The Power of Mental Health Days

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the underrepresented in tech podcast, where we talk about issues of underrepresentation and have difficult conversations. Underrepresented in tech is a free database with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech.

Hello, Samah.

[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello Michelle.

[00:00:22] Speaker A: How are you?

[00:00:24] Speaker B: I’m good. I’m good.

I’m in the autumn mood.

I like winter here a lot. So I’m cozy and cold. And I’m working from home today because I need a little bit of a break.

Yeah, that’s good. How are you and how was your weekend?

[00:00:47] Speaker A: My weekend was quiet, which was nice.

I did get to go shopping, which is nice.

Shopping is hard if I don’t have a friend to go with me. So my friend Lisa went with me, and she went into the store and brought out the little writing cart so that I could go in and shop and not have to worry. So that was a lot of fun. And then we went and had some dinner together. So that was good. She’s bringing lunch over today for my birthday, so happy birthday. Thank you. 56.

[00:01:14] Speaker B: 56 today. You look like early thirties, so. Yeah. And your soul is, and your soul is in your early twenties, so that’s the most important.

[00:01:24] Speaker A: But my knees are 80 so.

[00:01:28] Speaker B: Mine is 200, believe me. It’s like sometimes when I wake up from bed, I say, like, how is my fifties going to be exactly?

[00:01:38] Speaker A: Well, I was supposed to go away this weekend, but I didn’t get to go because of the hurricane and things that had happened here in the United States. But instead of not taking those days off, I chose to take the days off anyway and give myself a little bit of a staycation because I just needed a mental break. And that’s not news to you because we talk about these things before we start to hit record. But I did send you an article this morning about mental health days and how good a mental health day can be for your mental health, especially when there’s a lot going on in your life. And there’s a lot going on in my life right now. There’s my birthday first, but there’s also, you know, the WordPress ecosystem is experiencing some issues right now, and many people know about that, of course. And so that weighs heavily on a lot of our minds. And, you know, I am a single person, and so with winter coming, I think about, you know, I’m kind of shut in more. I don’t get to go out as much. And that can be a tough thing mentally, and my stepfather is not doing well. And so, you know, yeah, he’s maybe just got maybe a week or two more that the doctors think that he’ll be with us. And so that’s very heavy on my heart as well.

You know, thinking about helping my mother through losing her spouse, you know, thinking about obituaries and funerals and things that will be coming. And so a lot of that is very difficult. And so, taking some time for myself this weekend, and just like, I woke up, I think it was yesterday, I woke up at around ten in the morning, but I didn’t get out of bed until after one in the afternoon. I just laid there and played on my phone. I did some Sudoku, I did some crossword puzzles, I scrolled through our favorite TikTok, you know, all of these things. I doom-scrolled a little bit on Twitter, and then I was like, nope, get out of there. That’s not, you shouldn’t do that on a mental health day.

[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:03:38] Speaker A: And so it just made me think to talk to you today about mental health.

I know we’ve talked about mental health in the past, but specifically, what we can do with a mental health day, why it’s important, and what burnout looks like. So that article, which we’ll, of course, put in the show notes this week, had some really good ideas. So what are your thoughts?

[00:04:03] Speaker B: I totally agree with you. Like, it’s, we should all take a post sometimes when it is too much.

I work from home today because it’s so exhausting for me. Like I said, okay, I’m going to focus on my work, and at the end of the day, I’m gonna cook something nice for myself and go for a walk.

I totally agree that mental health is really crucial. It’s like the influence on our emotional, psychological, our social well-being and everything. And sometimes it’s okay not to be okay, because in my culture where I grew up, you have to keep going. There’s no stop. There’s no taking a break. You have to keep going. I learned in the last three years to stop, to pose, and to take care of myself, to take a break. I’m sorry, my cat is facing his face here. I’m sorry. Like, I was talking seriously, sorry. That’s okay. Also, stress is really, really dangerous because it can cause a lot of psychological and physical effects. Like, if you go check with the doctors, they will. You have energy, are at a low level, cannot focus, and a lot of things can happen out of the stress. It’s really important to stop it because going in the loop to get out of it. It is really difficult. And also burnout. We work in, let’s say, a sector that is one of the sectors that has more burnout than any other carriers.

And yeah, burnout, of course, states of emotional, physical, mental, exhaust, exhaustion getting out of it. It’s not easy to prevent it. It’s much easier. I don’t know about the States.

I was reading when you sent me the article, and I immediately googled a couple of things. I was shocked. The United States and the Netherlands, where I live now, have one of the highest burnout in the world. And I was like, oh, what?

This is crazy. Even at work, with our neighbors, or as a friend, I also start noticing people in their early twenties getting burnt out. And my backward opinion said, twenties, what do you need to worry about? When I was in my twenties, I was really happier than now. But of course, there’s something that causes them stress in life. And I agree, as you said, the world is crazy. The war, everything is happening around you; all of it piles on you with the stress. Personal life, it’s not a nice combination. It’s like feeling like you’re a ticking bomb and taking a day off. It is really important. And as I said earlier, it’s okay not to be. Okay. It’s okay not to be productive. It’s okay for you to take one day. And I’m just like, okay, I’m gonna lay down in bed. I do binge-watch and watch Netflix. Put something I watch 500 times. Just stare. You know, just stare and have a nice quality.

