(Updated July 20, 2022)
Bring back the mental health day!
Mental health days are gifts to yourself in the form of time. Time is the most precious commodity on earth and it’s readily available for the taking.
The question is, “Do you lose yourself in your work to the point where it’s hard to justify caring for your mental health needs? The pandemic has taught people that work can be a weapon of mass avoidance. You can’t handle world news. Just lose yourself in your work. Your partner or children are annoying you. Just work more so you get some distance.
But there is a huge price to pay for this work-as-avoidance tactic. People start to resent you. You miss out on “life.” It’s also very hard to reduce your work hours if an addiction to work is solidified over time.
The Pandemic’s Impact on Taking Mental Health Days
Let’s give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say that work helped us get through the pandemic. We’ll call it a coping strategy. What a nice name for it. Well, the pandemic looks different nowadays. Can you still justify neglecting your health for the sake of making more money?
Am I talking to myself here or are you listening? The reason I joke like this is because we humans have an elaborate system of defenses used to justify working hard. We learn to tune out what nudges us toward scary versions of change. Our phones teach us how to do this as well. What? You don’t feel like having that important and neglected conversation with your partner? Just open Instagram and jump into your phone. Done. Conversation avoided.
Yes, the pandemic has taught us to avoid, especially when it felt like there was no escape. The other consequence of living in the pandemic is that remote work makes it hard to justify taking a mental health day. We say to ourselves, “Why take a day off when I can just do the minimum for my job and still count it as a workday?” That makes sense but there’s something to be said for totally tuning out of your responsibilities and justifying a day to relax or play.
The pandemic made it harder to justify caring for our mental health needs via days off. My hope is that as we continue to head back into the office around other people who emerged from their own caves, we will remember how good it feels to work less and play more. That boundary between work and play needs attention. Alcohol and drugs have been the boundary maker for many people.
How about if we apply conscious, free choice that is free of these vices to the process of choosing to care for our needs as a show of self respect? It will go a long way toward boosting a sense of self-worth.
Work-Life Imbalance Is the New Balance
Forget about the idea of work-life balance. I don’t know anyone who has truly brought this curated ideal into real life. The goal is to honor your mental health to the point where you become aware of changes in your daily mood and you have a set of tools and evasive maneuvers available to manage yourself better. A mental health day is the ultimate manifestation of self care, another concept that makes me queasy to say because it is so overused, but it is worth writing just once here.
Call them what you will…a mental vacation day, an emotional sick day, a press-pause-on-responsibilities day…these days are necessary survival tools in the digital age. Do you listen to the signs that it’s time for you to press pause on your responsibilities and grant yourself a sacred mental health day?
If you pan back and view your life from a distance, away from the minutia of daily life, you will hopefully see that time is more valuable than money or pleasing your boss or a deadline or keeping a perfect reputation as the employee who never misses a day.
While not easy to time perfectly, sick days are much easier than mental health days to figure out. Your body offers more recognizable signals that you won’t be able to function at work and that home would be a much more comfortable place to suffer. People (your boss included) speak the language of the sick day. They won’t question your decision like they would if you declared that you’re taking a mental health day.
A mental health day, on the other hand, is a different story. Most people wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving their boss an early morning message stating that they’ve decided to take a day off because they’re feeling more depressed than usual or the thought of an upcoming meeting is giving them panic attacks. People generally feel too exposed to use their mental suffering as a reason for skipping a day, especially if their work environment leaves no room for sharing weakness.
What about tuning in to the state of your mental health to assess the need for a day away from your routine?
The idea of a mental health day isn’t embraced by American society. It can be viewed as a sign of weakness, especially by people who value money and productivity over happiness. I feel sorry for these people.
But really…what better way is there to care for yourself than to honor your emotional needs for at least a day…to address the neglected parts of you and take a big first step toward gaining a sense of control over them? Vacation days have their obvious value. We idealize them and justify our sacrifices based on future vacations.
A mental health day, though, is the ultimate sign of self-respect (not self-care.)
