Attorney Heal Thyself: A Lawyer and EFT Tapping Practitioner Discusses Career Burnout

[00:00:08] John Reed: If you're a lawyer and have ever dreaded Sunday nights, felt physically ill at the thought of starting another week, or found simple job tasks to be impossibly draining, you're not alone. You could be experiencing burnout.

A 2024 Bloomberg Law study suggests that attorneys feel burned out nearly half the time, higher among female lawyers. It can take many forms, including disrupted sleep, anxiety, depression, reduced energy and concentration, worsened mood and physical health, eating issues, and substance abuse.

[00:00:41] John Reed: But beyond the symptoms, there's also shame and guilt in thinking that you have to walk away from a law degree and career path that you spent so much effort and money to pursue. Not to mention the uncertainty of figuring out where to go next. It's a hopelessness and paralysis that can be all-consuming, putting both professional and personal relationships at risk.

Our guest today is Tracy Inscore, a San Diego environmental law and real estate attorney who felt trapped by the weight and exhaustion of burnout. After traditional therapies and even leaving the practice failed to deliver the results she needed, she discovered a different path to self-care and healing. Tracy now helps other lawyers and professionals overcome burnout while she maintains a productive and satisfying legal career.

Hi, Tracy. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:28] Tracy Inscore: Hi, John. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:30] John Reed: So you and I have something in common. We've both burned out, for me, a couple of times, but as common as it is, not everyone experiences burnout the same way, right? I mean, can you put some definition and context around that?

[00:01:46] Tracy Inscore: Sure. So when I say burnout, I'm talking about a chronic state of exhaustion and depletion on a physical, mental, emotional, even spiritual level. It's the kind of tired that sleep or a vacation won't fix. It's really being tired on a soul level. I find it can be caused by doing too much of the things that drain us and not enough of the things that fill us back up.

You just know it when you feel it, but coming up with a single definition can be hard because we can't always tell the difference between "normal" stress and fatigue and burnout because there's really no defined time period or severity that we can use as a benchmark.

And everyone's different. In certain professions, especially the legal profession and just society in general, we've set the bar really low as far as how good we're supposed to feel and what's normal and acceptable for our lives.

[00:02:45] John Reed: There's no clinical definition or diagnosis; if you've met one person with burnout, you've met one person with burnout.

[00:02:54] Tracy Inscore: Right. And if, and if you struggle with depression or anxiety like I did, or really any chronic health issue, chronic pain, that can also overlap with symptoms of burnout quite a bit. And it can be tough to tell which is causing, which, for me, it was like, am I depressed because I'm burned out? Or am I burned out because I'm depressed? So.

[00:03:13] John Reed: For me, I remember the Sundays, I call them, just the worst, the point of being, basically what you said, feeling exhausted, feeling depressed, physical manifestations, like a nausea about starting a new week in this rut. Later, I experienced it again, and it was more personal withdrawal. I just didn't want to have contact. And the thought of answering a phone call or talking to a colleague just rattled me so much. I just wanted to isolate myself, but it's interesting that you said there are all kinds of different ways it manifests itself.

[00:03:45] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, I can relate to those. I definitely had the Sunday Scaries every week and also chronic neck pain. I would be sick all the time, along with the anxiety, the depression. Everything took so much effort, and once I kind of came out on the other side, it was like, wow, I wasn't making that up. Things really were twice as hard. So, no wonder I was exhausted at the end of every day. Exactly like you said, just making a phone call took so much more energy than it should have.

[00:04:16] John Reed: Sure. Have you found that with the heightened emphasis on self-care and mental health these days that burnout isn't this shifty sometimes excuse of a word? It used to be a time earlier in my life, if you said burnout, the response was, "Suck it up, buttercup." Right? And it seems that now it's taken more seriously. Have you witnessed that yourself?

[00:04:42] Tracy Inscore: I have witnessed that. I started practicing law in 2008, and just between then and now, the difference in the way that this is even talked about is pretty striking. And I have seen an emphasis on more self-care techniques. Unfortunately, I don't think those techniques or strategies are often practical for lawyers necessarily. And so that's why a lot of us still find ourselves within that same pattern. But at least, yes, that attention is finally being paid to mental health in general.

[00:05:15] John Reed: So you started it. I'll continue with it. Tell me about your legal career. So, in 2008, you get your walking papers, you get your bar card. Walk us through your trajectory.

[00:05:26] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, so I graduated in 2008 in the middle of the Great Recession.

