More Than Anxiety

Ep - 78 Making The Most of Mental Health Days

• Megan Devito • Episode 78

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When you're busting your butt at work, 
covering for slackers, 
taking on more than you can handle, 
and missing out on family time, 
it makes sense that you feel overwhelmed, burnt out, and resentful. 

And that you might need a mental health day. 

Sometimes you need a break to recharge and take care of yourself. 

But when you’re using them the wrong way, 
mental health days can backfire and make you feel even worse.

Check out Episode 78 of the More Than Anxiety Podcast to hear more about Maximizing Your Mental Health Days so you're truly solving the problems that are making you miserable and not making yourself more anxious and stressed in the future.


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You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I'm the Life Coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 78. My name is Megan and I am really glad you're here this week for this episode. If it's your first episode, welcome, I'm so glad you're here. If you are back for more, you know that I love having you around, so thanks for coming back this week.

Megan Devito:

I want to talk to you guys about mental health days, about how they might be incredibly necessary and incredibly beneficial for you, or how they might just be making everything a heck of a lot worse. We're going to go ahead and dive in. What I want to start with is this general blanket statement that I know that we do things with good intentions with our mental health and that a lot of the things that we do feel really helpful, but they're actually counterproductive. Mental health days are one of those things. They've been in the news a lot lately. When we talk about managing workplace stress or school stress, depending on where you are if you're working in a corporate environment, if you are a high school or a college student you're probably feeling the pressure, because there is a lot of it out there.

Megan Devito:

I'm going to start by just admitting that I give my kids a couple of mental health days from school every year. I have since they were in kindergarten. I have four kids. My oldest is 23, and he can tell you that, starting when they were really little, I would give them two, maybe three days where, if they just were not able to go, for whatever reason either, they were overwhelmed from something that happened, they were exhausted and they needed to get caught up from sleep. I let them stay home and they haven't abused it. Even my kid, who really is not a fan of school at all, I can always tell when he's just like, yeah, I just don't want to be there, versus I really need a day, and he'll be honest about it. I am 100% a fan of mental health days, but you're going to learn in this episode that there's a right way and a wrong way to use those days. Let's make them work for you.

Megan Devito:

We're going to talk about how mental health days can do more harm and good and actually make you more stressed out and overwhelmed and more anxious, or how they can be something that you use to improve, to change situations, to change your mindset and to help you fall in love with your job again, to do better on your school, to reconnect with your friends and your coworkers all the things. But I want to start with a little story or an imagination activity where you can kind of picture the story that I'm telling you. My guess is it's going to apply a lot to your own life, whether you're a student or whether you are working in a job. Okay, so here we go. Imagine with - me put yourself into this position. I don't think it's going to be that hard. Let's just imagine that you're working really, really hard at whatever it is that you're doing, and you are doing amazing things at your job or at school.

Megan Devito:

But sometimes it feels like, no matter what you do, it's never enough. Other people who you work with aren't showing up or you end up covering for them. You're taking on more responsibilities than you could possibly manage because you're afraid to say no, and you're missing out on the things that you want to do and that you thought you were going to be able to do because you thought you had this great job or this great schedule. But instead you find out that you're working way more than you thought you were going to have to do. So, instead of being able to have dinner with your family or to hang out with your friends after school, you're working late, not just every once in a while, because you have a big thing coming up, a lot like at least once a week, maybe two or three, or please don't tell me every night during the week, but you're working late more than you should have to. And even though you wanted to go home and make dinner or have dinner with your family, you're just going to stop and pick up fast food and toss it on the table because you're already late and you're exhausted when you get home. When you wake up the next morning, you're already stressed about going back to school or back to work before you ever leave the house, because you know you're just gonna have to do it all again.

Megan Devito:

Here's what happens. You don't want to be one of those people who never shows up or calls in last minute and leaves everybody in a lurch. But you're on the verge of crumbling. So you do. You just call in sick and you decide you have to take a mental health day. You go back to bed and you get some really decent sleep until about 10:30 when you finally get up and you're feeling like, oh, my gosh I really needed that, I should probably check my email. So you open your laptop or you grab your phone, whatever and you check your messages, and all of a sudden you notice that, oh my god, my chest feels tight and my throat feels bad again. Like, oh, I hate this feeling, I know this feeling.

