Lawyers are hardwired to notice the negative in every situation.

But then Thanksgiving comes around, with its tradition of reflecting on the year and expressing gratitude for the good things in life.

And experts ask: What if the Thanksgiving feeling lasted all year?

They say the season creates positive emotions and can increase connections to loved ones. It's a welcomed reprieve from the high-stress, adversarial profession that has created a lawyer population suffering from depression, anxiety and substance use disorders at rates much higher than the general population.

"Lawyers, more so than others, need to be more intentional about cultivating positive emotions," said Anne Brafford, a former equity partner in Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, who's transformed herself into a positive psychology PhD student and lawyer-wellness aficionado.

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Gratitude Resources

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The idea behind a gratitude practice is easy enough: It means taking time to think intentionally about positive events and people that create feelings of thankfulness. One of the well-known iterations of the practice is called, "Three Good Things," where attorneys keep a journal that explains the events that made them grateful and the reasons why. While some people practice gratitude every day, researchers have found the practice less effective when it becomes a chore.

Once per week is enough, as long as the lawyer keeps it up, according to Brafford.

As people create a habit of scanning their environments for good things, they grow a different interpretive lens that makes them better appreciate positive events, said Brafford, founding member of Aspire, a California-based educational and consulting firm for the legal profession. Because they often express their appreciation for other people, they form closer relationships, which help them in times of stress, she said.

Also, grateful people have less time to dwell on the negative. This helps combat a widespread phenomenon known as negativity bias, which means that people tend to notice and react more to negative events, according to Brafford. People need to experience three to five positive emotions for every one negative emotion, since the negative is so much more powerful, explained Brafford.

Bree Buchanan Bree Buchanan. (Photo: Eric Quitugua/State Bar of Texas)

Bree Buchanan, senior adviser at Krill Strategies, a legal consulting firm that focuses on attorney wellbeing, said when she launched her gratitude practice she decided to add a layer of accountability to strengthen her commitment to the practice.

She and a friend joined as "gratitude buddies" and would spend about five or 10 minutes drafting short emails to each other, three times per week, to express something that made them grateful and explain why.

Other people keep up their gratitude practices by writing their thanks in a notebook, purchasing a "gratitude journal," or using an app on their smartphones.

After about three weeks, Buchanan noticed a change in her internal dialog. For example, during a long commute, rather than steaming about the bad traffic, she started dwelling on what she might express in her gratitude email when she arrived at work.

The item didn't have to be earth-shattering. For example, Buchanan works in Austin, where summer temperatures climb past 100 degrees. One day, she wrote that she was grateful she worked in air conditioning.