Every October legal professionals are invited to talk about mental health, and most scroll straight past. This is about the mind your work depends on: what sustained pressure does to the legal brain, and three habits that protect it.

You sat with a client’s worst year this morning and drafted a contract this afternoon. What that switching does to the brain, and how to stay steady without going cold.

The client is shouting, or crying, or blaming you for the law. You have to stay steady enough to advise. Here is what is happening in you, and how to hold it.

The profession has no word for what happens to a practitioner who listens to the worst of other people’s lives for a living. The clinicians do.

You have read the letter twice and drafted a reply in your head that would end your career. This is the threat system at work, and there is a better way to answer.

Twenty years in, and the night before a hearing is still a bad night. It is not a failure of experience. It is anticipation, and it can be managed.

You were courteous to a rude opponent, patient with an anxious client and measured with a difficult partner. Then you got home and snapped at a child over a schoolbag.