Megan Devito:

So you shut the lid and you put your phone down and you grab a snack and a blanket and you make your way to the couch to watch TV and not too long into like the second episode of your show, your phone starts to blow up because you're getting texts from your coworkers or from your classmates about this project that you've been working on and they're asking you questions about your perspective. Or, hey, what do you think we should do? And could you just jump on a call with me? So your heart starts to do that thing again and it's getting really hard to breathe, and you just send back this really quick answer to their questions and you promise them look, I'll be there tomorrow. But now you just feel guilty too, because you think you let your team down for taking time to rest and the next day you get ready to head back to work or to school and you're still stressing out, but at least you had a little chance to rest and like catch up on Ted Lasso.

Megan Devito:

And you're also feeling anxious about what your boss or your teacher will say, or maybe if your coworkers or your teammates are upset with you and you think you have to make up for all of this, for all of the problems that you caused by staying home. And so you just go ahead and plan to stay late again. Nothing has changed, other than you had some good naps that you really obviously needed. So you agree to stay late and you make it through the conversation with your boss about how you're feeling, you told them that you must have had a little bit of a bug, because you didn't want to actually tell them how overwhelmed you are by your job, or by your projects or your classmates, or that you're to a point that you're so burnt out that you've lost your creativity and you dread coming in the next day before you ever leave the day that you're on Like you're just looking forward to more dread.

Megan Devito:

By the time you finally leave, you're exhausted again and you're on the verge of tears and you feel like you made a huge mistake by staying home and taking that mental health day. You needed that mental health day, but it didn't help. It actually made you feel worse. So what was the point? Nothing was solved. So you go back to the same job or the same class with the same stressors and the same thoughts about what's expected of you, about what you should do or what you can't do, and you have the same mindset day after day after day, and a few weeks later you've got to call off again for another mental health day. And really, sleeping always helps. Ice cream is great, it's like a miracle drug. But now you notice that you're anxious at home too about going back in, because that feeling you used to get when you were overthinking or overwhelmed at work or at school has spread into your home life and you're convinced that you're trapped. So you call on the next day too, because it's better to be anxious at home than it is at work or at school, and at least you can sleep. What the heck are you supposed to do? Here's what's going on. Using mental health days the right way.

Megan Devito:

That means taking a mental health day and doing what you need to do to take care of your actual mental health. It means taking time off to prioritize your mental health or to recharge your battery, not just with sleeping, s leeping is great, but also with exercise, or by meditating or journaling or getting coached or going to therapy, and taking time to address all of the thoughts or the situations that are making you feel stressed or anxious to begin with. It's time that you take to be proactive so that you can prevent burnout from getting worse by figuring out where you need to set and hold boundaries on how long you're at work or what you say yes or no to. And you might notice you're staying up late to have time to yourself and you're coming up with ways to make a long time a priority. Or maybe you're lonely and you need more connection.

Megan Devito:

Whatever it is that's causing you to need that mental health day, use that mental health time to take care of yourself and come up with real solutions. Schedule in that time that you can be alone that's not at midnight. Schedule in time where you can take care of yourself. You just need 15 minutes to be able to journal or clear my head during the day. But you have to make that happen, and when you're just avoiding it all together, you're not really solving the problem.

Megan Devito:

When you're taking mental health days and you're not looking for a solution to the things that are burning you out or the things that are causing you to feel overwhelmed, or why you're always staying late, you're just using them as a crutch. . Maybe to avoid the things that make you feel anxious, or just to avoid having to solve problems because it's going to be uncomfortable. And there's another example of how this could be. It could be that you're going to take a mental health day because you feel off or you feel anxious during the day, and maybe that happened for a really logical reason. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you have a little too much fun over the weekends and you didn't get enough sleep. Good for you. That sounds amazing, but it makes a lot of sense that you feel overwhelmed or anxious because you're tired.

