How to Handle Emotions of Overwhelm in Five Mindful Steps

Cover image from post with lawyer being inundated with things and the title from the blog post "How to Handle Emotions of Overwhelm in Five Mindful Steps"

Overwhelm is one of the emotions that I dislike the most. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I am not talking about being overwhelmed with positive emotions, like love, joy, or gratitude. When those things happen, they are amazing.

More often, I experience the nasty kind of overwhelm. This is when I am confronted with a challenge that is so big, new, or strange that I feel totally unable to handle it. In times like these, I feel defeated, powerless, and usually ashamed.

When Does Overwhelm Arise?

I’m thinking of this phenomenon because I just experienced it when I bought my daughter a new “big girl” bed. Initially, I prided myself for my efficiency when I shipped a Smastad loft-style bed from IKEA. That feeling immediately transformed to regret when I saw a collection of 6 large, heavy boxes and at least 4 other smaller packages filling my garage.

For some backstory, I am historically awful at assembling items. My husband usually jumps in immediately to save me from myself but he’s a CPA dealing with his own variety of overwhelm during tax season. I considered hiring a handy person to help, but the number of boxes suggested that managing the handy person would be more work than doing the project myself.

I stood before the boxes with few good options and had to face the facts. I was overwhelmed.

Mindful Step 1: Don’t Fight the Overwhelm.

Since I am a mindfulness teacher and a lawyer trained to solve problems, I bet you are hoping that I had some magic trick up my sleeve. Nope. Not at all. Even so, life experience has taught me this: it doesn’t help to fight emotions like overwhelm.

You can’t make overwhelm pretty or nice or satisfying. You can’t gloss it with a silver lining or fill it’s cracks with gold. At least, you can’t do it on the front end. With overwhelm, the first best step you can take is to not fight it.

I stood in my garage, staring at the boxes. I let my mind race about how long it would take. I allowed my mind create horror stories about how exhausting and frustrating it would be. I raged at myself for an impulse purchase of this magnitude without considering the consequences.

In other words, I let the overwhelm be there. I didn’t fight it. I felt it. I let it have it’s moment and fully accepted the situation that I had created for myself.

Image of blog post author with the quote "You can't make overwhelm pretty or nice or satisfying. With overwhelm, the first best step you can take is to not fight it."

Mindful Step 2: Honor Your Emotions.

With most big emotions, mindfulness practice has taught me that time and space are the best salves. In this case, that means I left the gigantic boxes sitting in my garage for a week. To put it another way, I didn’t rush in to handle the situation. I just waited until I calmed down and I could stand to look at the boxes again.

Ultimately, the thing that pushed me to move forward was being annoyed with the boxes themselves. I was sick of climbing over them to get to the garage. I wanted my daughter to have the awesome new loft bed. I also started to feel curious about whether I could find a way to get this thing built without driving myself crazy.

By giving myself time and space, I let the overwhelm subside and made room for the feelings that motivated me to act. They helped me refocus on the goals I had originally, so I could get back on track.

Mindful Step 3: Make a Plan Tailored to Your Human Needs.

When my motivation was restored, I decided that there was no way to get started without first assessing the situation clearly. My first job was to unbox everything, locate the instructions, and gather all the pieces.

That was no small feat, so I gave myself time to rest before I began the organization phase. Since I had always struggled putting things together, I decided to take the remaining steps very slowly. I took time to study the instructions and even found some handy YouTube videos about assembling this very item.

I divided the project into three phases and made sure my daughter would still have a bed to sleep in even if gaps occurred. This helped me account for my own frustration and fatigue. It took the pressure off and accounted for the inevitable mistakes I would make in following the instructions.

Mindful Step 4: Execute the Plan Step by Step.

After creating your plan, the next phase is execution. This is when the old adage about eating an elephant comes to mind. How do you do that? Bit by bit. In this case, I subdivided my phases into even smaller microsteps.

I first organized and arranged all the hardware (pro tip: a muffin tin is perfect for this). I gathered all my tools. I lined all the pieces up exactly as illustrated in the instructions and then followed the instructions step by step. Any time where I made what felt like a judgment call, I noted it so I could retrace my steps if needed.

In other words, I did the opposite of what my millennial brain told me to do when I get a new product. I didn’t play around and figure it out. Instead, I moved in super slow motion as if I was an assembly robot. This kept me organized, allowed me to take breaks when needed, and kept my mood and mindset in check.

Image listing the five mindful steps for handling emotions of overwhelm as shared in the blog post

Mindful Step 5: Celebrate the Victory.

Recently, I finished phase 1 of my massive project. This means that I assembled the bookcase/wardrobe that serves as the foundation of the bed mostly on my own. Am I concerned that someone else could have done this faster? Not at all.

I celebrated the crap out this achievement. I showed it to my daughter. I reveled in the feeling of progress and compared it to my feelings of overwhelm just a few weeks before.

The point here, of course, is that celebration is a critical component to any big project. Sure, it’s only phase one. Yes, two arguably more challenging phases remain for me to complete. The difference, though, is that now I have a renewed sense of confidence. I have evidence that I can find a way to work my way through the rest of the steps to accomplish my goal.