[00:05:30] John Reed: Good timing.

[00:05:31] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, I was among the lucky few to have a good job offer right out of school, and it was practicing environmental land use real estate law, which wasn't something I was necessarily passionate about. It doesn't light my soul on fire, but I had student loans to pay back, and I had bills to pay. So, like so many of us, it was really driven more out of economic necessity to become a practicing attorney.

And so that's what I did, and I really thrived in that I had been an overachiever my entire life. And so that naturally continued throughout law school and in my early years of practice. I would say after about five years, I really hit a wall, and the burnout and all of those other symptoms I'm describing really hit and I made a decision to leave full-time practice and craft sort of a non-traditional legal career.

I was a law professor and a college professor. I went in-house for an environmental consulting firm. I was even a fitness instructor. Just to round out. Like, I had about six different part-time gigs because I thought that getting away from full-time practice would be what solved the issue. I thought it was just, I'm not cut out to be a lawyer.

Well, turns out I burned out doing those other fun things, too, because I've learned it was that burnout is really never about the job. It's about the energy that you bring to whatever it is you're doing. And so because I had all these deeper underlying issues going on, it really didn't matter what I was going to do. I would find a way to burn out. So I went through a spiritual awakening for lack of a better term. I found myself on a healing path where I really opened my eyes to alternative and holistic healing because I had tried everything to feel better. I had tried everything to make this work.

In that process, I was seeing so many attorneys leave the legal profession entirely. And these were kind, creative, brilliant, empathic people, the kind of people that we need in positions of authority and leadership. But they were leaving because they were so burned out. Just adding to that, the number of fellow lawyers we're losing to substance abuse and suicide.

So, I became an EFT tapping practitioner. I discovered that as the modality that helped me the most. And I realized that as lawyers, we were in desperate need of this technique, and it became my mission to just share it with as many people as possible. My goal is to get this into every law school and for it to really become part of everyone's daily wellness routine. I want to see my colleagues be the happiest and healthiest versions of themselves. So, I do still practice part-time.

[00:08:26] John Reed: Let me back up for a second. You said it, now you got to define it: EFT and tapping. Talk to us about what that is.

[00:08:34] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, so EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques, commonly known as tapping, and it involves, as the name implies, tapping on certain meridian points in a specific sequence while we focus on an emotion or memory or a problem. So it's based in traditional Chinese medicine, and it centers around this core premise that everything is energy, that all negative emotion is caused by energy blockages within the body.

We're vibrational beings, and so every emotion and experience carries a certain vibration or frequency. We're basically like sponges and we store in our body everything that we experience. So this meridian system is like an energetic highway running through the body, and tapping allows us to restore the proper flow of our life force energy—our chi— through those meridians. So there are 12 main meridians. Each one corresponds to a different part of the body. When there's any sort of blockage, that's when the physical ailments and illnesses and emotional issues start to happen. And so traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture were actually way ahead of their time, thousands of years ago, in identifying the Meridian system, which basically represents the framework of the nervous system as we know it in modern western medicine.

So most of us are kind of already familiar with this because of acupuncture, which involves, as you know, placing needles along certain points to get that stuck energy moving again.

Now, thankfully, because I hate needles. the founder of EFT,

[00:10:11] John Reed: Good choice.

[00:10:14] Tracy Inscore: A man named Gary Craig identified that there are certain meridian points on the head and upper torso that are especially useful for dealing with emotions, and that without needles, just by tapping or applying light pressure in a specific sequence, we can essentially get the same result as acupuncture, but without needles.

[00:10:34] John Reed: I'm glad you brought up the comparison to acupuncture. My understanding, it's not a practice where there's a mindfulness that comes along with it. People go to have acupuncture to get relief, if not instantaneously, pretty quickly. What you described, though— positive thoughts, a certain mindfulness— that seems to be the difference here. Is that correct? Did I say that right?

[00:10:55] Tracy Inscore: Exactly right. It really requires you to be an active participant in that release of the energy. So what we're doing is we're engaging the body, the nervous system, and the subconscious all at the same time while sending these signals of safety throughout the body. That's exactly what the tapping is doing. So as you're talking about a negative emotion or a past memory, a past traumatic event, or maybe you're just like, oh my God, I screwed up in court so bad last week, and I just feel like a freaking idiot. Right?

