Two and a half years after the pandemic, exhaustion it’s still here it’s said to be widespread in all industries such as medicine, teaching and child care; by some measurementswork stress has just increased even when daily routines seem more “normal”. to cope, American people-especially younger generations— are resorting to “mental health day”: an occasional day off, perhaps at short notice, justified as necessary to maintain wellness. It is, in principle, a sick day for the mind.
Companies have begun to respond: some are renaming sick days as “wellness days”, which employees can take for physical or mental health. A poll of 455 employers found that 30 percent intend to offer mental health days within the next two years, compared with 9 percent now. The concept of mental health day has even reached schools. Fathers journal recently published the results of a poll showing that 56 percent of parents have allowed their children to take time off from school for their mental health, and another 32 percent are willing to consider it.
But a mental health day, however well-intentioned, is not a permanent solution to the chronic burnout, cynicism, and feelings of inadequacy that are markers of exhaustion. An occasional extra day off also can’t get below the surface where conditions like anxiety and depression reside. If we want to improve the mental health of workers and address widespread burnout, we need to make much bigger changes to the way Americans work.
It’s true that working less in general can help prevent burnout. That’s because workload is one of the six main aspects of a job in which a “mismatch” between a person and their job can lead to burnout, according to psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, the authors of the new book The burnout challenge, who have been at the forefront of burnout research for decades. Other researchers have found that taking more days off per month is associated with a lower prevalence of exhaustion in health workers. A 2014 study found that doctors in Japan who had two to four days off a month had more than triple the risk of burnout compared to those who had eight or more days off.
But the first problem with mental health day is that no one seems to agree on the details of what it is. For some workers, it’s an official pool of paid time off from which they can draw at will. Others, whose employer policy may not offer such time off, claim the occasional mental health day as a kind of de facto sick leave. In any case, the fundamental point is that a day off is not the same as a consistently lighter schedule. It’s a band-aid fix, not a long-term fix that would actually make a worker’s day-to-day life more manageable. It may not even reduce someone’s workload, if they have to overload themselves to catch up after…or before—his rest. “The occasional mental health days are good,” Leiter told me in an email, “but they have little impact on burnout. If people go back to the same maladjustments that led to burnout, a little time off will be good fluff.”
So we might think of a mental health day as a way to avoid the workplace dressed in the language of self-care. One of the only academic papers on workers taking mental health days looked at nurses and midwives in the Australian state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney. the the researchers found that nurses who said they had taken what they described as a mental health day in the previous 12 months were more likely to work shifts, spend much of their work hours on their feet, have experienced workplace abuse work and feeling that they have accomplished less at work due to emotional problems. In short, the nurses who took mental health days were having serious difficulties at work and, unsurprisingly, were 55 percent more likely to plan to leave their job. In this case, the employees’ need for a mental health day meant a bigger problem in the workplace.
Australian nurses who took mental health days were also 42 per cent more likely to experience symptoms of a common mental disorder, such as anxiety and depression. Taking individual days off as the only way to address such symptoms may be its own kind of risk. Saige Subosits, a psychotherapist in Pittsburgh, told me that mental health days are not a “quick fix” for people with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorders. In fact, if they avoid their work out of fear without taking other steps to treat their condition, returning to the workplace could become even more difficult, Subosits said. She added that going to therapy can be a healthy reason to regularly take time off work. But it is therapy, not time off, that helps improve someone’s condition.
The central problem is that mental health days are a compromise concept, inadequate to address two very different problems. People with common mental illnesses benefit more from sustained treatments like therapy, not the occasional day off. Plus, everyone deserves enough vacation days to recharge and a culture of taking time off. no apologies. Perhaps the increase in mental health days reveals that we have devalued leisure so much that we can justify free time only by appealing to a abstract and vague notion of well-being that supposedly will make us better workers.
Here’s another way to think about time off: “Any day off is a mental health day,” Steve Unger, a 37-year-old telecommunications engineer in Little Rock, Arkansas, told me. Unger said he does not have a mental illness diagnosis and has no desire to avoid his work. “I never get the feeling that I just don’t want to do it today,” he said. When he takes what he calls a mental health day, as he did eight Fridays in a row earlier this year, he can spend time with his family or go for a 10-mile run. Usually he goes into a day like this “with no intentions, no tasks, no expectations of what I need to accomplish during that day.”
Unger’s day off activities align with today’s conventional wisdom on mental health days: that people should spend them on classic leisure activities. In the Fathers magazine survey, only 23 percent of respondents whose children took mental health days said they spent part of the day seeing a mental health professional; 37 percent of the children did art or music, and 30 percent spent time in nature.
For many students and workers, mental health day is simply a cry of time that is not determined by work. In an article reporting on the results of the Fathers survey, a high school student told the magazine that she feels she can’t afford to take a mental health day, even though her mother would let her. “As a [International Baccalaureate] student, the idea of skipping school is really scary,” said the student. His daily volume of schoolwork seems impossible to make up after an absence. She said her coping strategy is to “just go until I have a little meltdown, and then I have to stop.”
If going to school is so intense, the school must change, not the student. The same logic applies in the workplace. As John W. Budd, professor of work and organizations at the University of Minnesota, told me in an email, mental health days “do not change, or even question, the nature of work that creates excessive stress and other health challenges.” mental”.
So, to fix burnout on a large scale, we need to look at the job itself. Employers must assign manageable workloads with lots of days off built in: Unger said he had seven personal days and 25 vacation days this year, and his employer has few barriers to taking them. As a society, we should also be open to trying new work structures:four-day work weeks, for example, which can reduce burnout without sacrificing productivity. Time off work is a good thing. But workers deserve much better than a mental health day: jobs that don’t test their mental health in the first place.
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