Happyness Skills For Lawyers With Depression
by Gordon Livingston M.D.

Editor’s Note:  Richard O’Connor, Ph.D. is the author of several noteworthy books, Happy at Last: The Thinking Person's Guide to Finding Joy,  Undoing Perpetual Stress: The Missing Connection Between Depression, Anxiety, and 21st Century Illness and Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach you and Medication Can’t Give You.  He is practicing psychotherapist with offices in New York City and Canaan, Connecticut.  He has suffered from clinical depression and is a member and leader of a free self help group.  

After writing several books about recovery from depression and stress, I finally decided it was time for me to look a bit beyond recovery; Happy at Last is the result. Let me say at the outset that happiness is not trivial. Genuine happiness is not only the transient sensation of joy, but also a feeling of overall satisfaction with your life and its course. It’s got to do with being wise and not bringing unnecessary misery on yourself. It requires that you feel a sense of meaning or purpose in your life. It’s the antidote to depression, anxiety, and stress. It’s an especially important subject for lawyers, whose very career seems at times to interfere with personal happiness.

While doing my research, I found a few surprises. Here’s a shocker, if only because the results are so consistent: For each of the past fifty years, sociologists have polled the American public to ask a simple question: “On a scale of one to five, how happy are you?” In every single year, people responded that they were less happy than the year before. This discouraging finding most likely has to do with cultural change that interferes with personal happiness—longer working hours, lower real personal income, divorce, the loss of faith in social institutions like education, the church, and the government. It’s also likely that our expectations for happiness have been rising unrealistically, thanks to advertising and the media. Whatever the case, achieving real happiness seems to be becoming more and more difficult.

Another surprise:

Happiness isn’t our normal state of mind. From an evolutionary viewpoint, the brain doesn’t really care whether we’re happy or not. In fact, the brain often tricks us into believing we’ll be happier if we do things that give our genes a competitive edge, but actually don’t make us happier at all—like elbowing others to get to the top, being unfaithful to our spouses, or working ourselves to death. More and more research is showing that, in order to be happy, we have to be thoughtful and deliberate about our priorities and decisions.

We all have a happiness thermostat. A famous study compared lottery winners and accident victims a year after their good or bad fortune. The researchers found that people in both groups had pretty much returned to the individual levels of overall happiness that they’d had before their good- or ill-fortune. If you were a grump, winning the lottery just made you a rich grump; and if you were pretty contented, pain and disability didn’t have much impact on your overall positive outlook. We all know this instinctively; we know certain people who are always on the bubbly side, while others tend to be morose, no matter what’s going on in their lives. While we can’t totally transcend our personalities, it is possible to turn the happiness thermostat up a few degrees and learn to be happier. I’m going to give you some tips, all based on solid scientific research.

You’ll notice, however, that much of the usual practice of law interferes with this advice. Lawyers are trained to be pessimists, to find the fly in every ointment; it’s easy to become cynical. It’s largely a solitary profession, and much of the work is routine. Big firms are extremely hierarchical, and competition is fierce. You tend to see people at their worst, and trust can seem naïve. You’re trained to be stoic and control your emotions, and you may forget how to enjoy yourself. You work long hours, and often your family life suffers. So for attorneys, achieving greater happiness may require some big changes in your routine.

• Perhaps the most revolutionary development in neuroscience is the growing recognition that the brain is a malleable instrument, continually changing in light of our experience. Practice changes the brain; anytime we do anything once, we develop a little circuit in the brain that will make it easier to do the same thing the next time. The more practice, the stronger that circuit becomes. The more you think pessimistically, the more likely you are to keep on thinking that way. But if you catch yourself and decide to have a more positive expectation this time, you’ll make it easier to think positively in the future. Or, you might pretend you’re an extravert. It’s really true that extraverts have more fun. The research shows that even introverts have more fun when they're pretending to be extraverts. If you practice it enough, you won’t be pretending any more.
• There’s research to suggest that losing something we have causes us more “misery units” than the equivalent number of “happiness units” acquiring it gave us in the first place. Losing money or status will make you feel like a bigger failure than getting it made you feel a success. And we all know the effects of “buyer’s remorse,” the sinking feeling you get when you’ve spent a lot of money on something and suddenly realize that it will never live up to your expectations. Considering all this, especially in light of today’s economy, it seems that pursuing acquisitions or chasing status opens the door to a lot of misery. You can practice “not wanting” and get better at it with practice. There’s a special sense of satisfaction that comes with realizing you don’t really need anything right now.
  

One of the biggest fallacies about happiness is the belief that I’ll be happy when I get what I want. It’s quite likely that when you get what you want, you’ll quickly get used to it and just want something else. On the contrary, real happiness has to do with appreciating the present moment. Far too many of us spend much of our lives in dreamland, waiting for something, or in the past, looking for justification for being stuck right now. Or in a mindless frenzy, trying to keep up with too many commitments. We think that good intentions count, but they really don’t. Don’t waste any more time waiting for your happiness. We are what we do. Your schedule is your life; take control of it.

There’s hard research to show that practicing what’s called “mindfulness meditation” will help reset your happiness thermostat. Mindfulness means seeing things clearly, as they are, with no defenses, illusions, wishes, or pretensions. But it also means viewing yourself and your experience with compassion and kindness. Attorneys are trained to think critically, and that’s valuable, but it’s also of value to suspend judging and be open to all sides. Mindfulness also means looking at your thoughts, not from your thoughts. A great deal of unnecessary misery is caused by mindlessness, the frantic, hypervigilant frame of mind that has us always rushing to cross to-dos off our lists, in a hurry, not listening, not concentrating, distracted, not fully present. Mindfulness is being present, but also detached. It means fully experiencing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences without being distracted by irrational worries and fears.

Finally, here’s one specific little exercise that has helped millions of people achieve a greater degree of happiness.

• When you go to bed at night, clear your head of other thoughts and think about three good things that happened during the day. Three things that went well, that made you feel good, that brought a smile to your face. These can be very small things or relatively big things. Something you liked for lunch, or getting a raise. Hearing a new song you like, or a productive day’s work
• Focus in on your feelings about these things. Practice differentiating the subtleties of feeling. Do you feel proud? Excited? Joyful? Naches? Does the memory make you want to smile? Pay attention to the muscles on your face as they form a smile. Do you feel warm? Where? In your heart, your stomach, your whole body? Do you feel a pleasant lump in your throat? Does your heartbeat change?
• Visualize the neurons in your brain forming new happiness circuits—tiny little bulldozers widening the channels to happiness. Remember that brain cells form new circuits just because we’re remembering. Visualize endorphins flowing into your joy receptors like fresh snowmelt flowing into those new happiness channels. Remember that doing this exercise regularly will change your happiness set point; you’ll feel more joy, more easily.
• Let yourself go to sleep as you continue to savor, explore, and visualize.
  One test of this exercise found that it increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for the entire six months of the study period, although participants had been asked to do it for only a week. Further exploration found that most of them had continued to focus on three good things entirely on their own.