Mindful Minute: Let It Fall
By David Present
Ask any lawyer or legal professional how they are doing and you will usually get the same answer. Busy.
We say it lightly, but the data suggests we should not. In a survey of more than 3,100 lawyers and legal staff, nearly two-thirds said billable hour pressure was hurting their mental health.[1] In another study of licensed attorneys, one in four women and one in six men said they had considered leaving the profession over mental health or burnout.[2]
September brings this into focus. Summer ends, and the year suddenly has a deadline attached to it.
The plate is full. The logical move is to subtract.
Usually, we add.
We add a system, an app, a better calendar, an earlier alarm. Researchers at the University of Virginia tested this instinct by giving people a tilted Lego platform and asking them to make it hold a brick. They could either buy pillars to raise the low side or pull out the pillar holding up the high corner and let the platform drop flat. The second option cost nothing. Curiously, most people paid to add. The pattern held across all eight experiments, until someone pointed out that removing was allowed.[3]
We are not bad at subtraction. We just forget it is on the menu.
Fall is a good reminder. We call autumn a season of loss. Botanically, however, that is backwards.
A tree does not lose its leaves. It releases them. It builds an abscission layer at the base of each leaf stalk, a narrow band of cells whose only job is to let go on schedule.
The leaf is not torn away. It is cut loose.
And the tree takes back what it needs first, drawing the nutrients out of the leaf and storing them in its branches and trunk for the winter.[4]
Keep the nutrients. Drop the leaf.
Not every tree does. In many oaks and beeches, that layer never fully forms, and the tree carries dead brown leaves all winter. Botanists call this marcescence.[5]
The leaves are dead but still attached.
Some seasons, we are that tree. Lawyers are trained to hold on. We are paid to be thorough, to follow through, to not drop things. That instinct is an asset, until it is aimed at the wrong leaf.
The research on letting go points in the same direction. Carsten Wrosch and his colleagues study goal disengagement, which is the capacity to release a goal that is no longer reachable. People who can do this report better health and steadier cortisol patterns.[6]
Holding on carries a physical cost. Setting down relieves it.
So look at your plate and find the leaf. The case you took as a favor and have resented every month since. The committee you joined in a different phase of your life, when you had more time. The standing meeting nobody defends. The project you have been meaning to start since March.
The leaf is not the hardest thing on your list, nor the thing you are merely behind on. It is the thing that stopped being worth it but is still attached.
You can do one of three things with this leaf. Take what is useful and release the rest. Give it a date. Or give it to someone whose fall has more room than yours.
Any of the three will work. What does not work is the fourth option: carrying it into next year and calling that diligence.
The tree that sheds its leaves is not quitting. It is deciding what to carry into winter.
You do not owe every leaf a season.
Let it fall.
[1] Debra Cassens Weiss, More Lawyers Report Billable-Hour Pressures Affect Their Mental Health, A.B.A. J. (May 15, 2025), https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/more-lawyers-report-billable-hour-pressures-are-affecting-their-mental-health-survey-finds(reporting ALM’s 2025 Mental Health Survey; 65.5% of more than 3,100 lawyers and staff, predominantly at large firms).
[2] Justin Anker & Patrick R. Krill, Stress, Drink, Leave, 16 PLOS ONE e0250563 (2021), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250563 (25% of women and 17.4% of men had contemplated leaving the profession due to mental health or burnout).
[3] Gabrielle S. Adams et al., People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes, 592 Nature 258, 258–261 (2021), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y; see also Add Value Through Subtraction, Darden Ideas to Action, Univ. of Va., https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/add-value-through-subtraction (additive solutions fell from 59% to 39% once removing was identified as free).
[4] Why Do Leaves Change Colors in the Fall?, Nat’l Park Serv., https://www.nps.gov/articles/why-do-leaves-change-in-the-fall.htm (a tree absorbs the last of the nutrients from its leaves before each one falls).
[5] Winter Leaf Marcescence, Clemson Coop. Extension, https://hgic.clemson.edu/winter-leaf-marcescence/ (persistent leaves do not readily form an abscission layer at the base of the petiole).
[6] Carsten Wrosch et al., Giving Up on Unattainable Goals: Benefits for Health?, 33 Personality & Soc. Psych. Bull. 251, 251–265 (2007), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167206294905.
