We accept suffering as normal.

We believe in conflict as necessary.

We carry pain as if it were part of who we are.

But it is not.

These emotions are symptoms, not our true self.

Beneath all the layers of fear, we are love. We are freedom. We are life itself.

To heal is to see clearly again.

To awaken is to choose a different dream.

—Don Miguel Ruiz¹

My friend Kim, a 35-year veteran attorney in Miami, recalled to me a stage in her legal career when the normal workday ended in the bar downstairs. She said, “You had to wash out the work with a few glasses of Scotch before you could handle going home.” She recounted the conversations as well. When colleagues asked each other how they were or how the day was, the answer was always the same: “So busy... SO busy... SO stressed...” Long hours and crushing stress were both the social currency and a badge of honor. She said the attitude was, “If you’re not suffering, are you even doing it right?”

Many attorneys live in a near-constant state of stress, tension, and self-criticism. It’s not just the nature of the work—it’s the mindset they’ve learned to embody.² Over time, they can become addicted to the cycle of rumination and dissatisfaction. Internal chaos is then equated with high performance, and in moments when peace may arise, we don’t trust it.

“We are addicted to our suffering, and like the scorpion that stings itself over and over again, we are punishing ourselves with the same story over and over.”

—Don Jose Ruiz³

Though it is overshadowed by substance addiction, emotional addictions, like the addiction to suffering, also have a profound impact on our well-being.

Every emotion, positive or negative, produces a combination of hormones and neurotransmitters in our brains that then circulate through the body. With repeated and frequent exposures, no different than nicotine or alcohol, that chemistry of emotions is very addictive. Our body and mind crave that familiar cocktail, and for many of us, those frequented emotions are stress, guilt, and overwhelm.⁴

Being habituated to negative emotions can also cause us to feel untrusting of positive emotions such as peace or ease. If it’s not experiencing stress, the brain sounds an alarm that something must be wrong. A form of cynicism is born here. We get so addicted to negative emotions that just seeing more positive words like love, gratitude, or kindness creates a feeling of aversion.⁵

Imagine getting into bed after a long day: You lie down, your body relaxes, your stress hormones ease, and your brain panics! In the other version of this, people fall asleep from sheer exhaustion quickly but then wake up a few short hours later to a brain that will not turn off. This is every night for many people. Any time there is quiet, rumination steps in. You replay the day, difficult conversations, that stupid thing you said in 9th grade, the thing you wish you’d said during the 2 o’clock meeting... It’s unrelenting.

Think about rumination in the context of addiction: The present moment is calm, but your body craves that hit of stress hormones, so it recreates emotions of the past to produce those chemicals. In those few precious quiet moments of our day, we torture ourselves by reliving the traumatic and stressful moments of the past—over and over again.

Rumination is a particular problem for lawyers because critically thinking about a situation from every angle repeatedly is a part of the job. It’s not just any brain recreating the stress; it’s a brain that is very highly trained to recreate events. Lawyers are super ruminators!⁶

The first step in breaking the cycle of emotional addiction is the same as it is for any other addiction: being aware that you have a problem. Awareness is the first step to emotional freedom. We must develop the habit of catching the behavior as we are doing it, and then as we grow this skill, we catch it before we do it. We can then stop the rumination and redirect our brain to the present moment.⁷ Meditation practice is a scientifically proven way to train both awareness and presence. We become more aware of the patterns in our minds, interrupt them, and create space to replace them with something less negative.

Meditation is not the absence of thought. Meditation, in practice, is drifting between thought and an object of focus, most commonly your breath. It is not passive. It is a continuous effort to train your brain to return from distraction to the object of focus.⁸ Here’s a simple technique to start a practice:

1. Set a timer. Start with 5 minutes.
2. Get comfortable. There is no right position; just be comfortable.
3. Rest your attention on your breath. Feel it come in; feel it go out.
4. As you breathe in, count to eight quietly in your mind.
5. As you breathe out, count to eight quietly in your mind.
6. When you notice you have drifted off to thoughts or distractions, drift back to counting your breath.
7. When the timer sounds, you’re done! Do this daily, and notice your awareness shift over time.

Outside of daily meditation practice, when you catch yourself ruminating on negative thoughts, emotions, or events, make an active effort to stop. Get up and go for a walk, even if it’s just down the hall and back. Replace the repeating story with something else—as you inhale, say, “Breathe in,” and as you exhale, say, “Breathe out.” Do that repeatedly until the story stops trying to surface.

When you catch yourself in rumination, stop and consider the present moment: What is actually happening right now? In the present moment, when you are ruminating on negativity, what you will find most often is that there is not anything negative actually happening. Everything is usually quite fine. Ram Dass gave me my favorite mantra for these moments: “This moment is perfect.”⁹ Instead of replaying that negative moment and poisoning your body with stress hormones, repeat the phrase, “This moment is perfect” in your mind.

Stress isn’t a badge of honor, and suffering isn’t the price of success. The habit of suffering is strong, but awareness is stronger. Each time we notice, we are free to choose again. With practice, we can return to what was always waiting beneath the noise— presence, peace, and the reminder that this moment is perfect.