I used to think of myself as a brain in a vat — fully engaged, hyper-productive, floating on adrenaline, caffeine, and sugar.
But in reality, none of us is just a brain. We are bodies. And I would predictably crash.
One particularly hard morning, I was overwhelmed by stress. I didn’t know how to keep putting one foot in front of the other. A friend said something with enough genuine sincerity to get my attention: “You have to find a way to get out of your head. Exercise, meditation — you need something.”
We were two weeks away from a big arbitration, working around the clock. But that night, I did 20 minutes on the rickety elliptical machine at the tiny gym in our office building. I felt better than I had in months.
I clung to exercise like a lifeline, and pulled myself up, inch by inch.
Making the long-term into the short-term
If the benefits of exercise feel far away, you’ll never do it.1 The trick is to stop exercising for the future. Do it for right now.
My friend’s advice was to do just that. And it triggered my “renaissance period.”
I started by hiking the little mountain trail behind my house — which I came to think of as “my beloved Shaw Butte” — to see the sun rise.
It’s five miles exactly from my front door to the top of Shaw Butte and back. In the hot Arizona summer, the time to start that hike is before the sun comes up; I’d be at the top by 5:30 a.m., and back home in time to get to work by 9:00 a.m.
After a few months of hiking Shaw Butte most mornings, I started seeing changes in my body. I wondered at first if they were some kind of tumors. No, not tumors, muscles! I wanted more, so I started weight training, and eating better.
In six months, physical changes were noticeable.
No one ever told me it could be this easy, or that it could feel good.
And the impact ricocheted through every aspect of my life. My husband started going to the gym with me. New friends became the core of my community and introduced me to new interests. Things I’d always loved – like gardening and hiking – got easier.
Staying connected to the physical in a virtual world
Then, the pandemic hit. I worked harder than I ever had before, routinely billing more than 300 hours a month.
Sitting down at the desk in my living room—cluttered with three monitors, a laptop, and a cell-phone on speaker—felt like plugging into the matrix.
For most lawyers, the virtual world still hasn’t let go. Finding ways to stay connected to the physical world is even more critical.
What to expect in this Health section
The Health section of this blog is about reclaiming your body—not as a long-term project, but as your lifeline right now.
You’re not just a brain. You’re a whole human. You deserve to live like one.
Start here. Subscribe for more to come.
Footnotes:
¹ In finance this is called a high time preference, the natural desire to reap rewards now and put hard things off. It is perfectly rational. No extra minute is guaranteed to any of us. See here for more about how this can play out for finances.↩︎
The Fully Invested Lawyer 
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