Megan Devito:

Or, on the other hand, maybe there's a performance review at work or a difficult conversation coming up that's maybe making you feel anxious and instead of preparing for the conversation or the presentation, you just avoid it by staying home from work, or you avoid taking care of yourself in ways that would get you to work even when you're feeling anxious, by creating ways that you can calm your body down, or learning to question your thoughts or to get grounded so that you can stay, feel uncomfortable and anxious, and teach yourself that you're actually safe there. These are avoidance behaviors and even though they feel like you've dodged a bullet, they're actually making everything worse. It's just an attempt to escape from a responsibility that you might have or a feeling of anxiousness all the time, without actually working towards resolving that problem or learning how to handle how you feel or what you think and what's actually causing the problem to begin with. So using a mental health day as a crutch will make you more overwhelmed. You still have the problem waiting for you. You'll feel more anxious because you've taught your brain that there's actually something to avoid. The people pleasing is still going to happen because you haven't learned or practice holding the boundaries or setting the boundaries. Whatever it is, it will be worse, rather than better, because you're not solving the problem. It just creates a cycle of avoiding things and telling your brain to react faster to make the fear bigger and more real, and you end up missing more work, losing more money and potentially, your job, which really makes you even more anxious and stressed out about things. So you have to find a balance and use those mental health days responsibly. To do this, you have to know when you genuinely need time to rest and to work on yourself, versus when you might be using it as a temporary escape from situations or people that make you feel. However, it is that you feel.

Megan Devito:

When I'm working with people who feel anxious about going to work or about being at work or at school, we start by coming up with a list of things that they think make them anxious, because sometimes we think it's one thing, but it's actually something else entirely. So, everything from having to manage other people, having to fill in for people who aren't showing up, not wanting to be a micro manager, maybe being afraid to create and hold those boundaries and have difficult conversations this could also be unrealistic expectations that they have for themselves or maybe for their boss or the people who they're in charge of Whatever it is, we start with saying, okay, tell me all the things that you think are the problem. Lots of times we think we know exactly what the problem is, but it's something else entirely. It's a belief that we have about ourselves that we need to be perfect, that we can't say no, that we can't hold boundaries. We don't want anyone to think we're mean or bad or lazy or whatever the thought is, but we start there and we just get really clear on how they feel when they think those thoughts.

Megan Devito:

How does your body feel when you tell yourself you have to be perfect or your boss is going to fire you? Is that actually true? Notice how your body feels and we learn to use the feeling inside of your body, that feeling that we call alarm or anxiety, as an actual alarm, so that you know that it's time to stop thinking and start feeling your way out. I've said this over and over you will not be able to think your way out of an anxious, stressful mess. Your brain just can't do it.

Megan Devito:

So of course, we come up with ways for you to recenter and get grounded and get calm, even in a situation where you've been anxious and you've been angry and frustrated and stressed out for a long time. We recenter, we get calm and we do a ton of evidence seeking for what you want to believe instead, so we can work on your beliefs about how brilliant you are and how did you land this job to begin with? Oh, you're a creative genius, I see. Okay, so you're really smart. And yeah, you're capable and incredible. God, you're a good manager. I would love to have you for a boss.

Megan Devito:

And we start finding evidence for those things as we change the feelings inside your body and the thoughts that you have about yourself, your coworker, your boss, your jobs. So if you're feeling like it's necessary to miss work because you are overwhelmed, burnt out, exhausted or just mentally flat, message me. I know it feels good to sleep away the suck, but I also know that when you do that, you're going to feel worse and that anxious and stressed out feeling will grow and it will spread to other areas of your life. So let's talk about getting you to a place where you feel confident, where you know that you can say what you need to say, where you trust yourself, and back to the place that made you love your job in the first place or made you love your friends at school or being at school in the first place, and if you never loved being at school or your job, let's talk about ways that you can find it tolerable until something new comes up Graduation, a new opportunity, whatever that looks like but let's come up with a plan so that you don't have to be tired. You can have energy there, you can have space to think and create. You can have a life that you love outside of that place too, and to do this, you can message me on Facebook or Instagram. I am @Coach Megan Devito in both places.

Megan Devito:

You can also go to the show notes and click the link to my calendar and schedule time right now to talk to me about how I can help you. Ok, that's what I have for you today. I hope it was super helpful, and if I don't talk to you on a call this week, I will be back next week with another episode. Take care, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun. You can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon and I'll see you.