Because a big project involves so much effort and patience, it is smart to offset it with a healthy amount of celebration at each milestone. You better believe that I am going to celebrate fully when this bed is finally assembled.

Conclusion: Overwhelm Is Hard but You Can Manage It Step by Step.

Whether it is caused by a major work project or an imposing box from IKEA that is gathering dust, overwhelm happens to us all. It is an emotion that can sap our motivation and cause us to want to run and hide. With mindfulness and self-compassion, though, we can work through overwhelm just like we go step by step through any big project. In this post, I offered you a brief instruction manual with 5 steps to help you navigate if overwhelm happens to you.

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Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.

The Connection Between Mindfulness and Writing Success

Cover image for appearance on Dear Indie Author podcast on mindfulness and writing

As a mindfulness teacher and blogger, the connection between mindfulness practice and writing comes up for me a lot. Though I have always been drawn to writing and I do it every day in my work as a lawyer, I didn’t always consider myself a writer. It took many years for it to emerge as a real passion and part of my life.

How Meditation Led to Writing

If I never started meditating, there’s a good chance that I never would have discovered this meaningful pastime at all. As I have explained before, meditation helped me create the mental space that was necessary to recognize some of my copious thoughts as ideas. Over time, I also cultivated self-compassion and became more aware of latent judgments, so I could get ideas on the page.

Then, finally all the time sitting in meditation and the benefits it imparted convinced me of something fundamental: using some of my time to please myself was worthwhile. This helped me get over all the fears about writing being a “waste of time” or “too much work” or that “nobody would care.”

The Interview Discussing Mindfulness and Writing

I was fortunate to get a chance to discuss all of these things and more with fellow writer and coach, Shonda Ramsey. I met Shonda online when I saw her searching for self-published authors. Writing my first book was a great experience and one that has led to many other wonderful opportunities in my life.

I was glad to get to talk to Shonda about it and explain how mindfulness and creativity are interconnected. I was also pleased to discuss the fact that writing, a traditionally lonely endeavor, was something that led me to cultivate greater community. In fact, I was proud to share that I got help from a book coach to make the leap from blogger to author quickly.

How to Watch or Listen to the Interview

If you are interested in writing or wonder what mindfulness can do to help you get more creative in life, check out the full interview on the Dear Indie Author podcast. You can listen online, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify or watch the interview on YouTube here:

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How to Stop Doomscrolling: 5 Essential Steps

As an anxious person, I have to be cautious about the amount of news I allow myself to consume. I try my best to focus on what matters most to my work and my community. When things are out of my control, I try my best to let go. Usually, this means I don’t allow myself much time for doomscrolling.

In the last few weeks, natural disasters, political tumult, and other challenges have caused my anxiety levels to rise. To some degree, this is normal. Change leads to uncertainty and uncertainty wants to be resolved. The siren song of the internet promising endless information and quick answers is hard to resist.

The thing is that doomscrolling usually leaves me feeling more confused and anxious and it is usually a huge waste of time. In case you are experiencing this now or ever struggle with it, here are five steps that may help you stop doomscrolling.

1. Recognize That You Are Doomscrolling.

The first step to ending doomscrolling may be the hardest to implement. Many lawyers and professionals often use the internet as a tool to address anxieties about our work. We may notice an issue, feel concerned, and take to the internet to gather legal authority or facts to solve the problem.

In my experience, doomscrolling starts much the same way. I come across something alarming and then I unconsciously start searching and clicking in the hopes of finding something to make me feel better. The problem, of course, is that the internet offers ready access to information but meaning can be harder to find. This means that the searching could go on endlessly and it is likely, and often does, raise more anxieties that will need to addressed.

So what are the signs of doomscrolling? It can vary for each of us but the salient features I have come to recognize are: sprawling or directionless searching, an investment of time with no meaningful return, and fear or anxiety.

2. Pause and Bring Awareness to What You Are Doing.

When you start to sense that you are doomscrolling, it can be hard to stop. In the midst of relentless searching, your mind may become scattered, race towards the future, and overwhelm itself with information. To disrupt the cycle, though, you can pause and return your awareness to the present moment.

One way to do this is to literally remove your hand from the mouse or put your phone face down or ideally out of reach. Close your eyes, take a breath, and notice how your body feels. Ask yourself whether the scrolling is helping or hurting. One question I often ask myself when I find myself mindlessly scrolling or clicking around is “what am I looking for?” If I can’t answer the question, it’s a great sign that it’s time move on to something else.

3. Identify and Acknowledge the Emotion Hiding Beneath the Scrolling.

If you are sure that you are doomscrolling but are struggling to stop, you may need to get up and away from your device and proceed right on to step 5. Assuming the temptation to keep scrolling is in check, however, I find it helpful to acknowledge what caused the doomscrolling in the first place.

As noted above, when doomscrolling is happening fear or anxiety is often involved. Even when I have a good sense of the emotion, though, I find it helpful to get more specific. For example, I may note or say to myself the specific fear or concern that started my scrolling. This helps me to honor my emotions and get some distance from them.

