You were exhausted at 3 p.m. You were exhausted at dinner. You nodded off on the couch twenty minutes ago. Then you got into bed, turned off the light, and your brain opened for business. 

Now you're replaying what you said on the afternoon call, drafting tomorrow's email to the client, wondering whether you double-checked that exhibit, and trying to decode what the partner meant by "let's catch up tomorrow."

Racing thoughts at night usually happen because bedtime is the first quiet moment your brain gets all day, and it uses that moment to catch up. 

If this is a regular part of your life, you're in good company. It's one of the most common reasons people can't fall asleep, and I'd guess nearly every lawyer I've worked with has been through a stretch of it. 

The good news is that there are specific, practical ways to quiet it down. Most of them come from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBT-I, which major medical guidelines recommend as the first treatment for chronic insomnia.

There is a specific kind of sleep complaint I hear more than any other, and it almost always comes with the same disclaimer. "I don’t have trouble falling asleep. I’m out in five minutes. It’s just that I wake up at 3 a.m."

People say this apologetically, as though it disqualifies them from having a real sleep problem. It doesn’t. It might be insomnia and it’s not uncommon with my clients. It also has a specific explanation, which I want to walk through, because once you understand what’s happening at 3 a.m., the whole thing becomes less mysterious and considerably less frightening.

High-functioning anxiety gets missed for a simple reason: every symptom is also a job skill.

Rereading the email four times is thoroughness. Running through the worst version of the meeting the night before is preparation. Checking the document after you already checked it is diligence. Asking a colleague whether something is fine, and then asking a second colleague, is collaboration. None of it looks like a problem, and most of it gets you promoted.

I’d like to describe what depression treatment actually consists of, because I think the vagueness around it does real harm. When you don’t know what happens in the room, “you should probably talk to someone” sounds like a vague instruction to feel better, and vague instructions are extraordinarily easy to postpone. So here is the specific version, including what I’ll ask you and what we’ll do.

When we talk about burnout, most of us picture the depleted version: flat, exhausted, going through the motions, running on nothing. That version is real, and I’ve written elsewhere about the kind of burnout that looks like hitting your billables while feeling absolutely nothing. But there’s a second presentation that gets missed almost entirely, largely because it doesn’t look like someone struggling. It looks like someone being difficult, and that’s a much harder thing to be met with compassion about, including by yourself.

There’s a particular way people talk about their sleep once they’ve been struggling with it for a long time, and I can usually recognize it within the first few minutes of a consultation. It’s apologetic. Someone will list everything they’ve already tried, the blackout curtains and the magnesium and the app with the rain sounds and the rule about no screens after nine that they kept faithfully for eleven days, and then they’ll land on some version of “so I know I’m probably just not being consistent enough.” They say it the way you’d confess to skipping the gym.

I used to think depression had a look. Tears, a darkened room, a person who couldn't get out of bed. Then I went to law school, started practicing, and later sat across from dozens of lawyers in my therapy office, and I learned how wrong that picture was. The most depressed people I've met were often the ones billing the most hours, closing the biggest deals, and answering email at 11 p.m. with crisp, competent sentences. Nothing in their work suggested anything was wrong. That was exactly the problem.

I've spent years working with lawyers, and I used to be one, so I want to talk plainly about something the profession is very good at not naming: high-functioning depression. The kind that never shows up in your billables, never makes you miss a filing, and never gives anyone a reason to worry. The kind that hides precisely because you're so good at your job.

If you’re a lawyer quietly wondering whether you still want to do this, you’re not alone and you aren’t broken. You’re asking a question that a significant number of lawyers are asking right now and that almost none of them are saying out loud.

Therapy is one of the places where you can say it out loud. Here’s what that looks like and why it helps.

If you are a lawyer who functions well under pressure, who delivers consistently and never drops the ball, you’re probably the last person in your firm who would be described as someone with anxiety. That’s exactly the problem.

Anxiety in lawyers is not rare. It is not a sign of weakness, a personality flaw, or proof that you chose the wrong career. It is, by most measures, one of the most predictable outcomes of a profession that selects for perfectionism, rewards hypervigilance, and treats rest as a liability.

What makes it hard to catch is that lawyers are exceptional at functioning through it. You can be genuinely anxious, clinically anxious, and still make partner. Still win cases. Still look, from the outside, completely fine. That's not resilience. That's a very expensive coping mechanism with a long lag time before it breaks down.

If you've been wondering whether what you're carrying is stress or something more, this is worth reading carefully.