Lawyer Burnout Is Valid Even If You Don’t Have Kids [TFLP274]

You’re single. You don’t have kids. You’re experiencing lawyer burnout at your firm, maybe even dealing with depression or anxiety. But instead of acknowledging how bad things are, you’re telling yourself some version of: “I shouldn’t be struggling this much. Other people have it harder than me.”

Sound familiar?

This topic came up recently on a group call for The Former Lawyer Collab, and it struck Sarah as something that needed to be addressed directly. Multiple lawyers who are single and childless expressed feeling like they didn’t deserve to be as overwhelmed and burnt out as they were because they don’t have the external responsibilities that come with having kids or a partner.

This is just another way lawyers participate in what Sarah calls the “misery Olympics.” The constant comparison of who has it worse, who deserves to feel bad, who’s allowed to struggle. It’s toxic, and it needs to stop.

The Problem With Comparing Your Struggles

Here’s the thing about lawyer burnout: it’s not a competition. Whether you’re as miserable as someone else has basically no bearing on what your level of misery can, should, or ought to be. At a certain point, misery is misery.

Your mental health, your feelings, the stress response that gets created in your body when you’re in a toxic work environment—these things aren’t meaningful to compare against other people’s experiences. Your nervous system doesn’t care about your relationship status or whether you have kids. It only cares whether there are metaphorical lions in your environment.

If you’re in a toxic workplace, your nervous system is going to respond to that toxicity regardless of what else is or isn’t happening in your life. You can’t logic yourself out of feeling the effects of a stressful work environment by telling yourself that someone else has more responsibilities than you do.

The Reality of Being Single and Childless in Law Firms

Let’s be honest about what actually happens to single, childless lawyers in toxic work environments. Yes, having kids can be an additional stressor. But it’s also very common for the lawyers who don’t have kids to be the ones who get the most work dumped on them.

There’s this assumption that because you don’t have to care for other humans at home, it’s okay to overload you even more than they’re overloading the people who do have families. So this idea that people with kids automatically have more on their plate than you do isn’t necessarily factually accurate.

And if you’re single but would prefer not to be, you’re probably spending time and emotional energy on dating, maintaining friendships, and building the support systems that people in relationships might take for granted. If you are single and want to stay that way, you still deserve to have a life outside of work.

The point is: there’s no configuration of social and relational characteristics that makes you less deserving of feeling how you feel. You’re a human being. You’re allowed to be burnt out even if you’re wealthy and have zero personal obligations to anyone.

Why We Do This to Ourselves

As lawyers, especially high-achieving lawyers who ended up in prestigious jobs, we’re conditioned to be extremely hard on ourselves. We focus more on what we haven’t done or what we’re not doing perfectly than on what we’re doing well. We’re perfectionists who don’t necessarily treat our own feelings as valid.

Our brains are constantly looking for reasons to tell us we’re not allowed to feel how we feel. “Do I deserve to feel this way? Is it rational? Would someone else in my position feel this way?” All of that questioning is essentially our way of gaslighting ourselves.

This leads to thinking that if you’re struggling, it’s because there’s some moral weakness in you. That you can’t hack it. That it’s an indication of your own failure rather than recognition that you’re in an environment that might as well be designed to make your mental health suffer.

Your Nervous System Doesn’t Care About Your Logic

You need to understand this, you do not have control over most of the way your nervous system responds and processes stress. The idea that you should somehow be less affected by a toxic work environment because of external factors completely ignores how your body actually works.

Your nervous system is asking one question: “Are there lions or are there not lions?” If there are metaphorical lions in your workplace, it doesn’t matter what your home life looks like. Your body is going to respond to that threat regardless of whether you have kids, a partner, or any other responsibilities.

Your burnout is just as valid as anyone else’s. Your mental health is just as valid as anyone else’s. Your mental health struggles are just as real as anyone else’s.

Stop Gaslighting Yourself

If you’re someone who is single or childless or both and you use those facts to make yourself feel like you shouldn’t be struggling as much as you are, just stop. It’s not fair, logical, or rational.

