We are inches away from back to school season, and if you’re a parent, you know what that means:
**screaming internally**
Back to school season can be nice for parents that need to focus on work or have an easier time managing their day to day lives. But it also means late nights doing homework, lots and lots of errands, kids that are likely going to be going through their own challenges, and so much more.
It is, for many of us, a stressful time. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
Back to school season is also a great time to consider connecting with a therapist you can talk to, to make this after school season both easier on you and easier on your children.
The Annual Stresses of School Build Up
It’s important for parents to understand that seasonal stresses, like back to school season, are not harmless. When we’re stressed every year for a significant portion of the year, those stresses can affect our short and long term mental health. They make us more tense, increase our anxiety, make it harder to enjoy the things we used to enjoy, and impact our relationships.
Some years we might be able to overcome it as things settle down. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if something else goes wrong during back to school season, or it puts added stress on your marriage, or your child is showing more symptoms of ADHD or learning difficulties and needs extra attention?
Many, many issues can arise, and when they do, it becomes something that can lead to further mental health challenges if you don’t have someone to talk to.
Therapists for Adults During September and October
Therapists are not *just* for back to school season. Yet this time period is often one where many parents realize they could use some ongoing mental health support.
Still, because it is such a busy season, it is also not a time when many people seek it out. This school year, it is best for your mental health and wellness to strongly consider speaking with a therapist ready to address your current AND ongoing challenges, help you work through your feelings, and provide you with help for stress, depression, and anxiety so that you can manage this back to school season (and the next one, and the one after that).
If you find that your stress levels are high this back to school season, and you’d like to finally address it, contact Flourish Psychology, today. We’re here to help you better manage your mental health and get the support you need to thrive this year and the next.
How Fear of a Climate Change Future Can Cause Couples to Struggle to Decide Whether to Have Children
This past month has been the hottest recorded global temperature in recorded history. But that is not new. The past few years have seen records broken one after another. It’s understandable for this to cause people distress, especially when most reports about the likely future with climate change are fairly grim.
These fears are causing people to alter their lives in preparation for a climate change future, and one of the ways they may do this is by reducing their desire to have children. This, in turn, can affect relationships, happiness levels, and more.
Living to Your Values
Now, the decision to have – or not have- children is uniquely personal, and there is no right or wrong reason. Fears over climate change may be perfectly valid reason, and there is no wrong choice when that choice comes from you and your values.
One of the challenges, however, is determining whether that choice is being affected by other factors, such as anxiety and depression. Many people are experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of climate change. Those conditions affect how a person thinks, how they make decisions, and more.
If you’re struggling with a climate-change related depression, and that is the reason you do not want to have children, then it may be worthwhile to work on that depression first before finalizing that decision. In the end, you may find that it is still very much within your values.
But you also do not want to wake up one day years into the future and regret the decision, either. If your decision was caused by anxiety/depression and not solely by your values and goals, then you may end up with regrets that can affect your mental health in the future. Evaluating how you’re feeling, why, and whether or not there is something worth treating first can thus be advantageous.
How Relationships and the Future Can Be Affected by Climate Change Fears
Similarly, the choice to have children is often one that people engage in as a couple. Partners may not have the same view of the climate or of the world. This is a decision you’ll often want to make together, and it would be harmful and hurtful if it was being influenced by anxiety/depression. It may affect your relationship together in ways that may not be ideal for your long term mental health.
Working with a Therapist
Therapy – either individually or with couples – can be a healthy and productive way to address and identify what your fears are and help you determine what your values are (yourself or you both as a couple). It can help you examine any internal struggles, whether or not you will be comfortable with your decision in the future, and what can be done to reduce anxiety should you ultimately decide that you may want a child but are still struggling with these fears.
Your choice to have children is personal and uniquely yours. But issues like anxiety can also cloud what your “true” self wants. Through therapy, we can determine what you really want, and – if anxiety is affecting your decision – how we can reduce your anxiety so that you can live with fewer regrets. Learn more about our therapy services by contacting Flourish Psychology, today.
aw school trains lawyers to practice law. It teaches case analysis, legal reasoning, courtroom procedure, and the substantive knowledge a competent attorney needs to serve clients. It doesn’t teach how to hire and manage staff, handle payroll, navigate conflict between team members, set operational procedures, or build a functional organization around a legal practice.
Attorneys who open their own firms quickly discover that running a law firm is two jobs. The first is the one they trained for. The second is the one that was never mentioned.
Two Jobs, One Person
The pressure that comes with managing a team on top of practicing law is specific to a professional class that is highly trained in one domain and largely untrained in the other. A managing partner at a litigation firm is responsible for their own cases, their clients’ outcomes, and the operational reality of a business with employees, overhead, deadlines, and the full complexity of a professional organization — all simultaneously.
The legal work is demanding on its own terms. Attorneys deal with a specific kind of stress that comes from operating in a professional world defined by high stakes, adversarial dynamics, and the consistent pressure of win or lose outcomes. Adding the management of a team to that baseline — the personnel decisions, the conflict resolution, the coaching of underperformers, the retention of people who are good at their jobs — produces a load that accumulates in ways that aren’t always visible until they’ve become significant.
