What Happens After We Adapt?

One of the things I enjoy about reading outside psychology is that people often ask questions I hadn't thought to ask myself. Alexandra Michel's paper had exactly that effect on me. By the time I came across her research, I'd spent months thinking about professional culture, identity and adaptation, largely through the lens of the conversations we'd been having with lawyers. Michel approached the subject from an entirely different direction, yet somehow arrived in a very similar place.

Her study, published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2011, followed a group of investment bankers over a period of nine years (Michel, 2011). The length of the study is important because it allowed her to observe something that shorter pieces of research rarely capture. Most studies provide a snapshot of people's experiences at a particular point in time. Michel was able to watch those experiences evolve. She saw young professionals entering organisations full of enthusiasm, confidence and ambition, and she watched how their relationship with work gradually changed as the years passed.

That long view immediately appealed to me because it reflects something I've become increasingly aware of in the legal profession. The changes lawyers describe rarely happen quickly. Nobody wakes up one morning and discovers they have become consumed by work. Instead, careers seem to evolve through hundreds of small adjustments, each of which appears entirely reasonable at the time. Looking back, those adjustments form a recognisable pattern. Living through them, however, they are almost impossible to see.

One of Michel's earliest observations is that the bankers did not initially experience the demands of the organisation as oppressive. If anything, they embraced them. They wanted to succeed, they wanted to belong and they wanted to prove that they deserved to be there. Long hours were interpreted as opportunities rather than burdens. Working through the night demonstrated commitment. Missing meals or sacrificing weekends became evidence that they could cope with the demands of an elite environment.

That shouldn't surprise us. Most high performers are not forced into excellence against their will. They choose demanding environments because they enjoy challenge and derive satisfaction from doing difficult things well. The young athletes I worked with were rarely looking for an easier training programme. They wanted coaches who would stretch them. In much the same way, very few lawyers enter commercial practice hoping for a quiet life. Challenge is part of the attraction.

The interesting question is not why ambitious people work hard. The interesting question is what happens when hard work gradually becomes the lens through which they begin to understand themselves.

Michel's answer is both simple and profound.

She argues that, over time, the body itself becomes drawn into the process of organisational socialisation. At first glance that sounds like an unusual claim because we tend to think about organisations influencing beliefs, attitudes or behaviour rather than bodily experience. Yet, the more I reflected on her observations, the more I realised that she was describing something many professionals recognise without necessarily having the language to explain it.

When we first become tired, we notice tiredness.

When we first begin working very long hours, we notice the effect.

When stress levels increase, we usually recognise that something feels different.

Those internal signals are part of the body's normal regulatory system. They provide information about our current state and, under ordinary circumstances, help us decide when to rest, eat, recover or seek support. Michel observed that, over time, many of the bankers she studied became progressively less responsive to those signals. Fatigue was no longer interpreted as information suggesting recovery might be needed. Instead, it became something to overcome. Hunger became something that could wait. Physical discomfort became an inconvenience rather than feedback.

I found that observation particularly interesting because Michel does not portray this as recklessness or poor judgement. Quite the opposite. The professionals she observed were adapting successfully to the demands of the environment in which they worked. The organisation rewarded endurance, responsiveness and commitment, and they became increasingly capable of delivering all three. From the perspective of the firm, adaptation initially looked like success.

That is an important point because it challenges the way we often think about resilience. There is a tendency to imagine resilience as an almost limitless capacity to tolerate adversity. Michel's work suggests something more complicated. The professionals she studied became remarkably resilient in the conventional sense of the word. They tolerated workloads that would have seemed impossible only a few years earlier. They adapted to patterns of work that most people would find unsustainable. Their ability to keep going was, in many respects, extraordinary.

The question Michel leaves us with is whether adaptation always remains adaptive.

That may sound like a play on words, but I think it captures something important. Adaptation is usually described as a positive quality because it allows us to cope with changing circumstances. Yet adaptation itself is neutral. It simply means that we become accustomed to repeated experiences. If those experiences are healthy, adaptation serves us well. If they are not, adaptation can quietly disguise changes that deserve our attention.

As I read Michel's paper, I found myself thinking back to something a solicitor said during one of our interviews. We had been talking about recovery and I asked when she first realised that she had become exhausted. She smiled for a moment before saying, "The truth is, I didn't realise I was exhausted. I thought I was just busy." That sentence has stayed with me because it captures the essence of adaptation. Exhaustion had become so familiar that it no longer stood out as something unusual. It had simply become the background against which the rest of life was being lived.

Michel describes a remarkably similar process. The professionals she observed gradually stopped experiencing bodily signals as meaningful sources of information. The body became something that needed to keep pace with professional demands rather than something that might occasionally question them. This wasn't because they consciously rejected their physical needs. Rather, they had become so accustomed to overriding those needs that doing so no longer required conscious thought.

Reading those observations, I found myself wondering whether this is one of the hidden costs of expertise. The better we become at functioning under pressure, the easier it may become to overlook the signals that pressure is beginning to change us. Elite performers often pride themselves on being able to continue when others would stop. That quality undoubtedly contributes to success. The difficulty is that the same capacity can make it surprisingly difficult to recognise the point at which persistence has ceased to be helpful.

Michel's study becomes particularly powerful because it doesn't end there. As the years passed, the bodies of many participants began demanding attention in ways that could no longer be ignored. Persistent fatigue, disrupted sleep, pain and other physical symptoms gradually interrupted the assumptions that had guided their working lives. It is at this point that Michel introduces the idea of transcending socialisation. Some participants began to question ways of working that had previously seemed entirely normal. The body, in effect, became a source of knowledge rather than simply something to manage.

I found that idea fascinating because it suggests that the body is not merely a passive recipient of organisational demands. It can also become the catalyst for re-evaluating them.

That, I think, is where Michel's work leaves us. She has shown us what adaptation looks like over nearly a decade. The question she leaves hanging is why some people eventually begin listening to those bodily signals while others continue overriding them. That feels less like a question about organisational behaviour and more like a question about psychology.

It is also, I think, the point at which LegalPsych begins to enter the conversation.

Reference

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.