This is honestly a learned behavior that you’ve internalized to force yourself to continue doing things that aren’t good for you because of external expectations about what you should be able to handle. But your feelings about your work environment are valid regardless of what your life looks like outside of work.

You don’t know what’s really going on for other people. There are lots of ways people deal with toxic work experiences that aren’t good or healthy, and you may not see all of those coping mechanisms. But more importantly, it doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing or how they’re handling things.

Getting the Help You Deserve

If you’re struggling with lawyer burnout, depression, or anxiety, please get help. Go to therapy. You deserve it, and you deserve to be mentally well. If therapy feels like too much right now, at least go to your regular doctor and say “things are not good.”

If you find yourself dismissing your feelings because you think you don’t have it as hard as other people, that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s worth working through with a therapist. Tell them: “I’m struggling, I’m super burnt out, but I don’t feel like I deserve to feel this way because of XYZ.”

And if you’re ready to explore what else might be possible beyond your current situation, that’s what The Former Lawyer Collab is designed for. It’s for lawyers who know they don’t want to be doing what they’re doing but need help figuring out what comes next.

The Bottom Line

You’re allowed to feel what you feel. You’re allowed to be overwhelmed, burnt out, and ready for something different regardless of your relationship status or whether you have kids. Your feelings are not up for debate or comparison.

Being in a toxic work environment affects everyone differently, but it affects everyone. Your experience is valid. Your struggle is real. And you deserve better than a job that’s slowly destroying your mental health, regardless of what your life looks like outside of that job.

Stop participating in the misery Olympics. Start taking your own feelings seriously. And remember: there’s no prize for suffering the most while pretending you’re fine.

Ready to take your feelings seriously and explore your options? Download the free guide First Steps to Leaving the Law and start figuring out what you actually want instead of what you think you should be able to handle.

Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

I want to talk about a really important topic today that actually came up on the last group call that we had for the Collab.

If you know about the Collab, it's my program for lawyers that self-pace, that they can join at any time, that has a community component, and also a framework curriculum that people walk through to go from, "I don't know what I want to do," to, "Oh, here's what I want to do and here's how I target that." So there's the curriculum and also this library of panels that I have hosted with different former lawyers who have gone into different fields.

Then there's also a community component on Circle where you can talk to the other lawyers in the Collab. Then once a month, I host a group call that anyone can come to on Zoom and get advice, talk about their progress, all sorts of things, sometimes just be like, "This thing happened and it's so ridiculous and I need to talk to other lawyers who get it."

So, of course, a huge topic on the calls, on the podcast in general, in the entire legal profession is the topic of burnout, which we've talked about many times in the podcast before. Burnout is a real thing. Burnout is serious. It is not just, "Oh, I'm feeling tired today."

It is something that can often overlap with clinical depression and have a lot of similar markers of clinical depression or clinical anxiety. It's, of course, a huge, huge problem in the legal profession, especially amongst lawyers in law firms.

So full disclosure, if you've listened to the podcast at all, you know I am married and I have two kids. So that's my social location. I've also been pretty open on the podcast about the fact that for me, especially having young kids—babies and toddlers—was not easy in any way.

I love my kids to absolute pieces but also, parenting young kids can be very challenging depending on all sorts of things. So it definitely comes up in the podcast. When I'm recording this, I recently had a conversation with Dan Lemon, who is a member of the Collab, about his experience going from big law to a family law practice.

One of the things he talked about quite a bit was the role that being a dad played in that decision. So it definitely comes up, right? Because if you're a lawyer with kids, it just is part of it, right? It's part of the whole thing. In the same way that if you're a lawyer with family members or close friends that you are responsible for in some way, it also comes up.

But the thing that I think can be very toxic for all of us as lawyers is that we are so often looking for why we don’t deserve to feel how we feel. If we're high achievers who got on the law track because it was like, "This is a good idea, and achieving is a thing, and doing a prestigious job is what I'm supposed to be doing," etc., etc., most people like that are also extremely hard on themselves.

