Stress causes brain damage. Unrelenting stress is an essential feature of legal education and legal practice, and chronic stress hurts the brain. Lawyers suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression than the rest of the population and they rank fourth in professions with the highest number of suicides. Lawyers’ anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are likely linked to overwork and exposure to toxic chronic stress. Anxiety and depression can cause changes in the brain that are related to an overactive fight-or-flight stress response system. Lawyer languishing, a state of incomplete mental health, may be a precursor to lawyer’s anxiety or depression. The rat-fumbling researcher Hans Seyle noticed that the discomfort his lab rats suffered made them sick. He used the term stress to describe the general unpleasantness his rats experienced when he routinely dropped, chased, and recaptured them during his experiments. The culture of his lab was making his rats sick. When law school or legal practice cultures subject students or lawyers to a broad array of incessant stressors; the general unpleasantness is prone to make them physically and emotionally sick; and it damages their brain.

Lea Pulkkinen, born in Finland in 1939, is Emerita Professor of Psychology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). She is best known for creating the ongoing Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (JLSPSD). The study was specifically intended to test the hypothesis that the human brain allows for more variation in behavior than the simple ‘fight or flight’ response observed in animal studies of aggression. She further hypothesized that humans’ capacity for cognitive control over emotional behavior was the key factor involved in controlling aggressive behavior. These hypotheses led her to devise an impulse control model to depict behavioral alternatives, which she tested with teacher and peer ratings of aggressive and nonaggressive behaviors. Forty years later, the JLSPSD revealed the long-term significance of self-regulation for socio-emotional behavior. Results from the study showed that aggressive behavior during childhood tends to be associated with other types of under-controlled behavior during adulthood. On the other hand, ‘constructive’ behavior in childhood tends to lead to positive social relations, mental health, and successful integration in the work force.