[00:11:28] John Reed: Mm-hmm

[00:11:29] Tracy Inscore: As you're tapping, that allows us to sort of deactivate that visceral physical reaction that you are feeling when that memory comes up. It allows us to actually process our emotions instead of just suppressing, denying or covering them up with positive affirmations.

[00:11:46] John Reed: So let me be the naysayer here for a sec.

[00:11:49] Tracy Inscore: mm-hmm

[00:11:50] John Reed: Give us the clinical evidence. Give us the science behind this.

[00:11:54] Tracy Inscore: Oh yeah, I was the biggest skeptic, and in fact, I heard about EFT, and it took me a few years to try it, I'm embarrassed to say, because I thought this sounds too good to be true. I had tried everything else, so the idea that lightly tapping on my own face was going to solve my problems just seemed ridiculous.

But, it is actually clinically proven effective in treating anxiety and PTSD. What it actually does is it sends calming signals to the amygdala in the brain, which calms our nervous system and gets us out of that chronic "fight or flight" state that so many of us live in perpetually. And it actually helps us to create new neural pathways and increases our resilience long term. So yes, it is rooted in this ancient practice and might sound a little woo-woo to some people, but it's actually based in science. Veterans, in particular, have had tremendous results using this technique to overcome PTSD.

[00:12:58] John Reed: So somebody finds you, and we'll talk about how they find you in a minute. But somebody finds you, and I don't want you to give up your secret sauce or anything, but where do you start, and how does it progress?

[00:13:10] Tracy Inscore: Sure. So, I use a three-step process, and that doesn't mean we always go in these linear steps. Sometimes, we'll go back and forth. But the first step is to take the edge off and get you out of that chronic fight-or-flight state because it's kind of like the hierarchy of needs.

If you are in literal survival mode, and remember, our brain, our body doesn't know the difference between a stressful email and getting chased by a tiger. So if your body thinks it's in literal survival mode, you really can't access these deeper parts of you that can make lasting change. The first thing we do is bring that stress level down. We bring some immediate relief to whatever is your most urgent problem or whatever might be bothering you the most, whether that's your boss or a stressful deadline or whatever it is.

We use a zero to ten scale so you can subjectively score how you're feeling throughout the process so you know that it's working. Let's say someone comes in and they are at a level-nine stress. We want to get that down to about a three or four before we move on. Otherwise, it's just not going to be that effective.

But the second step is really where we get into some deeper root cause issues and what caused this burnout pattern because it is always part of a bigger pattern in the first place. So that might be childhood family dynamics, past traumas, subconscious programming, core or hidden beliefs that we have that may be no longer serving us.

[00:14:44] John Reed: Sure.

[00:14:44] Tracy Inscore: And then step three, once we kind of clear some of the unwanted, is really where we can get in and start creating the life that they do want. Let's create. Now that we've gotten rid of the undesirable, how would you prefer for your life to look? What might be holding you back from that? And we can work on anything that might be preventing that.

[00:15:05] John Reed: The phrase that I found in researching you was burnout archetype. Can a person be predisposed to burnout? You know, nature versus nurture, physiological versus environmental?

[00:15:19] Tracy Inscore: Absolutely. I have yet to see someone with burnout that was just limited to one area of their life. I coined that term of burnout archetype. And what I see in clients across the board is they'll tend to overgive in one-sided relationships. They have trouble with boundaries. They'll tend to be in codependent relationships with friends or family. Maybe they're allowing their time and energy resources to be drained. A lot of times, they might over-exercise, push themselves to the point of injury. There might be extreme dieting, food restriction, or overeating on the other side. Really anything to an extreme. Substance abuse. Just an overall lack of balance.

And especially when you think of lawyers, and we tend to have certain personality traits in common, Type A overachiever, that really contributes to someone who is prone to burnout. Just like me, it doesn't matter what you're doing; you'll find a way to overdo it.

[00:16:19] John Reed: Do you find that, maybe not in the first session, although it could happen, the people you're working with, there's a Eureka moment or just a visible catharsis that happens? A relief that they experience?

[00:16:31] Tracy Inscore: Yes, and a lot of times we will address the initial issue they came in with relatively easily, and then they'll be very surprised at what else comes up. Because we are able to work with the subconscious on such a different level, compared to other techniques, that all of a sudden, things will start to kind of surface, different emotions or memories that might start coming up. But yes, I would say in terms of the general relief, within, I would say three sessions, most clients are experiencing a dramatic change. So not just momentary relief.

[00:17:09] John Reed: Mm-hmm

[00:17:10] Tracy Inscore: But real change.