4. Take Care of that Emotion.

If at all possible, it helps to take one moment more to do something to care for the emotions that started the doomscrolling. Where possible, avoid judging yourself for doomscrolling or being afraid. The world is complex, information is all around, and life changes fast. Given how much information is available to us all, it’s easy to get sucked into an information anxiety loop.

Recalling this fact alone may help you see the common humanity in your situation and that of other people. This is an essential element of self-compassion that can help you care for the fear that may be lurking beneath the doomscrolling. I also find it to be empowering too. Even though I may be unable to solve all (or any) of the world problems my doomscrolling revealed, I find that I am at least able to take care for myself when I am afraid.

Image with 5 tips to stop doomscrolling that are shared in the blog post

5. Do Something Useful, Pleasant, or Kind.

It is not possible to tell your mind to not think of whatever caused the anxiety and prompted the doomscrolling. The mind does not work that way. What you can do with the mind, however, is shift attention to something else. In this way, you can care for your mind and your your emotions after doomscrolling by doing something else that engages your attention.

Since doomscrolling is emotionally challenging, generally negative, and often useless, the best antidote to it is to do the opposite. Find an an activity that is useful, pleasant, kind, or ideally all three of those things. Experience has taught me that movement, creativity, getting outside and away from technology, and real human contact are the most effective answers to doomscrolling. They remind me of my present moment reality, the people and things I care about most, and my power to do good even in an imperfect and confusing world.

Conclusion

Doomscrolling happens to the best of us but it can easily make a bad situation worse. Knowing how to recognize and stop doomscrolling is an essential skill for contemporary life and challenging times. With mindful awareness and self-compassion, you can stop doom scrolling, care for the fear that started it, and put your time and energy to better use.

If you need any additional strategies for staying calm in the midst of difficulty, check out the Coping Strategies for Difficult Times ebook.

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Cultivating Motivation: A Mindful Approach for 2025

In case you didn’t notice, I took the last month off from the blog. This was actually a good thing. I had a great 2024 filled with many wonderful things, including finding my place at a new law firm, editing a legal treatise for LexisNexis, and many new opportunities. The only downside was that I was exhausted by December and, as a result, many of my normal habits fell away.

This means that I have been thinking a lot about motivation lately because I need to get back to my normal habits. As most of us know, January is the perfect time to refresh habits because it is the season of goal-setting and resolutions. I have already picked my word of the year for 2025, so now I just need the energy to execute my plan. This raises the question: how does one bring motivation back?

Motivation Starts with Intention

If I had to answer this question with one word, it would be “intention.” I used to think talk of intention was new age puffery. It made me roll my eyes and wonder what the heck it even meant. “Why did I need to think about intention?” I would think to myself. “I usually know what I am doing.”

Experience, and of course lots of meditation, has shown me that in many cases we do not know at all what we are doing. Sure, we know in the sense that we are generally aware of what is happening and have a vague idea about what we want. But, how often do you actually think about the direction of your life and where it is leading you? How often do you ask what your deep intentions are?

Mindfulness Can Help You Connect with Your Intention

More often, we are embroiled in habits and busy people, like lawyers, can get so distracted by life that we don’t think about how we want to live. For this practical reason, when we want to establish new habits or need to get back to old ones, it helps to reflect on our intention and ask what we want or are trying to achieve.

This is one of the reasons that meditation has become such an important part of my life. Not only does the practice give my nervous system a break, it also allows me some time and mental space to check in with myself, including what I need and what I really want. In fact, it is so important that I have made checking in with my intention the first step when I start meditating.

Image with quote that says "Motivation starts with intention and mindfulness practice can help you connect with your intention."

Motivation Requires a Connection Between Effort and Results

Identifying our intention may be enough to get us started with initial steps, but it won’t last for long by itself. It is commonly said that habits take weeks to form, so a burst of initial energy from a reflection on intention will only get you so far. The next essential step, I find, is often overlooked: we need to create a connection between our effort and the results we week.

In my experience, this connection requires two things:

a belief that our effort will lead to some kind of positive result; and
a plan to turn our belief into a reality.

In some cases, belief comes first but sometimes we may need to chart a course to inspire confidence. Last year, I succeeded in losing some weight in a few months. Of course, I had thought about starting for months before but put it off until I started imagining my plan of attack. Once I had a plan, I realized the feat was achievable and it gave me the energy to try.

Sustained Motivation Requires a Good System

Now, anyone who has tried to start a new habit or get back to your wholesome ones knows that energy fades. As you are creating your plan of attack, therefore, it only makes sense to factor in a system that will sustain your motivation.

To do this, you can’t rely on discipline and willpower alone because both of these things wear out quickly and may be heavily taxed by your existing lifestyle and work. If you are a lawyer or other busy professional, your schedule may not be your own. If you are a caregiver in addition to that, many people may depend on you too. This means, at some point, you are going to require support to stick to your good habits.

What Kind of System Supports Motivation?

