Stop Feeling Bad About Taking a Mental Health Day
It’s Friday morning. I sit in bed, phone in between my hands, the Slack app open and a message halfway written on the screen.
“Hi all. This week I haven’t been feeling so great. My anxiety is high and I’m not doing well. As such, I’m going to be taking a mental health day.”
I pause, staring at what I wrote so far.
Come on. What are you doing? You’re fine. Suck it up. Get your ass to work.
My brain is speaking so loud I can’t hear anything else. No thoughts. No reason.
Stop being so weak. They’re going to think you can’t handle it. You wanted to work for an agency, right? This is how it feels. Stop being a baby.
I press the [Delete] button and hold it until the message is erased. I continue to stare at the blinking cursor on the screen, battling with my inner critic. Battling with my anxiety.
After a moment, I start typing again. Another message. A shorter one. One that explains I’m taking a mental health day, and that I can be reached if absolutely necessary, but that I’m going to be mostly offline for the day.
I hit send. Before my anxiety has a chance to speak up. Before I can talk myself out of it.
Moments later, the responses come in.
“No problem.”
“Feel better!”
“See you on Monday.”
That day, I did absolutely nothing. I took what Being Boss’s Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson call a “Mandatory Lazy Day”. And it was exactly what I needed.
The Anxiety Epidemic
In case you haven’t heard, America is in the midst of an anxiety epidemic.
There are the traditional causes of anxiety:
“We still experience many traditional causes of anxiety such as poor health, difficult relationships, unemployment, poverty and disadvantage, loneliness, work stress, and exposure to violence, trauma, and conflict.” — PsychologyToday.com, 2018
And there are the modern causes of anxiety:
“Even in our modern world, some of these traditional sources of anxiety are on the rise. These include loneliness; relationship factors such as divorce; violence and abuse including childhood abuse and neglect; increased working hours and more stressful work procedures; and a general sense of lack of control over our own destinies — especially among our youngsters who are introduced to the possibility of failure earlier and earlier in their lives as a result of increased systematic educational testing.” — PsychologyToday.com, 2018
And let’s not forget the plain-old diagnosed cases of anxiety disorder, which affects about 18.1% of the American population and results in anxiety for pretty much any reason, including no reason at all.
So, with anxiety on the rise, why the hell is it still so taboo — even in our own heads — to take a mental health day when we need one? Why is that every time we should take one, we beat ourselves up over it so much that, often, we talk ourselves out of actually doing it?
Let’s take a quick poll, shall we?
Raise your hand if you have felt severe-to-extreme bouts of anxiety in 2020
Now, keep your hand raised if you’ve taken a mental health day in 2020
If your hand is still up, congratulations. I invite you to please below with your story and inspire others to do the same.
However, if you’re like me and raised your hand to number 1 and put it down for number 2, welcome to the party. It’s a pretty lame party, I will admit, but there are lots of us attending nonetheless.
Why Are Mental Health Days So Taboo?
It’s 2020. People aren’t committed for anxiety disorders or moderate depression anymore.
Thanks to social media (and platforms like Medium), it’s more talked about than ever. People share their stories. They have a voice.
And yet, taking a mental health day…and even talking about mental health with your manager still feels so hard. Much harder than, say, calling in because you have a 102-degree fever.
But why?
1. The stigma against mental health has long roots
…and, depending on what culture you’re from, it may still be a part of your daily life.
Many communities, including those in the U.S., still have a strong stigma against those with mental health disorders such as anxiety. These communities include:
Korean
Vietnamese
Latino
Arab
Persian
Chinese
…and more.
Plus, even for those communities where there’s less stigma, it still goes a long way back.
Women were diagnosed with hysteria (a female-only disease, of course), and “cured” with sex (or sexual abstinence) and fire for over 4,000 years.
Beyond that, women were sent to the asylum for things like anxiety, postnatal depression, and, yes, work stress.
So even though there may seem to be a lot of people talking about it today, as with any major societal change, we still have a long way to go.
2. There’s a separate, but related, stigma against millennials
Whew. The millennial stigma. I could write an entire, separate, article on this. And I probably will at some point. But for now, here are two separate articles I love on this topic:
Millennials Are Ready to Own Up to Everything We’re Blamed For — Jeanne Sager, Medium
Millennials Are Screwed — Huffpost
In short, we’ve heard it all. We are lazy. We think we deserve the world and don’t want to work for it. We’re narcissistic. We’re killing greeting cards (and department stores and bookstores and journalism, etc., etc., etc.,).
And, for our next trick, we actually don’t want to spend our entire lives working 60–80 hours a week until suddenly we’re 75 and not retired (because, oh yeah, we won’t be able to afford that) and looking around wondering where the hell all that time went.
So what do millennials have to do with mental health? Well, just type “millennials mental health” into Google and you’ll see.
The first article that came up when I did that just now was this one, by Business Insider.
To sum it up:
“The forecast for millennials’ mental health in 2020 doesn’t look pretty — depression and ‘deaths of despair’ are both on the rise among the generation, linked to issues such as loneliness and money stress.”
…I’ll just leave that there.
3. Anxiety just doesn’t shut up when you want it to
As we saw in the story above, anxiety is no joke.
Taking a mental health day doesn’t just come with societal taboos and stigmas…but it also (and mostly) comes from within our own minds.
Any time I need a moment to breathe, 5 minutes to myself, or to do something as drastic as taking a mental health day, my brain decides to speak up and speak out. It takes that moment to start a riot, protesting the unfairness of taking some time off right when anxiety is working so hard to tear me down.
So there’s that. Mental health working against mental health.
The Taboo Doesn’t Make Sense
Once you start really thinking about the taboo around mental health days, it really doesn’t make sense. Here’s why:
1. Poor mental health costs employers…when left unmanaged
Think your employer can’t afford you taking a day off for your mental health? Actually, they can’t afford you not to do so.
According to research conducted by the World Health Organization, anxiety and depressive disorders cost more than a trillion dollars globally in lost productivity each year. — VeryWellMind.com, 2019
Now, it’s easy to read this and think, “shoot, I shouldn’t tell my employer about my mental health. They won’t want me to work for them.”
I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience, it’s just the opposite. Every employer I’ve ever worked for — the good and the bad— has been at least somewhat supportive of helping me manage my anxiety disorder. In every case, while they don’t have it themselves, they have gone out of their way to try and understand it and provide the space and flexibility I need to do my job well.
If that’s not the case, you’re probably better off without them.*
*Disclaimer: I say this with the understanding that, in many cases, simply not taking a job because they don’t understand mental health is not financially feasible, and is only an option for those with the privileges to do so. This disclaimer applies to everything in this article.
2. Mental health is a part of…well…your health
When you have a fever, what is the first thing you do? If you have the privilege to do so, you call your boss and take the day off.
When you’re having a mental health flare-up, what’s the first thing you do? Talk down to yourself and guilt yourself into going to work, just to force your way through the day and not actually get anything worthwhile done. Also, making your mental health worse and prolonging recovery.
It’s funny. We don’t often think of it this way, but our physical health is just half of what makes up our overall health. Mental health is the other half, but we don’t treat it with the same respect.
Just Take The Damn Day Off
To sum up this rant, I just want to say this: take the day off when you need it. Talk to your managers. Talk to your team members. Talk to yourself.
In the long run, you’re doing so much more damage by working through it. You’re putting off the inevitable — a mental breakdown, severe burnout, or worse— and not doing anyone any favors.
Give yourself those 8 hours. Take a mandatory lazy day. And just do what makes you happy. Your body, and your employer, will inevitably thank you for it.