[00:17:11] John Reed: You've progressed, evolved, from burnout. Victim, sufferer, survivor to healer and teacher. You talked about discovering EFT tapping. At what point did you say, you know what, I want to evangelize this? I want to share the love here and help others?

[00:17:31] Tracy Inscore: Really, when I started seeing how effective it was for me, because I was still a practicing attorney looking around every day, working with so many other lawyers and realizing how much we were all in the same boat, and how this technique, in particular, could be so incredibly beneficial. Not just for lawyers, but really any high stress professional. But I've found that, in particular, lawyers tend to really do well with this technique.

[00:18:01] John Reed: Are lawyers inherently insane to want to be in a high-stress profession as this is?

[00:18:09] Tracy Inscore: No, of course not. And, you know, law is certainly not the only profession to have burnout. I think the ABA back in 2021 said it's 52%. Personally, I think it's probably closer to the 80% that the American Psychology Association reported across all sectors. But I think, it helps to first understand what makes lawyers unique.

So, not to play into those stereotypes because we're obviously all complex, diverse people. But I think we can agree that, as a group, we tend to maybe be described as overachievers, perfectionist, Type A. And these qualities usually serve us very well professionally, and we don't want to disown those parts of ourselves. But they make up an important part of that burnout pattern. You add to that, we have the common shared experience of going to law school. That's highly competitive, and we're trained to look for problems. We're trained to anticipate the worst-case scenario, which, again, is a valuable skill for a lawyer, but it wires our brains for difficulty. It trains us to focus on the negative.

So then we start practicing. We get used to suppressing and ignoring our emotions, sometimes even ignoring our own bodily cues of stress, hunger, fatigue. In a lot of law firm environments, going without sleep or billing a crazy number of hours is seen as a badge of honor. We're in these adversarial, high-stress, high-conflict situations. Sometimes, within toxic law firm cultures, we may have to advocate for positions that we don't agree with or that go against our own morals and values. There's almost a dissociation that needs to take place in order to effectively function and to be a good advocate.

We tend to kind of be lonely, whether that's because we don't have a lot of extra time to spend with our support system or because we work in isolation. And you know, anyone who's highly analytical and logical and used to being in their head a lot can really be disconnected from their body.

I remember the first time a therapist asked me where I felt a certain emotion in my body, and I just looked at her like, "What are you talking about? My emotions are in my head." Little did I know.

So, a lot of us as lawyers are overdeveloped in terms of cognitive strategies to deal with stress. Things like positive thinking, delegating to others, but we're underdeveloped when it comes to somatic strategies, somatic meaning within the body. As a lawyer, you're probably already really good at making cognitive shifts and seeing different perspectives, and that's really important. We can't ignore the cognitive component, but if you've done all that, if you've done a ton of talk therapy and you're still feeling stuck, it might be because you've ignored the body, you've ignored the nervous system component. And, like I said, a lot of the self-care strategies that lawyers are given aren't realistic. They're not made for the way that a lawyer's brains work.

If you're like me, you might have a hard time trying to quiet your mind in meditation because it's like trying to go from a hundred to zero. Most of us also aren't going to do yoga for an hour in the middle of a trial or a big closing. We need something that engages both the body and mind but that doesn't require us to go anywhere or spend a lot of time.

[00:21:37] John Reed: Lawyers, you need to be good at thinking on your feet until your feet hurt. Right? So until there's a physical manifestation of how bad it can be,

[00:21:45] Tracy Inscore: Mm-hmm

[00:21:46] John Reed: One of the things you brought up earlier, and I noticed it on your website, too, is this idea of not being confused by the source of the burnout, the stress, the fatigue. That burnout can inadvertently steal your joy. That you can be a fantastic lawyer or whatever profession and thinking that I need to leave that in order to heal myself, when, in fact, you leave it, and as you discovered, it doesn't matter where you go in your profession, your vocation, it follows you. You make a point on your website that you didn't want to waste your law degree, the investment that you made, you know, financially and with time to do that.

Are you seeing that there's this kind of confusion between my job and my other predispositions when it comes to burnout?

[00:22:40] Tracy Inscore: Yes. And I know for me, I felt like my identity was really wrapped up in being a lawyer and having achieved this huge milestone. So, in addition to not wanting to throw that away and feeling like I was wasting it or somehow ungrateful for like, not many people get to do this. I got to do this and I don't like it.