So, what kind of system supports sustained motivation? For a deep dive on this issue, I highly recommend that you check out Atomic Habits by James Clear. He has a lot of practical tips for changing habits and making the change stick.

In general, though, what you want to do is create a system that offers you support on a practical level. It should reduce the friction and effort needed to overcome it in getting the relevant task accomplished. Ideally, if at all possible, your plan should support your intrinsic desire to do the task. That means increasing your personal enjoyment and satisfaction with the task.

An important way to do this is to track and check your progress and to regularly check in with your intention to remind yourself why you are investing the effort.

Image of a notebook with a quote that says "Willpower can’t sustain motivation, But a good support system can."

Self-Compassion Is Essential

Ideally, when you get back to your new habit, it will be smooth sailing with no major challenges. For most of us, though, challenges and struggles are bound to arise eventually. This is why self-compassion is one tool that is essential to sustaining or renewing motivation.

As I have written before, self-compassion is positively correlated with goal attainment because it supports persistence. When a challenge arises, it is self-compassion that helps us focus on what we need instead of how we failed to measure up. When our energy is depleted, self-compassion is what may help us take the time to rest so we can recover and get back on track.

Just like any other habit, self-compassion is a skill that can be trained over time and it is one that can support you in cultivating other positive habits. For this reason, as you set your intentions and craft plans to motivate yourself for the new year, be sure to include compassion for yourself.

Conclusion: Motivation Can Be Cultivated and Mindfulness Can Help.

This is a great time of year for refreshing habits but don’t fall into the trap of believing that motivation is an elusive energy that changes like the wind. Though motivation can be this way, it can also be something we cultivate with mindfulness and self-compassion. If we connect to our intention and craft a plan that supports our effort, we can cultivate motivation and sustain it over time.

If motivation to start or get back to meditation is what you are looking for this year, check out the downloads on our Resources page, including the Meditation Habit Worksheet based on the principles of Atomic Habits.

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How to Practice Gratitude without Being Fake

Thanksgiving is coming up in a few days. This holiday is one that is pretty easy for me to love because cooking and eating are two of my favorite things. You get to do both on Thanksgiving and you only have to spend one day with your extended family. Seems perfect, right?

Oh yeah, I forgot about gratitude. In some form or fashion, you may be asked to reflect on or proclaim your gratitude. I don’t doubt the myriad studies that say gratitude is good for us. I appreciate the need to express and receive gratitude. But, as a lifelong pigheaded person, I refuse to feel something on demand.

Forcing Gratitude Doesn’t Work

Honestly, it’s not even truly refusal. I could decide to go along with the little game of gratitude to amuse my family or shut them up. But I would know in my secret heart of hearts that I don’t really feel grateful. What I really feel is resentful.

This same phenomenon is why I also can’t do positive affirmations. They don’t make me feel strong, calm, empowered or loved. They make my mind argue and my mind already does this well enough on it’s own. In short, despite the best intentions of these positive practices, I just can’t force my mind or heart to go in a direction it’s not already inclined to go.

Then How Can You Practice Gratitude?

So, what’s the key here? How can someone like me practice gratitude in a way that’s not fake? One way, of course, is to notice when genuine gratitude comes up, savor it, and where appropriate share it. I do this and it feels really good.

But can I cultivate gratitude otherwise? Despite my mental and emotional blocks against fakery, I have discovered a hack. I have written many times about my fondness for loving-kindness practice. One of the reasons I love this practice so much is that it serves as a gratitude practice for me.

I don’t go into the practice hoping for gratitude but it almost always shows up as a wonderful side effect. When I bring to mind the people I love and care about and wish them well, invariably I also feel gratitude that they are in my life. Strangely, I even sometimes feel gratitude to myself and to the difficult people in my life as the practice progresses.

Try This Gratitude Meditation

This is why I am sharing a gratitude meditation that is really a modified loving-kindness practice. It follows the same traditional pattern, but instead of wishing the phrases of peace and well-being it includes an offering of gratitude. I did this one for a Mindfulness in Law Society Virtual Sit and remembered how much I liked it.

To try out the practice, find it here or on our YouTube channel or on Insight Timer. Please have a wonderful holiday weekend. I am honestly and sincerely grateful to have you as a reader and meditation friend.

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Strong Lawyers Know When to Ask for Help

I never used to ask for help. Like at all. For most of my life, I would struggle mightily on my own for hours. I’d wade in self-doubt, angst, and worry until some unwitting person happened upon me. So overcome by pity and confusion, this person would practically force help on me.

In situations like this, a part of me would be glad to get some support. Clearly, I needed it. Usually the helpful person would see something I hadn’t, have an expertise I didn’t, or at least calm me down enough that I could think again. Even so, being in this position of vulnerability caused me to feel something else too: shame.

There’s No Shame in Asking for Help

Shame at what, you might be wondering. Just for needing help? Of course, the answer to that question, justifiably scoffing as it is, is yes. I used to feel ashamed to ask for help and certainly to need help. Ugh. Even the words “need help” sounded so piteous to me then that I couldn’t bear to think they referred to me.