Most people like that are often going to focus more on what they haven’t done or what they’re not doing 100% correctly than on the things that they're doing well. And for a lot of different reasons, if you are someone who's a perfectionist, who has that kind of personality, you're also pretty likely to be someone who doesn’t necessarily treat your own feelings as valid.

There tends to be a lot of, "Do I deserve to feel this way? Is it rational to feel this way? Would someone else in my same position feel this way? Or would someone else in general, even if they weren’t in my same position, feel this way?" All of that is essentially our brains looking for reasons to tell us that we're not allowed to feel how we feel.

This ends up in all sorts of things, like people feeling like, "Well, they're the only one who hates practicing in the way that they do, and it’s not because it’s just not a good fit, it’s because there’s some sort of moral weakness in them. They can’t hack it." It’s some sort of indication of their own failure, basically.

So anyway, this is sort of the background, the backdrop, to this specific topic, which is: we were talking about the fact that there are a number of people in the Collab—also just lawyers in general—who are single and don’t have kids and are struggling and are, you know, burnt out, may or may not be clinically depressed, may or may not have clinical anxiety.

This is your weekly plug for please go to therapy because you deserve it and you deserve to be mentally well. If you're working in a lot of these environments, they might as well be designed to make your mental health not good. So yes, therapy, therapy.

Or even if that’s too much, just go to your regular doctor and say, "Things are not good." The point I'm trying to make is that several different people expressed this sense of, "Well, I’m definitely burned out. I’m definitely struggling. I’m definitely having a super hard time because I’m working in this environment that is super, super toxic. It is not hospitable to human life. But I don’t have kids. I don’t have a partner necessarily. So I don’t have a lot of..." the sense is like, "I don’t have a lot of external responsibilities. I don’t have as many external responsibilities as people who do have kids and a partner, and so I’m just that much more undeserving of feeling overwhelmed and burnt out."

The fact that multiple people expressed having this feeling made me feel like I should talk about it on the podcast because I think it is just one of the many ways that we as lawyers compete in the misery Olympics.

Like, "Oh, well, I’m miserable but I shouldn’t be, or I’m not as miserable as this other person, therefore my misery is completely invalid and I should just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist."

That is not helpful, or right, or really anything, because the reality is that your mental health, your feelings, the feelings that are created in your body by the stressful situations that you are put in in your job, those things, it’s not meaningful to compare them against other people.

Whether you are as miserable, which I would argue whether or not you have kids or a partner has basically no bearing on what your level of misery can, should, or ought to be, because at a certain point, misery is misery.

But anyway, regardless of whatever factors, whatever things may be true about you, whatever characteristics are true, whatever your social location is, whatever your relationship status, whether or not you're a parent—all of this stuff—it doesn't matter.

By "it doesn't matter," I don't mean people in your life don't matter, obviously people matter. I mean that you are allowed to be burnt out even if you are ridiculously wealthy and have zero personal obligations to any person.

There is no configuration of social and relational characteristics that makes you not a human being, which I feel like is a very common theme on this podcast, but you are a human. You are a human. And if you're in a toxic work environment, or even just a not-great industry in terms of its environment, you deserve to feel how you feel.

If you're someone who is single, or even if you're not single, if you're someone who doesn’t have kids, and you’re someone who uses either or both of those facts to make yourself feel bad because you "shouldn’t be as overwhelmed as X and such person over there because they have kids and you don’t" or whatever, you should stop. You should stop.

And if you can’t, then that is a really, really good thing to take to therapy and say to your therapist, "Listen, I’m struggling. I am super burnt out. This is the kind of thing I’m experiencing. But I don’t feel like I deserve to feel this way because XYZ," or "I’m not able to hold it together in the same way that these other people are," blah blah blah.

Yeah, that is something that is very worthwhile to work through with a therapist.

And also, I think there are a couple important things in addition just to think about if you're someone who is single and/or childless, and you find yourself thinking about yourself this way, or dismissing your feelings this way, judging yourself this way, which, to be clear, I’m not saying everyone in this position does this, I’m just saying that it is not uncommon.