What does that mean about me? But I'm not minimizing that; of course, our job and how we spend most of our waking hours absolutely impact our mental health and can lead to burnout. But when we only look at those outside factors, it really keeps us trapped because we actually have the key to change everything about the way we relate to our career, really everything in our lives. For me, it was learning that, sometimes, it's deeper issues that can actually be what drew us to a high-stress profession in the first place because it felt so familiar.

[00:23:40] John Reed: Speaking of large law firms, as we have recently, you are working now with one of the nation's largest. There's unquestionably a pressure cooker stereotype, particularly amongst big law firms. How have you carved out this life and this life balance for yourself, and how has the firm accommodated you?

[00:24:01] Tracy Inscore: So I'm incredibly lucky in that they really get it right in terms of work life balance. They're really leading the charge in terms of flexible work accommodations, and obviously, because I'm able to do this, and they know about it and are supportive of it.

That wasn't always the case. I started my career at a smaller firm that was much more traditional and kind of old-school. We were expected to be at our desks from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm, sometimes 7:00 pm meetings, and no one cared how late you may have worked from home because no one really was supposed to be working from home. You were supposed to be in person in the office, and I really struggled with that kind of structure and restriction.

So, I was actually the first person at my old firm to go onto a part-time remote work arrangement. So I kind of led that charge and led by example and showed that, look, this can work and it can actually be really beneficial for everybody. So then Covid happened, and that just became the norm. But I always say I was doing this well before it was the typical thing.

[00:25:13] John Reed: You were cool before Covid, Tracy.

[00:25:16] Tracy Inscore: Yeah.

[00:25:18] John Reed: I know everyone's path to healing is different, but at what point in their stress and their burnout do people find and engage with you? You had your path, and you tried a lot of different things and you were skeptical of EFT and tapping. Is that kind of similar to what you're seeing when people happen upon you?

[00:25:36] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, I would say I'm finding a lot of people who are at their breaking point because pain is often our greatest motivator, and a lot of us have a really high pain threshold, a high pain tolerance. By the time someone is saying, "I can't live like this anymore and I really need help," it's often gone on for years being in this state. So I would love to see people sooner than that. Like I said, I would love to be working with law students who are just getting into this profession, teaching them this technique early so that they can use it as a lifelong strategy to help avoid burnout from happening in the first place. As of right now, I'm usually seeing people in kind of a crisis mode.

[00:26:22] John Reed: Well, hold on a second, Tracy, you actually have started working with law students, haven't you?

[00:26:27] Tracy Inscore: Yeah, so I started the Bar and Beyond program because I really wanted to get this into the hands of future lawyers as early as possible. So, especially for the bar preparation period and within the first few months of practice, I find are some of the most stressful months of our career or of our lives, and that can really set the stage for that burnout to happen around the three or five-year mark. Because you realize you have a lot of these very good students. Overachievers. Law school isn't where the stress starts. They've probably been stressed since high school. I've worked with even high school students who are already burned out and overscheduled. So, I really want to make this as accessible as I can, so even for students who aren't in their third year of law school, offering a discounted rate to students for 1L and 2Ls as well.

[00:27:23] John Reed: Where can our listeners go to learn more about EFT and tapping? What resources can you recommend?

[00:27:30] Tracy Inscore: So you are welcome to check out my website, which is tapoutburnout.com, but beyond that, I found EFT through YouTube. One account that I follow that I really like that introduced me to it was the Tapping Solution. Tapping videos on a variety of issues. So you could literally type in, you know, EFT tapping for stress, for overwhelm, for anxiety, and I think that's a really good place to start as far as doing it on your own.

[00:27:59] John Reed: We'll be sure to post those links in the show notes, as well as links to your website and all the resources there. I've learned a lot today, Tracy, including some things about myself, which is always a good thing. It's always a bonus. So, I just want to thank you for being here and taking the time to talk with me.

[00:28:16] Tracy Inscore: Thank you so much, John.

[00:28:17] John Reed: Listeners, if you're experiencing burnout and any of its symptoms, please get help from Tracy, a mental health professional, a religious or spiritual leader, or even YouTube. Be good to yourself. You deserve it. Plus, we need all the Sticky Lawyers fans we can get.

Lest I need to remind you, please take a moment to follow and subscribe to Sticky Lawyers wherever you stream the podcast. That way, you'll automatically get new episodes without even thinking about it, and you'll fill our bucket and boost our spirits.

Until next time, I'm John Reed, and you've been listening to Sticky Lawyers.