Psychological Battering and the Cost of Becoming Exceptionally Good

There is a moment in many of the interviews we've carried out where the conversation changes.

Up to that point we are usually talking about careers, leadership, workload or the realities of legal practice. Then, almost without noticing, people begin talking about themselves differently. They stop describing what they do and begin describing what they have become. The language changes in subtle ways. Someone tells me they no longer read books because they cannot settle their mind. Another explains that they struggle to watch a film without reaching for their phone to check emails. Somebody else says they have become less patient with their family than they used to be, although they are not entirely sure when that started. Occasionally someone laughs before saying, "I suppose I thought everyone felt like this."

Those comments have stayed with me because they don't sound like stories about stress. They sound like stories about gradual change.

What strikes me most is that nobody describes a single defining event. There is no obvious turning point. Instead, there seems to be an accumulation of experiences that, individually, are entirely understandable. A difficult case here, a demanding client there, another weekend spent preparing, another holiday interrupted, another year in which recovery becomes something postponed rather than protected. None of those experiences would normally concern us in isolation. The profession has always involved periods of exceptional demand. The question is what happens when those periods quietly become the background against which the rest of life is lived.

It was while reflecting on these conversations that I began using the phrase psychological battering.

I should say immediately that this is not a clinical diagnosis, nor is it a term I have found in the academic literature. It is simply a phrase that has helped me describe something I have struggled to capture in other ways. When lawyers have heard it, many have nodded almost instinctively. They tell me it feels like an accurate description of their experience, not because they see themselves as damaged, but because it captures the cumulative effect of years spent operating in environments where sustained vigilance, responsibility and high performance are normal.

The important word is cumulative.

When we think about injury, we often imagine a single event. A ligament ruptures. A bone breaks. The cause is obvious because the moment is obvious. Psychology is rarely like that. Much of the time change occurs through repetition rather than catastrophe. One difficult conversation is manageable. One poor night's sleep is manageable. One demanding week is manageable. Human beings are remarkably capable of coping with individual challenges.

The difficulty comes when those challenges cease to be individual.

They become continuous.

Looking back across Empson's work, Michel's ethnography and the stories emerging from the LegalPsych interviews, I am struck by how often they describe exactly this process, although using different language. Empson shows us cultures in which commitment gradually becomes part of professional identity. Michel demonstrates how years of living within those cultures can change the relationship people have with their own bodies. The lawyers we've spoken to describe something that sits comfortably alongside both observations. They rarely talk about dramatic collapse. Instead, they describe feeling slightly less present, slightly less patient, slightly less able to recover than they once were. The changes are often small enough to ignore, yet persistent enough to reshape daily life.

Perhaps this is where performance psychology has tended to focus on the wrong question.

For many years we have asked how people can perform under pressure. That is, of course, an important question and one that has occupied much of my own career. Elite performers need to function when circumstances are demanding. Barristers cannot choose easier hearings. Surgeons cannot postpone difficult operations because they are feeling mentally fatigued. Athletes cannot always wait until they feel psychologically ready before competition begins.

The ability to perform under pressure matters enormously.

What I now find myself asking is a different question altogether.

How long can somebody continue performing under pressure before the adaptations that initially supported performance begin quietly changing the performer?

That feels like a much richer question because it shifts our attention away from isolated moments of performance and towards entire careers.

One of the unintended consequences of becoming highly skilled at operating under pressure is that we often become highly skilled at overriding internal signals. In the short term this is adaptive. A trial still has to be conducted. A client still needs advice. A negotiation still has to be completed. The ability to set aside discomfort temporarily is one of the qualities that distinguishes experienced professionals from inexperienced ones.

The challenge is that temporary strategies have a habit of becoming permanent habits.

This is where I think Michel's work is particularly thought-provoking. Her participants did not suddenly stop noticing their bodies. They gradually became less attentive to them because organisational success consistently required attention to be directed elsewhere. Reading her observations alongside conversations with lawyers has made me wonder whether something similar happens psychologically. We become increasingly fluent in noticing the needs of clients, colleagues and cases, while becoming rather less fluent in noticing changes within ourselves.

If that is true, then psychological battering is not something that happens to a person.

It is something that gradually happens within a person while they continue functioning perfectly well on the outside.

That distinction feels important because it challenges one of the assumptions that often underpins discussions of mental health in the legal profession. We tend to look for visible signs that somebody is struggling. Yet many of the lawyers who have spoken to us are not visibly struggling at all. They are successful, respected and often performing exceptionally well. The changes they describe are quieter than that. They notice that concentration requires more effort than it once did. They find themselves carrying work mentally long after the working day has finished. They become aware that genuine recovery feels increasingly unfamiliar. None of these experiences necessarily indicates illness. They may, however, tell us something about the cumulative demands of sustaining elite performance over decades rather than months.

This is why I have become increasingly convinced that recovery should not be regarded as the opposite of performance.

It is one of the conditions that makes sustained performance possible.

Elite performers in every domain recover, not because they are weak, but because recovery allows adaptation to remain healthy rather than becoming corrosive. We have understood this in sport for many years. Training stimulates adaptation, but recovery determines whether that adaptation becomes stronger or weaker. Without recovery, even the most talented athlete eventually reaches a point where performance begins to plateau and then decline.

Perhaps the legal profession is beginning to face a similar conversation.

Not because lawyers are less resilient than previous generations, as is sometimes suggested, but because we are starting to recognise that resilience without awareness can become surprisingly costly. The qualities that enable exceptional careers are often the very qualities that make it difficult to recognise when adaptation has gone too far.

If there is one conclusion I have reached from reading Empson, reflecting on Michel and listening to lawyers over the past year, it is that sustainable excellence probably depends upon something much quieter than toughness.

It depends upon retaining the capacity to notice ourselves while we are becoming exceptionally good at noticing everything else.

References

Empson, L. (2017). Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford University Press.

Michel, A. (2011). Transcending Socialization: A Nine-Year Ethnography of the Body's Role in Organizational Control and Knowledge Workers' Transformation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3), 325–368.