary consultations and not only before hearings, the signal has changed meaning. That is about the reserves rather than about the hearing, and it is the point at which the ordinary tools help at the margins but not at the centre.

This is the kind of skill PMRI teaches in its talks, masterclasses and short sessions for advocates’ groups and litigation departments: the mechanism first, and then a method that fits a legal week rather than some other kind of job. The Goal Setting for Legal Professionals webinar covers the planning side, and how a written plan quietens the brain, in detail. The Burnout Prevention Framework for Legal Professionals goes through the stress response itself, with its workbook and assessments, for practitioners who have recognised the longer pattern. Both are developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and a legal professional in practice since 1999, one of whom has had her own share of nights before court. If you would like to talk about a session for your chambers or your litigation team, start a conversation with us. There is no charge for the first one.