I am here to officially declare that I have changed my mind about help. In truth, help is not something to be ashamed of at all. Help, knowing when you need it and having people to ask, is something that should make any lawyer exceedingly proud.

Asking for Help Usually Shows Self-Awareness and Wisdom

Think about it. Asking for help implies a few things that any smart, capable professional ought to be thrilled to announce to the world. First, knowing when to ask for help requires two important traits: (1) self-awareness; and (2) wisdom.

Though nobody, especially lawyers, likes the experience of acknowledging our own limits, few would argue that being aware of one’s limits is a bad thing. In fact, most lawyers would readily admit that they have seen disastrous consequences for lawyers and professionals who lack the ability to see themselves clearly.

Wisdom is related to self-awareness but it implies more than a present moment awareness of oneself. Instead, wisdom only exists when one is aware of lived experience over time. Knowing when to ask for help requires wisdom because we have to judge when collaboration serves us better than individual action alone.

Image with quote from the post which says "Acts of kindness support well-being but most people underestimate how much others are willing to help."

Asking for Help Means You Have Someone Helpful to Ask

Another reason why asking for help should make you proud is that doing so implies something most lawyers would want to brag about: a solid network. Think about it. If you ask for help, you are probably going to be asking someone with a talent, position, or expertise you don’t have.

Inherently, this implies that you are connected and on good terms with talented, powerful, kind, and prosocial people. This is something to celebrate and to relish. In fact, this is very reason that most lawyers take pride in cultivating good networks. We do so because networks can help us in many ways that most of us could never predict.

Asking for Help Increases Connection and Happiness

Some lawyers, myself included, may still struggle to ask for help on the theory that they don’t want to “burden” someone else. Though this may sound noble, it could easily be hiding something dark. I used to say this all the time, but I have since come to realize that I was just too afraid to feel vulnerable.

Hard as it was to face this feeling, I eventually came to see that this small act of vulnerability was a way to cultivate trust. Even to this day, it still feels awkward and desperate when I ask for help, but when I get it I always feel a warm glow. That warm glow is a connection to someone else and the feeling of support.

Research suggests, and I can attest, that people who offer help are similarly affected. Acts of kindness support well-being but most people underestimate how much others are willing to help. This means that seeking help isn’t a burden at all, but instead an invitation to connection.

Image sharing three of the points from the blog post indicating why lawyers show strength when they ask for help

Conclusion

If you struggle with asking for help, you aren’t alone. This is a reality for most lawyers. Even if facing every problem alone is your default setting, you can change this habit over time. Remembering that asking for help is a sign of strength is a good place to start. Next time you start to feel ashamed at the thought of needing help, flip the script. Knowing when to ask for help and having someone to ask aren’t signs of weakness; they are clear signs of strength.

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Mindfulness: A Force for Balancing Ego and Recognition

I was fortunate enough to receive an award this week. Of course, it was a wonderful experience for many reasons. Who doesn’t like recognition? As a mindfulness teacher, though, I couldn’t help but observe the impact of such recognition on my ego.

When it comes to mindfulness practices, many people assume that the practices require us to abandon our egos. This may be part of the reason why some, including lawyers, think meditation is woo-woo or not for them.

Of course, there is variation in how different teachers and traditions treat the ego. I, for one, don’t think the ego is the enemy in meditation practice or in life. But having meditated for more than ten years now, I also know the ego is not always our bestie either.

So, how can you find balance when it comes to your ego and how can mindfulness help? Here are the steps I took this week to check my ego but also embrace myself while accepting an award.

The Ego and Achievement Aren’t All Bad

If you meditate long enough, you inevitably will see times when your ego is out of control and creating problems for you. It may rage at you when things don’t go your way. It may push you to work extra hard for approval or achievements. It may encourage selfish or unkind behavior.

For many of us, myself included, meditation may have a moderating influence on these tendencies. It may help you see the times when you are becoming self-absorbed or striving too hard. Easing back from these habits of mind may help you build confidence, expand your perspective, and live a bit more selflessly.

But you don’t have to rid yourself of all striving and ego. Pursuing goals can lead us to great things and other wonderful people. It can ground us in our community and help us serve others. Meditation can help you tell the difference between these two extremes so you can stay on the middle path of pursuing good without losing yourself in the process.

Reflection on Growth Is a Good Thing

One great thing about awards is that they may cause you to look back and reflect on progress. I certainly had that experience this week because the award I got related to a program I did in high school. Clearly, this means that I had to consider some good and bad memories from my life.

Mindfulness practices can certainly help with this. Self-compassion can help us accept ourselves completely even in our times of human frailty. It can also help us see the ways that growth emerged for us, including the people who helped us and the experiences that changed us.

Noticing the ways our personality shifts and changes over time is perfectly consistent with meditation practice. One of the foundational principles of Buddhism that many meditators are bound to observe is the concept of not-self. Reflection upon receiving recognition may be another occasion to consider this.

Image with quote from blog post that says "we don't have to strive to rid ourselves of our ego with our meditation practice. As social beings, recognition is a human need."

