Thin-Skinned: Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience and the New Science That Can Help

Practicing law has always had its fair share of stressors. Lawyers are often entrusted with sensitive or high-stakes problems to solve; they often face urgent and inflexible deadlines; they may have to navigate significant values conflicts; and the workload can be overwhelming at times. But in today's environment of escalating change, there's an added source of stress that’s affecting lawyers everywhere: uncertainty.

Uncertainty activates the brain's threat-sensing circuitry. This type of threat response can raise stress and anxiety for anyone. But research over the past thirty-plus years by Dr. Larry Richard shows that lawyers have seven strong but atypical personality traits which help them practice high-quality law, but which make them more vulnerable to the damaging effects of uncertainty.

The most pervasive of these traits is lawyers' low level of Resilience. Resilience is the psychological ability to adapt resourcefully to stress, problems, setbacks, criticism, or crises, and Dr. Richard's data show that most lawyers score lower on this trait than most other people. Fortunately, emerging science in psychology, neuroscience, and related fields over the past two decades has provided antidotes to this problem. In Thin-Skinned, Dr. Richard and his wife, licensed psychologist Dr. D’Arcy Lyness, explain the challenges lawyers face in the legal profession and offer readers four broad evidence-based strategies (including more than 50 different self-improvement practices that any lawyer can deploy). By adopting one or more of these, readers can repair the effects of stress, inoculate themselves against future stressors, and, in the process, build greater well-being, life satisfaction, and workplace effectiveness.

Thin-Skinned is an evidence-based field guide to raising resilience, managing stress, and improving well-being using proven principles of behavioral science.