That is, do you have to be on the verge of collapse and borderline (or actually) suicidal? Or is it enough to wake up and find that it’s rainy and dark and you just don’t really want to get out of bed yet.
How do you spend them? Catching up on errands or tasks around the house? bundling up in a blanket burrito to watch movies and recharge? Going out to have fun?
What do you tell your boss? Do you tell them you’re sick? Or just that you’re not coming in (and if this is the case, what would you tell them if they asked why?) or do you straight-up tell them that you’re taking a mental health day?
And finally, does the job itself make a difference? Like, do you have the kind of job where it would really screw things up or take a lot of arranging to cover you if you’re not there or do you have the kind of job where you can easily work from home or miss a day and it’s no big deal? Does it make a difference in the decision to take the day off?
Usually about once a year so I can attend a club meeting. My current job is 18:00-23:00 so anything like a weeknight event is basically never. I usually pick a day I know is going to be slow; for me slow days are worse mentally than getting slammed.
Did you read the Ethicist in the Times Magazine today? One of the questions was from a person who every month or so wakes up so screwed up that he or she can’t go to work. The question was about whether this person should tell the boss the real reason for taking off, or continue to lie that it was a physical ailment.
For me, never. If I got stressed I could take a vacation day in advance. Now that I’m retired I can stay in bed as long as I want to, or until my wife or the dog kicks me out.
I take a mental health day once every few years, usually after I’ve had a very stressful day at work (more often involving colleagues than patrons). I just call in and say I’m sick and can’t come in today. Then I stay home and play ukulele until my fingers hurt.
I try very hard to limit it to once or twice a year and make it a generic “I’m sick and can’t come in today” call. When my mental health was worse several years ago it was frequent enough to negatively impact my job, and I do what I can to avoid that happening again. What I try to do instead is monitor my stress and general mental health and request a vacation day or two every couple of months. The company I work for only lets us keep 40 hours from one year to the next, and anything over that just goes away January 1st, so there’s no good reason to even try to stockpile it anyway.
As for what I do… if I’m so bad that I can’t bring myself to go to work, I’m probably not in a “go out and have fun” kind of mood and likely not feeling up to trying to catch up on chores (more work). I’ll generally putter around the house, read, watch some movies or something, and basically just try to de-stress and be okay again. It’s not all that different from a typical day of being sick (cold, flu, etc).
I’m lucky that I know my boss well enough for him to know I struggle with mental health and anxiety-related insomnia and that I will sometimes have days where I literally didn’t sleep the night before and will occasionally need to take time off. He knows me well enough to know that I won’t try to take advantage of him and I do my best to make up for anything I miss. It’s not as bad when I have a project with approved overtime, so I can just start work at 3AM when I’ve given up on sleep.
I probably take one a year, on average, but it’s never spontaneous: it’s more like the stars align such as that I feel like there’s a day where everything I planned to do, a sub could do just as well. This is really really rare, but when it happens, I call a sub with no regrets. I was really mad the other day when I had a ton of kids absent because of a terrible confluence of field trips. If I’d realized how useless the day would be, I would have called a sub.
But I always plan it in advance and I always leave clear plans. I’ve never had a day where I woke up just so depressed and upset that I couldn’t go in. I am grateful for that.
ETA: I am always upfront that I am taking a personal day.
Running my own company, I never cancel a scheduled job. If I don’t have anything on the schedule and feel like taking the day off I do. I’ll give my employees the option of various busy work or taking it off themselves.
There is always a list of paperwork, vehicle maintenance, organization or cleaning to do. Sometimes I’d rather just go hiking.
When I was last working for a large corporate employer, in 6 years I never took a sick or vacation day. Sick time was paid out yearly and I could put in for vacation time and still work, doubling my paycheck that week. Looking back, the extra money was nice, but I should have taken more time for myself.
Not often. We get 12 sick days a year but if you take more than an undisclosed amount they start coming down on you. I’m paranoid I’ll use a day that I’ll next for a bad illness later in the year. It’s changed for new hires so I can bank some unused sick time and get paid for it when I retire so there is some incentive to not call out.
Back when I was depressed, I was loathed to take off from work. But it’s not because I’m a virtuous hard worker. It’s because my depression would then be mixed with guilt for missing work. And anxiety too. I’d be afraid to leave the house lest I bump into my boss and be forced to explain why I wasn’t bed-ridden. Plus, staying in bed in my PJ’s all day always makes me feel worse about myself. The only times I would call in sick were when insomnia had robbed me of four or more hours of sleep the night before. Physical fatigue seemed more like a valid excuse than psychological fatigue to me.
But now I’m much saner and I understand how much of a fool I was. One of the best benefits of my job is that I can take off work without having to explain why. So if I wake up and just don’t feel like my attitude is suitable for the workplace, I’ll just email my boss, tell him I’m not coming in, and then deduct 8 hours from my bank of family/personal leave. I figure that’s why I have it, so why not use it?
I have a lot of leeway to work from home. At worst, Monday through Thursday I have to be on site at a client (although haven’t in over a year) so Friday would be a work from home day.
Like monstro, I tend to get a bit anxious and depressed if I work from home too much. Not guilt so much, but more anxious that my company doesn’t have anything important enough for me to do to require to either come to the office or travel anywhere. But after three years, I keep getting raises and no complaints so I guess it’s ok.
With no notice? Never. We can take just about any days off that we want to, provided we ask two weeks in advance. Any time I have called out without warning has been when I have felt unwell.
I usually take one afternoon off per season to go to the ball park. I’m less than two miles from Nationals Park, so I can leave half an hour before first pitch. I try not to take more than one mental health day or school year. I probably won’t take any this year, since I missed 3 days with the flu and 4 following a nasty fall that left me bedridden for most of a week. I 've never come close to that sick day total before.
I feel like almost everyone in this thread is defining “mental health day” completely differently than I normally see it used. When someone I know refers to taking a mental health day they are talking about taking an unscheduled day off when they are not feeling physically ill and that is unrelated to any diagnosable mental health issue. It’s the day they call in because the weather is too beautiful to be at work or too miserable to leave the house (but not so bad as to make commuting difficult). Or because they wake up and cannot.stand.one.more day of the aggravation/stress at work.
I’m sure there are lots of times people can tell they are getting stressed and arrange in advance to take a day off- but I’ve never heard someone call that a mental health day. They just call it a vacation day or a personal day.
About every other year. It’s usually a beautiful spring day, when I just can’t stand the idea of being inside. I don’t take it off if I know there are big projects, or if I know a co-worker is out, but once in a while, it’s just to nice to go into the office.