Feel Real Gratitude

We have all seen one too many posts on LinkedIn that start with a hollow proclamation of being “humbled and honored” for some recognition. This trope, though, doesn’t have to be the norm. The truth is that nobody who gets an award or achieves anything big did it all on their own.

Getting a recognition is a time to feel proud of yourself, but it’s also a great time to feel truly grateful. This leads to another fundamental principle that meditation may help you discover: interconnection. If you earn a recognition, reflect on this fact. Identify the people who helped you and the ways that they supported you.

Take the time to reflect on what this meant to you. If you need help with this, check my Gratitude Guided Meditation on YouTube or Insight Timer. Then, if possible, share your feelings with them. By doing this, you are moderating the emphasis on yourself and broadening the focus to your community.

Put the Achievement to Use

Another way to expand a recognition outward is to use it for a good purpose. Frequently, award recipients get to make acceptance speeches. They may get other attention from their community or even the press. If you get a chance like this, put it to good use.

Your recognition could bring attention to a worthy cause or idea. It could also offer a golden opportunity to encourage others to get involved in the community. Or it could provide an opportunity to share a brief story that may touch people’s hearts or make them think in a new way.

If you want to avoid making an achievement all about you, then focus on your broader community even in accepting the recognition.

Keep Things in Perspective

Recognition and praise is something we all want. As such, it would be easy for anyone to get stuck in ego-driven rumination when recognition comes. This is where letting go becomes a necessity.

It is really nice to be recognized for hard work, longstanding dedication, or a job well done. After the recognition ends, though, life returns to normal. That’s why perspective matters. Awards might boost us up for a bit, but nothing boosts us forever.

When recognition comes, enjoy it and savor it but don’t get stuck in it. Feel good for a moment and notice how important recognition is for all of us. Then move on with life and look for opportunities to boost and recognize someone else.

Cover image showing the 5 mindfulness tips for managing your ego amidst recognition from the blog post

Conclusion

We don’t have to strive to rid ourselves of our ego with our meditation practice. As social beings, recognition is a human need. However, when recognition comes mindfulness can help us stay steady and use it as an opportunity to expand ourselves, rather than becoming self-absorbed.

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How to Respond Mindfully to Nasty Emails

Cover image for blog post entitled responding mindfully to nasty emails

There are few things in life as satisfying as typing out a strongly worded email to someone who’s got it coming. Or maybe you have a colleague driving you nuts, so nuts in fact that you think a text message containing all your anger is the way to go.

As soon as you read these words, you probably see the error in this line of thinking. Yes, letting it all hang out in text or email may seem like a great idea at times. The moment we hit “send” on those messages, though, we are bound to feel something more akin to shame, regret, or even guilt.

Can mindfulness help us avoid this trap? Indeed, it can. Keep reading to learn how.

Why we need mindfulness when it comes to text and emails?

As I have written before, mindfulness is a faculty of mind for most humans. We generally don’t have to do anything extra, including special practices, to be mindful. With that said, when it comes to email and text, some extra help is frequently needed because those activities are so often mindless.

Consider how many text messages, personal messages, and emails you send in a given work day. If this number is large, and for most of us it is, then your use of these means of communication most likely is a habit. Habits aren’t bad, of course, but when there are habits there may be less conscious awareness.

Text messages and emails can be generated quickly and outside of the presence of the person with whom you are communicating. Doing things speedily rarely makes us more ethical. Less contact with others often implies less empathy and fewer options for establishing understanding.

What it means to respond to emails mindfully.

When I talk about responding to emails or text messages mindfully, I am talking about invoking the faculty of mindful awareness to support skillful communication. On a practical level, this means taking measures to counteract the risks stated above: slowing down the process, remembering our human connections, and choosing your response consistent with your values and ethics.

Here are five steps that can help you do this.

Image with a quote about why mindfulness is needed for responding to nasty emails

Mindful Step 1: Take a Pause

As noted above, emails and texts are dangerous because they are fast. They can quickly elicit emotion from us unless we have time to recognize it. Nasty emails and texts are likely to invoke the emotion anger, which often manifests as a burst of energy. One of the calling cards of anger, of course, is an urge to act immediately on that energy.

If you receive emotionally charged emails and texts, the first and best mindful step I can offer is to stop. Take a pause and, where possible, get away from your messaging device. Literally get up and back away from the computer or put your phone down. It doesn’t have to be for a long time. The point of this is to stop the chain reaction between your screen and your mind and body and give yourself a chance to choose your next step.

Mindful Step 2: Acknowledge Your Feelings

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: mindfulness is not just about being calm. Despite the common saying about sticks and stones, words absolutely can hurt us. They can even hurt lawyers and professionals who deal with shame triggers at work every day.

When you take a moment to pause, check in with yourself and acknowledge your feelings. This may show up with a multitude of thought reactions about the situation, the other person, or even yourself. It likely will also include the physical signs of emotion, including tension in your body, a faster heart or breath rate, or even heat in your face and neck.

You don’t have to make these things go away. Instead, you can note them in mindful awareness and offer yourself compassion for dealing with something hard.

