I’m not taking a mental health day today (but I probably should…)

I am a HIGHLY productive person. I encourage people who want work/life balance, but I am not among them. I LOVE working and I want to be working from the moment my brain wakes up to the moment it falls asleep (with breaks throughout for parenting, adventuring, and whatnot, sure) but I love working.

But today is not a highly productive day and I will tell you why.
My brain is irrationally in full-blown danger mode.

See, back in the days when I lived in the jungles of Papua New Guinea in a bamboo house on stilts, I had a fear.
To address my fear with rationality, I asked an experienced colleague what would happen if lightning struck my house.

He said:
Woosh. 🔥

That wasn’t particularly comforting.

So, while many people romanticize the idea of rain on a tin roof, I’d lie in bed awake at night wondering if this was the storm that would make my house go woosh!

Living in fear like that does something to your brain. It rewires it, so that long after you’ve left that situation, your brain remembers: rain on a tin roof is reason to fear

There are 3 major points I want for you to take from this story. 

1. Trauma Impacts Workplace Performance

Yes, my roof patio flooded into my house and it took 10 minutes to solve the problem and 30 minutes to mop up the water. Is it that big of a deal? No! It’s not! 

My brain is acting like it’s in danger of my house being incinerated even though I live in a concrete house. It feels like I’m in danger when I cannot see any danger, which you’d think would allay the fears of the brain, but no, it makes it worse. And that little flooding incident, only redoubled my brain’s vigilance. Every weird sound I can hear above the din of rain on a tin roof could be another catastrophe. I know it’s not true, but I still jump out of my skin when my husband starts making coffee. 

Why am I not getting any work done today? It’s raining. 

This is an awful trigger because there’s not a lot I can do about the weather. (Though I am seriously considering how I will survive rainy season here in Vietnam.)

However, in the workplace, there are many many, many triggers that we can do a whole lot about. Constantly in my work with my own direct reports and with my clients, I’m encountering triggers like:

• Key phrases that bosses are using
• Fear around making mistakes
• Panic around collaboration 

And the moment a team member’s brain goes into danger mode, their thinking brain goes off line. It’s bad for business! But a few strategic questions can pinpoint the trigger and empower us to work around the trigger. 

• Stop using that key phrase
• Explain how the company addresses mistakes (without saying woosh)
• Outline expectations around collaboration and ask about which parts feel hard. 

We can’t control the rain, but most often it’s tiny pivots that make a huge impact on performance, by eliminating unnecessary stressors, so the brain can move out of danger mode into high performance.

2. Mental Health Days can be Legitimate 

Do you know why I should take a mental health day?
Because I’m accomplishing remarkably little.
Because the pressure to perform is literally hurting my brain

1. Because I have a headache now
2. Because it’s not functioning because of stress and more stress doesn’t really resolve the issue
   Because if I would let myself take a break, I could rest, my brain could recover faster than if I continue to abuse it, and I could be back to high productivity faster.

I know a lot of people scoff at mental health days and I understand that the concern is people who are abusing the concept – calling off for every little thing when they need to know how and when to push through feeling a little sad today and get things done. 

That’s why I told you how much I love to work at the beginning of this. That’s not me. And I think we can clearly see how and why I need a mental health day (I mean, I think I laid it out well. Mental processing power isn’t high today. If I failed to illustrate it, consider it a proof of point.) 

Don’t evaluate your team on whether they need a mental health day or not, evaluate them on their performance every other day. I cannot control the rain, but I slay every other day. 

3. The Illusion of Productivity is Counter-Productive 

So why am I not taking a mental health day?

Because I was raised in a society that values the wrong metrics of productivity – it values hours at the office rather than the quality of the deliverables.

Countless research studies have pointed to more sleep, less hours, more physical movement, greater autonomy, more trust as what most positively affects the bottomline of companies, but when push comes to shove – obsessed with productivity as we are, we refuse to take the steps to amplify our productivity in favor of the illusion of short term gains.

I know the conversations are around these grand gestures like summer Fridays or switch to a 4 day workweek, but I’m not here for the grand gestures. I’m mostly about the little ones. 

There are tiny things we can do that make a monumental difference. When leaders can notice their team shifting into that danger mode,
they can ask the right questions to identify triggers so that
they can make the smallest viable pivots that “turn off the rain” so that
their team members can shift from the danger zone to high productivity and
they crush their goals driving that bottom line.

It all starts with noticing.