Doodle Away Your Stress: Simple Art Therapy For Busy Lawyers

Drawing is a tool for learning, explains Professor D.B. Dowd in his book, Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice. While many adults don't choose to try their hand at drawing if they don’t think they're 'good' at it, drawing can actually be used as a symbolic and therapeutic tool to make sense of the world and process emotions. With the 2018 JLD Resilience and Wellbeing Survey revealing that over 82% of respondents feel regularly or occasionally stressed, it’s abundantly clear that law professionals need simple tools which they can incorporate into daily life to help them manage their stress. If we let go of the idea that drawing must be realistic or good in some way, we can harness it as a therapeutic tool to help us manage our mental health.

Mindless Doodling

Absent-minded doodling is perhaps the easiest way to introduce yourself to drawing if you perceive it to be a skill you don’t have. Chances are, you already doodle while you’re on a phone call or in a conference. There may be a good reason for this: evidence suggests that doodling helps to improve concentration, with one study showing that participants were able to remember 29% more names from a list when they doodled.

Moreover, doodling is an expression of our subconscious thoughts, and much like dreaming, whether we’re aware of it or not, it can help us to process our emotions. It can also help us to become aware of our emotional state. A typical lawyer’s day may be so busy that stress creeps in without us realising until it’s a serious problem, but tuning into your doodles can help you become aware of stress early on.

If you notice yourself doodling in one spot, for example, this could be a sign that you’re feeling anxious and it could be time to take a break. If you notice that you’re regularly shading in your doodles, your subconscious could be indicating that you’re unhappy or you’re angry about something you need to address. Deliberate mindless doodling, however, when you’re in a moment of calm and you’ve made a conscious choice to pick up a pencil, can simply be relaxing, helping you to destress at the end of a difficult day. 

Getting To Know Yourself Through Drawing

Self-portraiture can be a valuable tool in getting to know yourself and understanding your current state of mind. Although it could be daunting to the inexperienced artist, try to let go of the idea that your portrait should be realistic. If you find the need for accuracy is holding you back try using simple guidelines and tutorials to help you create an accurately proportioned face shape to work with. Once you have a basic shape, explore your emotions through your portrait. Pay attention to how you feel and try to work this into the expressions on your face. You could create a past, present and future portrait to explore emotions at different stages of your life, which can help you look to the future and think about the things you’d like to address to help you be the self you’d like to be. This is an idea explored in transformational art therapy, and can help you explore the reasons for your current emotional state and identify sources of stress.

Drawing Your Emotions 

Drawing is often prescribed by art therapists to encourage clients to express their feelings. Drawing allows us to communicate simply and directly, even if only to ourselves. Ask yourself how you’re feeling, and try to draw the sense of the emotion. Accuracy is not important here: it’s simply a case of noting how you feel and trying to express it through abstract marks on the page. In a study conducted by art therapist, Jayne Rhyne, results showed that we tend to express our emotions in similar shapes and lines on the page. The sensory experience of exploring your feelings through drawing can lead to changes in your state of mind and refocus your outlook. By paying attention to your experience, you can use it to not only relax and manage immediate stress, but to learn more about how to process that stress in the future.

Stress is a very real problem in the legal profession, and the chances are high that you’ll encounter it at some point in your professional life. Finding ways to work small therapeutic exercises into your daily life can help you process your emotions and deal with stress before it becomes a problem, and drawing is one tool you have at your disposal. Even if you’re just mindlessly doodling, a pencil and paper can have an important role in helping you manage your stress. 

Lucy Peters, freelance writer