Many attorneys manage this for years before acknowledging that it’s affecting them. The professional culture of law doesn’t make it easy to say that something is too much. High achievers in demanding fields tend to absorb more rather than redistribute it — until the absorption capacity runs out.
What Managing a Team Demands Psychologically
Managing people requires a set of skills that are distinct from legal competence and that don’t develop automatically from years of practice. Several specific demands create consistent difficulty for attorneys who are managing teams for the first time or who have been managing without adequate support:
Holding Authority Without Becoming Isolated — Being the person in charge of a team changes the nature of every relationship within that team. Attorneys who were peers with their colleagues before becoming managing partners often find the shift disorienting. The social support that existed in the collegial relationship is no longer available in the same way, and the isolation of leadership in a small firm is real and rarely discussed.
Managing Conflict Between Team Members — Legal training prepares attorneys to manage conflict in an adversarial professional context. Managing interpersonal conflict within a team is a different skill entirely — one that requires emotional attunement, mediation capacity, and the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without defaulting to the analytical framework that serves well in court.
Addressing Underperformance — Giving difficult feedback, managing someone toward improvement, and making the call to let someone go are among the most psychologically demanding tasks in any management role. For attorneys who haven’t had explicit training or mentorship in these areas, each of these situations generates its own anxiety alongside the professional responsibility it represents.
Balancing Delegation with Accountability — The instinct of a high-performing attorney is often to handle things themselves — quickly, correctly, and without the friction of explaining what needs to be done to someone who might not do it the way they would. Delegation requires tolerating a loss of control and a level of imperfection that perfectionism makes genuinely difficult.
The Emotional Labor of Leadership — Being the person who sets the tone, manages the culture, absorbs the concerns of the team, and maintains composure under pressure is a form of emotional labor that has a real cost. It depletes the same resources that the legal work is already drawing on.
Each of these is a legitimate source of stress — not a sign of inadequacy, but a genuine demand that deserves to be addressed rather than absorbed indefinitely.
The Burnout Trajectory
Burnout in attorneys who are also managing practices follows a recognizable pattern. The early stages look like increased irritability, reduced patience with staff, and the creeping sense that the hours aren’t producing the results they should. Energy goes into tasks that feel endless rather than toward work that feels meaningful. The enjoyment of legal work — the thing that made the investment in law school make sense — begins to erode under the weight of management demands that were never chosen and never trained for.
Left unaddressed, that pattern compounds. Anxiety develops around the management role itself — the anticipation of difficult conversations, the preemptive rehearsal of conflicts that haven’t happened yet, the sense that the team is never quite running the way it should and that the fix is always the attorney’s responsibility. Depression follows when the depletion runs deep enough that the motivation that drove the career in the first place has gone quiet.
The burnout trajectory for attorneys managing their own firms is well-documented in the legal profession’s own research. The rates of anxiety and depression among attorneys are significantly higher than in the general population, and attorneys who own and manage practices carry an additional layer of stress that employed attorneys don’t share.
What Helps
Several specific approaches consistently make a meaningful difference for attorneys managing the dual demands of legal practice and team leadership. Working through these with the right support produces more durable results than attempting to implement them in isolation.
Working with a Therapist Who Understands the Professional Context
Therapy for attorneys at Flourish Psychology is provided by therapists who understand the specific professional pressures of legal practice — the culture, the stakes, the particular psychological demands of a profession built around adversarial processes and high-consequence outcomes. Therapists at Flourish have worked with attorneys at every career stage, including attorneys who have completed their own legal training. The work addresses both the legal profession’s specific stressors and the management challenges that come with running a practice.
Building a Team Aligned with Core Values
The composition of the team surrounding a managing attorney has a direct effect on how much management stress that attorney carries. A team whose members work in alignment with the firm’s values, who can be trusted to handle their responsibilities with genuine competence, and who share the professional standards the attorney holds reduces the management burden significantly. The process of assembling that team — defining what the practice actually needs, hiring deliberately, and being willing to make changes when someone isn’t the right fit — is itself a form of investment in the attorney’s own capacity to manage sustainably.
Delegating With Genuine Commitment
Delegation fails when it’s half-hearted — when the attorney delegates a task but continues monitoring it closely, second-guessing the person handling it, or redoing it when it isn’t done exactly as they would have done it. That pattern produces all the friction of management without any of the relief.
The capacity to delegate with genuine trust — to hand something off and let the person handle it, accepting that their approach may differ from yours without that difference constituting a problem — is something perfectionism specifically undermines. Developing it requires both the right team and the kind of psychological work that makes genuine relinquishment of control possible.
Knowing Your Management Style
Managing people effectively requires enough self-awareness to know how you naturally lead — what you do well, where you create friction without intending to, and how your communication style lands with the people reporting to you. Attorneys who lead by the same approach they use in adversarial professional contexts often find that the directness and pressure that serves them in litigation creates problems in a management relationship. Understanding the distinction, and developing the range to shift between them, makes the management role feel less like a constant improvisation.