Mindful Step 3: Get Help

This next step isn’t mandatory, but it may be a good option for challenging communications that are critical, recurring, or more deeply troubling. I’ve talked before about the “spotlighting” effect of empathy that can cause us to zero in on a particular person’s emotions. From experience, I know that this can happen with email and text communications.

One way to break out of this and get much needed perspective is to talk with a colleague. With this, I am not saying you need to ask the colleague to intervene in the communication. Instead, my suggestion here is to speak with a colleague as a sounding board to get a broader view and personal support.

I know many of us want to be independent, but I frequently check in with colleagues when dealing with difficult opposing counsel. It makes the experience less overwhelming and lonely. I also feel more confident that I am responding based on my judgment and not my resentment.

Image showing the five mindful steps for responding mindfully to nasty emails

Mindful Step 4: Invoke Common Humanity

Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, the humanity of the other person is present in all of our digital communications. I put this step next to last for a practical reason: it’s hard to recognize someone else’s needs when we are struggling.

Now, you may wonder about why you should care about the humanity of someone who just sent you a nasty diatribe via email? There are a few answers on this, but my best one is that it is usually better for everyone when we do so. Even from a very selfish perspective, most of us feel guilt and shame when we act in ways that are inconsistent with our values.

Email wars can cause us to forget basic values easily, but most of us want to to help and serve others in our work. Most of us do not want to harm and hurt others. A simple way we can do this is to remember that the person we are communicating with is a person with hopes, fears, dreams, and needs. Remembering that they are a person and not just an email or text troll can make it easier to choose our words wisely.

Mindful Step 5: Plan Your Response

This tip is less about drafting techniques than it is about the arc and meaning of your professional life. The plan I am talking about here simply means to ask yourself what your purpose with the communication is. This can raise deeper questions regarding your purpose in life, including at work, or your purpose with a particular matter.

It’s not necessary and it would be inefficient for you to expect crystal clear answers on these issues every time. Even so, asking yourself simply “what do I want here?” or “what purpose does this communication serve?” is a good start. Asking these questions is a way to reorient towards your values, meaning, and ethics so that it can guide your communication.

Conclusion

Copious and unpleasant digital communications are an unfortunate part of life for many lawyers and professionals. They can make our lives more stressful and pull us away from our deeper values. As with many things, an intentionally mindful approach can help. By slowing down, acknowledging our emotions and the needs of others, we can remember and reorient to effective communication that does not cause more harm. This can make our work lives better, less stressful, and more meaningful.

If you need a practice to help you go through these steps, check our our Guided Meditation for Responding Mindfully to Nasty Emails on Insight Timer or here:

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It’s Okay If You Meditate Just to Rest

I got up at 3:30 AM last week to catch a flight to New York City with my family. It was going to be a really long day. We had sightseeing and a Broadway show planned. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to sleep on planes, trains, or automobiles. Lucky for me, though, I had another plan: I knew I would be able to meditate on the flight.

Meditation is no substitute for good sleep.

Trust me, I am the last person in the world to try to convince you that meditation is a good substitute for sleep. The impetus for my own meditation practice was postpartum depression, in part induced by intense sleep deprivation while trying to breastfeed my newly born daughter. That experience taught me many things but the most important may be that sleep is a nonnegotiable for me.

Regardless, the reality remains that sleep is not always an option. As a lawyer, I frequently have deadlines or a hectic schedule that can affect sleep. Even when we make the best choices we can, insomnia happens on occasion for a variety of reasons beyond our control.

When sleep is not an option, meditation can help.

In times like these, meditation can really help. On days after a less than ideal night of sleep, I find that a few minutes of meditation really helps me. For one thing, closing my eyes helps them rest and can ward off headaches and tension in my face and neck. Reducing my heart and breath rate also helps my body recover from the extra strain of slogging through the day on limited sleep.

I won’t claim that 10 to 30 minutes feels the same as a good night’s sleep, but it is close to the benefits one might expect from a power nap. Unlike a nap (a luxury my body rarely lets me enjoy), meditation doesn’t leave me feeling groggy the rest of the day. To the contrary, meditating for a quick rest during the day often feels energizing.

Image listing 4 reasons meditation for rest is okay

Meditating for rest can improve your mood and mindset.

Even if I don’t get a big energy boost from meditation, it offers other benefits. Mediation will usually stabilize my mood and mind. This usually means less grouchiness and generally less conflict with any people I may happen to encounter. This can even include myself.

Many lawyers like me may have a habit of pushing past or through our own needs. Taking a few minutes to meditate for the express purpose of resting–instead of improving yourself or boosting performance–is an important recognition that your needs matter. Most of us need reminders like this every so often. When life throws you lemons with too much business or not enough sleep, you make lemonade by taking the opportunity to practice rest.

Conclusion

Some of us who meditate may think the practice has to have some noble purpose. I have a noble purpose for my meditation practice: I practice to create less suffering for myself and others. But, you know what? I am pretty awful at reducing suffering for myself or anyone else when I am tired. And I bet that I’m not alone.

