Montana Lawyer April/May 2024

PRACTICING WELL

WINDOW OF TOLERANCE MERI ALTHAUSER

Happy Spring/Summer Montana Lawyers! I hope this message finds you about ready to leave your desk and enjoy some sunshine. At a recent event, a question came up that made me want to connect some dots about why being intentional about mental health is important. I realize I’ve told you a lot about how to care for your mental health, but not exactly why you should care at all about deliberately deploying those skills! To start, a little bit of context: First, when it comes to stress, just the right amount is helpful to make sure you’re activated enough to be effective. You can imagine how unconvincing you would be if you were so relaxed that you acted like everything around you was a snooze-fest, let’s call stress-free feeling this the “yellow zone.” With your nerves in the yellow zone you might seem bored, uninteresting, or make mistakes in your overly-relaxed state. On the other hand, if you have too much stress you might be over-activated and you will tip into the “red zone.” In the red zone you might be yelling, angry, easily trig gered by minor issues, and not perform ing well. Right in the middle your nerves will be in the “green zone”, with enough stress to create optimal awareness and agility, but not so much you feel over whelmed. This is called the performance pressure curve. Your performance is best at the middle of a nice bell curve when pressure or stress is just high enough that you’re on point and in the green. Next, you all have a “window of toler ance.” In terms of stress, this has to do with the amount of stressors you can face (that can fly in your window!) and still maintain composure and perform well in the green zone. At a certain point, the amount of stress is too much and you can no longer tolerate it- so you tip in to the red zone. Everyone’s window of tolerance is different. We all know folks who might be thrown into a tailspin by a broken stapler, compared to folks who could watch people fight in their living room and then calmly cool things off

with grace and good humor. We’ve all probably had mentors who always know the right thing to say and seem impres sively unflappable with a panoramic win dow of tolerance. Your window of toler ance probably changes from day to day and over time. While last Monday I had a “DO NOT DISTURB OR ELSE” sign on my door, knowing that the slightest question would risk mental catastro phe- today, the door is open and chaos is welcome because I’m feeling pretty good! And my window of tolerance for conflict certainly changed from graduation day in 2011 to 42-year-old me in 2024! So after these concepts were ex plained to my group a question was posed: “But Meri… aren’t we just signing up to live in the red zone from now on?? Isn’t that what being an attorney is? Don’t we just have to learn to live with it???” Lots of “yeah’s” murmured from around the room…was the jig up? Is this the harsh truth? I imagined the meme on the internet of a cartoon dog sipping coffee in a burning building saying “yah, everything’s fine!”… #Lawyerlife! What do you think? Do you think lawyers just need to learn to deal? Some just can’t make the grade? While some attorneys would still agree that you can either hack it or you can’t, it made me realize that I haven’t entirely been connecting the dots be tween mental health skills (like building resilience, making habits, learning to deal with difficult situations, emotional support animals and all of the other top ics that I’ve written about) and mental health! Caring for your mental health is like building a muscle, just like build ing muscle at the gym. Put another way, practicing self-care is like taking a vac cine against stress. When you practice regular self-care you will experience less of a stress reaction when faced with oth erwise stressful triggers. Your window of tolerance will grow and with practice, either by practicing your difficult-peo ple-skills or by practicing self-care after stress occurs, the same thing that would

have put you in the red zone will later be tolerated just fine in the green zone. Just like you can practice cross-examination, you can practice tolerating stress and get better at it! Think of all the things you can do with ease now that would have totally stressed you out years ago: last minute hearings, weak arguments, difficult clients, HR issues, planning events, and so on! While that window of tolerance might naturally expand with time, when you’re deliberate about car ing for yourself and managing stress, the window will grow larger, faster. And a word of caution, if your win dow of tolerance is growing but you’re using less positive coping mechanisms to force those shutters open, be careful about the unintended consequences. Forcing your way through stressful events using alcohol, zoning out with distraction, or negative self-talk may help you accomplish your goal in the short term, but those strategies will cause more damage than good in the end. They may have their place from time to time, but focus on positive coping to become that unflappable attorney you’ve admired. So no, attorneys of Montana, you didn’t sign up to live in the red zone. You don’t have to just get by and deal with it. You can hack it. If you’re strate gic about prioritizing your mental health, you’ll soon be as cool as a cucumber in all of those more stressful settings.

Meri Althauser is an attorney of over 10 years practicing family law and mediation in Missoula. Her practice focuses on collaboration and solution finding for her clients and their fami lies. She also offers consulting services in workplace wellness, with a certifica tion as a Workplace Wellness Specialist through the National Wellness Institute and as a Resilience and Thriving Facilitator through Organizational Wellness and Learning Systems.

20 MONTANA LAWYER

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