Bringing in Operational Expertise
Fractional CFOs, operations consultants, and practice managers can absorb significant portions of the business management burden that attorneys aren’t trained for and don’t need to carry alone. The investment in outside operational expertise frees the attorney to focus on legal work — which is both what they’re best at and what generates the most value for the practice — while ensuring that the business side is handled by someone with the right background for it.
Getting Support
The specific combination of professional demands that attorneys managing their own practices carry isn’t something that willpower and efficiency alone resolve. The stress is real, the sources are specific, and they respond to support that addresses both the psychological dimension and the practical one.
Flourish Psychology’s therapy for lawyers provides exactly that — individualized support for the specific pressures of legal practice and the management demands that come with running a firm. Sessions are available in person in Brooklyn and via online therapy throughout New York. Call 917-737-9475 or reach out through the contact page to get started.
But let’s take a step back. What if it isn’t just social media that is affecting your mental health. What if it is the act of being on your phone at all?
Our Phones and Our Day to Day Lives
So many of us find that there is little time in the day to focus on ourselves – to take walks, to spend time with friends, to engage in hobbies, to spend quality time with our partners, and more. We need these activities to be our best selves and stay as psychologically healthy as possible. The problem is that there is just not enough time in the day.
… Or is there?
Most phones keep track of how much screen time you have looking at your phone, and if you review it, you may find that you’re spending anywhere from 2 to 8 hours of the day looking at your phone – out of only 16 hours that we spend awake.
When we spend that much time on our phones, then we’re not taking care of ourselves and we’re losing out on a significant amount of time that could have been available for things that are far more important to us. Even if you use it productively, that time is often seen as wasted, as it does not create memories that will help us through the hard times.
Time spend on your phone can also affect other things as well:
It activates our brain, causing us to feel less tired and potentially not get the sleep we need.
It turns us off to the rest of the world, causing us to look like we’re neglecting our partners or kids.
It prevents us from using our senses, as our phones only activate our eyes.
Studies have even shown that not all screen time is the same. Spending time watching quality television does not cause the same issues that phones do. Phones put your eyes on something in front of you, closing you off to the rest of the world. With television, you can typically hear and see what is going on around you, and interact with the world in positive ways.
What We Do On Our Phones vs Time on Our Phones
We know that what we do on our phones can impact our mental health, especially the time spent on activities like social media. But phones themselves, as a screen, are simply a worse choice for your mental health than many other activities. That is why it is so important to make sure that you unplug, and learn to control any phone addiction or other issues that cause you to feel like you need to be on your phone for a large chunk of the day.
For more information on living your best life, contact Flourish Psychology.
Most of us spend a lot of time working. At minimum 5 hours a week, 8 hours a day, and even more if we include commuting. Work itself is hard, and many of us – in any profession – can find it difficult to go from working all day to feeling happy and comfortable at home. There is a reason that, to address mental health, we often have to discuss the effects that our jobs have on us.
This is especially true, however, in the legal profession, and it is not only because the jobs themselves are fairly high stress. It is also because the legal profession, more than nearly any other profession, is one of the few jobs where a person is faced with black and white thinking – you either win, or you lose.
The Long Term Effects of Win/Loss Thinking
Rarely do we have to think in terms of wins and losses in most of our jobs. Work itself is typically gray area. A landscaper’s job isn’t winning and losing. A therapist’s job isn’t winning and losing. Even doctors do not typically deal with wins and losses every day (though they may have their own stresses related to loss in their profession).
But lawyers are different. Lawyers have to think in terms of winning. They have to look at cases to determine how they can win, and then – when they’re done – they have a peer that will almost literally tell them if they won or lost based on what they put together.
If they go to trial, they have a judge or, potentially, 12 other people that will tell them if they won or lost. Even in cases they win, this type of thinking, where you’re judged on your ability to win or lose, can have long lasting consequences.
This is believed to be why lawyers one of the careers most commonly linked to depression. When a person has black and white, win/loss thinking:
Every loss makes someone a “loser”
Every mistake means you’ve failed.
Every opposing counsel becomes an enemy.
You spend days at a time trying to get the information you need together to “win” a case, and even if you do win, you’re often constantly overthinking your choices and thinking about how someone else may prove you wrong. It is a lot to take on, and it’s something that you keep with you in other areas of your life. When you combine that same style of thinking with the stresses of the profession, it’s easy to see why depression can develop.
Depression, Black and White Thinking, and Therapy
Depression itself is, in many ways, a function of black and white thinking – where someone is either a winner or a loser. When you internalize your failures, you become more prone to thinking negatively about yourself leading to the conditions that can create depression.
Therapy, however, can help address this. Therapists that work with lawyers, like Flourish Psychology, can provide you with mental health tools that can break you out of this win/loss cycle and help you see yourself and the world in ways that are not so psychologically damaging. Through therapy, we can provide you with tools and guidance to get you to feel more comfortable with yourself and better able to function at your job. If you’re looking for a therapist that specializes in working with lawyers and those in high stress positions, contact Flourish Psychology, today.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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