Perhaps, like me, you live with someone who repeatedly questions whether your level of hypervigilance is strictly necessary for a stroll through a very safe town. My wife and I participate in what I can only describe as the Walking of the Spouses. This ritual often includes an intermission known as the Sitting of the Spouses, somewhere in downtown Apex, where we observe the community in its natural habitat.

Most people would see a vibrant community with kids outside riding their bikes and families out and about enjoying themselves. What I often see are infractions or problems that need to be fixed. I see kids on bikes riding down the sidewalk, weaving through pedestrians that could be injured. I see cars speeding through town and imagine the child who might dart out into the road and get hit. I am the self-appoint, powerless risk manager who feels the need to make observations and judgments about what should be done differently.  

I don’t really remember when I started doing this. It feels like it has been a sort of slow drift into becoming the person who mentally drafts ordinances while sitting on a bench. And if I am being honest, it was the parallel parkers before it was the kids on bikes and the speeding cars. 

The truth is that I have never seen, or even heard of, a kid on a bike running into someone or a pedestrian getting hit in downtown Apex.  So who, exactly, am I protecting? And why am I so invested?

To be a lawyer in 2026 is to live in a state of permanent neurological high alert, a condition increasingly described as professional hypervigilance. For years, we’ve called it “attention to detail” or “zealous advocacy,” which sounds noble and billable. But research is starting to describe something less flattering and far more physical.

We are trained to anticipate disaster and to spot the issue no one else sees. The problem is that the human nervous system does not have an “off” switch for this level of scrutiny. When the billable hour ends, the brain does not clock out. It stays on patrol. Some researchers describe this as baseline chronic responsibility, a state where your body remains in a low-grade fight-or-flight response because it has become accustomed to scanning for risk. In most cases, we’re not talking about actual risk but instead potential or hypothetical risk.

The 2026 Well-Being Report from the Washington State Bar Association puts numbers to what many of us already feel. More than half of lawyers report active burnout and anxiety. The same traits that make someone effective in the profession are also the ones quietly exhausting the system that sustains them.

In some practice areas, this goes even further, evolving into what’s known as Secondary Traumatic Stress. You spend enough time managing other people’s worst days, and eventually your brain stops distinguishing between their emergencies and your environment. This is how you end up sitting on a bench in Apex, monitoring bicycle traffic like an unpaid, unappointed safety consultant.

The legal profession has historically treated this state as a feature, not a bug. We admire the lawyer who never relaxes, never misses a detail, and never stops scanning. But there is a cost to living like that. If your brain is constantly preparing for impact, it eventually forgets how to recognize when nothing is wrong.

The takeaway is not that you should stop being a vigilant lawyer. The takeaway is that your vigilance needs somewhere to go off duty. Sometimes, that looks like noticing the urge to intervene and choosing not to act on it. It means letting the kids ride and letting the moment pass without drafting a mental memo. And maybe, just maybe, keeping my mouth shut about it. Because if you don’t decide when to stand down, the nervous system never will and you will spend a surprising portion of your life silently enforcing imaginary bicycle regulations in otherwise peaceful towns.