So if you're like, "I'm single and childless and it's great and I am super miserable and I completely own my misery," then seriously, more power to you. That is wonderful. And there are other things that you can work on. And woohoo! That sounds sarcastic. It's not sarcastic.

Anyway, I think that the other thing that is really important to remember is that, yes, having kids, for example, can be a big additional stressor. On the other hand, I think anyone who doesn't have kids will tell you that in these environments that are really stressful, it is very common that the person or the people who end up getting work dumped on them the most are the ones who don't have kids.

Because there's a sense of, "Well, you don't have to care for other humans, so therefore it's okay for us to overload you even more than we're overloading these people who do have other humans that they're caring for in their home." So one, I think that this sense of, "Well, if someone has kids, they just automatically have more on their plate than I do," is not necessarily completely factually accurate.

But also, I think if you're in a position where you are single, it's kind of a similar thing. Yes, there is an element of if you are in a relationship and you want it to be good, it takes time, and you have to interact with the person and be in their life and have time for them. And so if you're single, then that doesn't necessarily happen.

However, one, if you're single but you're not necessarily interested in being single, there are other things that you are spending your time on that are at least as much time and emotional energy as someone who's in a relationship. If someone is in a relationship and their partner or partners are supportive, on the whole, even though in certain ways that might create more stress or pressure, in a lot of ways it actually makes it easier to tolerate these types of environments.

So again, I'm not saying here like, it's good to be single, it's bad to be single, it's good to have kids, it's bad to have kids. I think that whatever is whatever, and whatever you want to be doing or want your life to look like is incredibly valid. I do not think that someone who has kids has it more difficult than someone who doesn't have kids, et cetera, et cetera.

But I do think that all of these things are things that we often use as lawyers to flagellate ourselves—to self-flagellate—because we're always looking for the ways to make ourselves feel bad and to feel like we don't deserve to feel the feelings that we have. So if that's you, if you're someone who is single and/or childless, and you've ever used those facts to make yourself feel like, "I shouldn't be having as hard a time as I am. I don't deserve to have a hard time if these other people don't seem to be having a hard time,"

one, just remember, you do not know what's going on for people. There are a lot of ways that people deal with a toxic work experience that are not good or healthy, and you may or may not see all of those. But also, just like, you do deserve to have the feelings that you have about the experience that you're having.

And keep in mind when we're talking about feelings, I'm not talking about just emotions, in the sense of "I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm angry." I mean, those are things, I did that in kind of a tone, but those are feelings. But a lot of times what we're talking about is: what is your literal nervous system? How is your nervous system reacting to your environment?

You do not have control over most of the way that your nervous system responds, processes, et cetera. So this whole idea that you should somehow not be as affected because of these external factors, your nervous system does not care. It's not like, "Oh, well, I have it easier in XYZ way, so now I'm not going to be triggered and go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn."

That's not a thing that's going to happen because you're a human and you have a nervous system, and your nervous system is the nervous system that you have. Believe me, I know it's hard to accept that because I've had to accept that, and my nervous system is, you know, real super special. Could be more even-keeled.

But your nervous system is what it is. You're not going to logic yourself out of feeling the feelings that being in a toxic, stressful work environment creates by being like, "But so-and-so other person has this other horrible life event going on or this thing or this obligation or this..." and so I should—your nervous system is like, "Are there lions or are there not lions?"

And if there are metaphorical lions, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Those other factors do not matter, and your burnout is just as valid as anyone else's. Your mental health is just as valid as anyone else's. Your mental health struggles are just as real as anyone else's.

And basically just stop gaslighting yourself, is what I'm saying. If you're someone who is single or childless or both and uses that to make yourself feel like you shouldn't be struggling, just don't do that. Don't do that because that is not fair or logical or rational.

It is honestly a learned behavior that we have internalized for lots of different reasons in order to force ourselves to continue doing things that are not good for us or that we don't like because of some sort of external factors. That was a bit of a long rant today, but I just think these are really important things to talk about because it's so hard in these spaces to just be able to feel what you feel and think it's okay to feel what you feel, let alone to actually let it guide your career decisions.

That's all for me today. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you next week.

Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.