My Bar Story: Managing Stress with Your Head, and Not Your “Heart”!

After passing the bar exam, I moved to practice law in Washington, D.C. A few years later I accepted an offer to serve as my law school’s Director of Academic and Bar Success. Upon my return to Ohio, I dutifully scheduled a doctor’s appointment to establish a primary care physician. At the pre-appointment intake, the medical assistant asked if I had previously been a patient of their practice group. I assured them that I had not. The assistant scrutinized the computer monitor: “it looks like you came to our urgent care in June of 2006 … for an EKG.” Confused, I considered the timeline. I was living in Ohio in 2006, studying for the bar exam. Then it suddenly came back to me. I did go to urgent care while studying for the bar exam, because I thought I was having a heart attack.

For me the bar study period was a battle of managing time, emotions, and, less successfully, stress. That summer I felt the constant weight of guilt that I should be studying always. To mitigate the distractions and maximize my study time, I began studying overnight in the law school library, sleeping during daylight hours. My nocturnal approach to study was isolating and ultimately counterproductive. On the occasions that I did interact with fellow bar studiers, I would anxiously recount our conversations to calculate the number of hours and subjects they had revealed studying, constantly comparing it to what I viewed as my own, insufficient bar study.

It was on one of those June evenings while studying in the law school library that I stood up and walked to the nearby urgent care because I felt like I was having a heart attack. I can’t recall if my belief was completely rational. But I do know that I believed it. Fortunately, the EKG confirmed that my symptoms were wholly stress related. I was embarrassed and confused. I remain grateful to the doctor who counseled me that afternoon, sharing his own story of medical school stress that culminated in a case of shingles. On his advice, I took the rest of that afternoon off and agreed to regular stress management exercises. As it turned out, professional guidance and shared experience – even from someone in a different field – and a re-tuned approach that was more balanced and holistic were key for my bar exam success.

Today, I realize that my bar prep routine was a little extreme, but I learned an important lesson. My experience instilled in me a commitment to manage not simply my time and emotions, but also stress during legal practice.

More meaningfully, my bar story continues to this day, with a career committed to improving and humanizing the practice of legal licensure.

Learn more about how AccessLex is empowering the next generation of lawyers with free tools and resources, from pre-law to passing the bar, and check out the Helix Bar Review blog posts for stress management tips and other words of wisdom.