This is why I say that it is okay to meditate just for rest. It’s okay to let go of your noble purpose and big goals, at least for a few minutes. It’s okay to rest your eyes and body and give your mind a break. If you try it out on a hard day, I bet you’ll find that this use of meditation is perfectly consistent with your nobler purposes for the practice.

If you want to try some Guided Meditations with the aim of rest of mind, check these out on Insight Timer or here on Youtube:

Mindfulness and the Life-Changing Magic of Opening Up

Focusing on progress with mindfulness practice is not without its risks. It is easy to get sidetracked from the daily work of practice by obsessing about one’s growth and all the benefits practice has bestowed. If taken too far, this could lead to frustration and impatience or, on the other hand, arrogance and malaise.

Even so, it is worthwhile from time to time to consider progress and growth. As a blogger, I have intentionally celebrated milestones whenever possible to maintain my own motivation. I started this blog on my own and, though it has certainly helped me develop community, the daily work of writing can be a lonely business.

A Confluence of Milestone Moments

For this reason, I was fortunate over the last few days to have a confluence of milestone moments. Much like the recent eclipse, the conjunction of all of these things lining up together made me stop and take notice. So what were these milestone moments?

The first one is that this is the 200th post on the blog. As my fav Peloton instructor might remark on a milestone ride, nobody does anything 200 times by accident. This is a meaningful recognition for me since most of my experience with this blog felt like an experiment.

I enjoy building things. I’m meticulous by nature and I am comfortable going step by step. When I launched this blog in December, 2020, though, I didn’t have a clear idea about what I was building. At the time, the blog was an act of celebration and an acknowledgement of how much I enjoy writing.

An image with a quote about milestones and making habits, including mindfulness, a part of your life

Celebrating 200 Blog Posts

All this time, I have managed the blog while raising two girls, managing a law practice, and teaching mindfulness and compassion. Given this context, managing to generate content consistently often felt like a game of keeping a helium balloon in the air. I had to keep tapping away or the balloon would fall.

In fact, for a period I let the ball drop so that I could focus on writing my first book. Getting to 200 posts feels good because I was able to get back in the game. I’ve often been worried that life would happen and my writing would stop. Now I see that my writing is part of my life.

A Blast from the Past

The next item that spurred reflection was not truly a milestone, but instead a blast from my past. In 2020, just a few months before I launched the blog, a woman named Janice Windt profiled me for her blog about working moms. In the post, I shared about my history with postpartum depression and how cultivating self-compassion helped me heal and thrive.

Janice reached out last week to check in because she was reactivating the series. I checked the old post and saw the date–August, 2020. I immediately recognized this as the time just before I became certified as a meditation teacher and launched the blog.

It was pretty fun to catch up with Janice and send her an update on all that has happened in the last four years. Sometimes we don’t know how small steps might affect our lives when we take them. It was nice to have a chance to think about how much can come from putting a little energy and time into a new idea.

An image with a quote about how big change can from putting time and energy small practices like mindfulness

Sharing My Story with Friends

The last milestone moment is my favorite because it was celebrated with friends. I got to deliver a dharma talk for my local meditation community this past weekend. For those who aren’t familiar, this is lecture about Buddhism in community, similar to a homily at mass.

Since I don’t profess to be a teacher of the dharma, this is not something I have ever done before. I usually teach about mindfulness or meditation practice and my talks are usually much more practical. With this talk, I got to share my story about the winding road that led me to become a meditation teacher.

I was nervous to give the talk since I had been only an occasional visitor to the community and wasn’t sure how someone with a variety of influences might be received. As I spoke, though, my fears vanished. The group was engaged and we had such good discussion afterward.

The Call to Help Others

And what do you suppose was the theme of my talk? It was called “Stumbling onto the Bodhisattva Path.” It was inspired by The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shantideva, a classical poem that is well worth a read and in-depth study.

A bodhisattva is someone who trains in mindfulness and compassion in order to alleviate the suffering of others. Many of us who are brought up in the Christian faith may hear this and think it is essentially a saint. The point of my talk is that helping others is more ordinary and available to us all than we may think. It can even come as a surprise on the journey of life.

An image with a quote about opening up to oneself through mindfulness and others can be life-changing

What does this have to do with opening up?

As I was driving home from the talk, I was feeling an emotion that was hard to identify. I left the radio off so I could sit with it without distraction as I drove. There was a sense of connection, satisfaction, and well-being. And the title for this post, a playful rif on Marie Kondo‘s famous work The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, popped into my mind.

Opening up can indeed by life-changing. To an overthinking, perfectionist introvert like me, it can feel like magic. Mediation helped me slowly learn to open up to myself. Then writing and teaching mindfulness helped me learn to open up to others. Both have had a huge impact on my life.

With this post, I am celebrating progress because hard work and dedication deserves a celebration. I won’t let this reflection distract me for too long from my daily work, though. The daily work of meditation, teaching, and writing is where I have found the connection that is my biggest reward.

An image thanking all the readers and followers of the Brilliant Legal Mind blog which offers teachings and resources on mindfulness to lawyers

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