[00:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah. I think you said that we were in our twenties that we didn’t have perhaps the same, but it was different when we were in our twenties too. There was no Internet when I was in my twenties. It was my late twenties when, well, actually, I was 23 when the Internet first came.

I think I was 25 and got my first job outside of family work and things like that at a college. And I remember when the Internet came, and they were like, you’ve got the Internet now. And I was like, I didn’t even know what to look up like.

Who had a website when they first brought the Internet to our kind of thing, which is very different than now? And you didn’t have it. We didn’t have smartphones; we didn’t have all that information just right there, readily available to all of us. And it’s made us more of a 24-hour society, but specifically in it where we work in a global market, you work in a global market. I work in a global market.

If I had my notifications turned on for everything on my phone, it would ping me every minute between Twitter accounts and Slack accounts and Facebook accounts and TikTok and LinkedIn and all of the things, you know, I wake up in the morning, there’s so many notifications across all of my different accounts, everywhere. If I was paying attention to that every single time, excuse me, I’m so tired. Every single time somebody pinged me, you know, or I got a notification, I would be glued to my phone. Twenty-four seven.

And as it is, I’m too much on my phone. I know this, right? I know I am because it’s my connection to the outside world as a single person living alone, you know? And, like, when your husband is on the road, I’m sure you’re probably paying more attention to your phone than when he’s there, and you can talk to him and do things together. Right? And so I think that all of that plays into the mental health issues that we might encounter because we are afraid to miss out on things. We are worried that somebody will message us with something important, and we won’t get it right away. Even though, like, at my company, everybody says everything is asynchronous, you don’t have to reply right away. Like, they’ll put out a so’s if it’s really important and you need to jump right away. Right. But that’s only during your work hours.

And yet, I still feel like if I don’t respond to people quickly, they’ll think poorly of me, and that is not the right way to manage my own mental health and avoid burnout, for sure. And so even though I was like, I’m very proud of myself because I did very little slack over the last six days, I still have notifications of direct messages and mentions on my screen right now that I can see down there in the lower corner of my computer that I haven’t looked at yet. Number one, I didn’t want to look at them and forget to return to them. Number two, I really wanted to not work during those days. It was important to me to binge-watch, do Sudoku, do crossword puzzles, and do those things that actually make me happy. Saturday, I took my cameras out. I drove to the wildlife refuge. The cameras died very quickly. I don’t know what was wrong with my batteries. I got, like, maybe five shots. I haven’t even looked at them yet. And there wasn’t a whole lot of wildlife, but it’s still. I was out driving around in nature for like 4 hours or more, you know, and then I drove through and got myself something for dinner on the way home and enjoyed a big old hamburger because I don’t make those by myself, you know, it’s just like, it’s too much to make a hamburger for one person kind of thing. Yeah, it’s like, got a Wendy’s big, juicy hamburger. Like, those are the things that at the end of that day, I was like, I may not have got the photos that I was hoping to get, but, man, did it just feel good to get out of my condo, to get into some. Not just in my little town, but an hour and a half away to drive through and to see the birds, even though they weren’t the ones I wanted to photograph, you know, those kinds of things. It was windy. There was. There was fresh air. Like all of those. Those things were just so good for my mental health, you know? I came home to messages from my mother that my stepfather was not doing well, and they signed the DNR for him and all of those things.

And so life is difficult, but if you can make yourself step away from it for an hour, for half a day, for a day, or even plan a week, even if you can’t afford to go someplace, do a staycation where you just maybe, you know, see things that are local to you or even just stay home and binge Game of Thrones again or something, you know, equally terrible.

But it’s so important.

[00:12:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. When you talk about Slack, I have the same opinion. I have Slack on my phone. Once I deleted Slack from my phone, I felt like I had lost a leg or an arm. You know, this is like, I feel unconnected. And yeah, you have the pressure that you need to apply fast.

Of course, now, everything is online in the world. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever. And you have to stay connected to stay up to date with the news. What’s happening in this, what’s happening in that, and now, of course, what’s happening in the worldwide, you need to stay up to date. It’s very stressful. At the same time, this is our life. Like, I wish I could go back to my early twenties. I remember that in my early twenties, I had a Facebook account. Super excited. I was checking it once a week.

Now I check my Twitter every time I make coffee, walk, or do stuff. And yeah, it is your connection to the world. At the same time, it’s so stressful and handy, but very stressful because you feel you need to answer. And I worked and lived in a lot of places. People like it when they WhatsApp you. Sometimes, I feel too exhausted emotionally to reply. And it’s especially if someone wants to go into deep conversation. If they sent me this article, how would you be? And they share the news. I feel guilty, and I notice it now. I’m trying to change it. It’s like. And now I say, let’s have a call because it’s emotionally less stressful than when you write it.

[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yes.

[00:13:43] Speaker B: Before, like three, four months, I don’t reply. And they’re really good friends, and they ask again and again. And then I would reply, I’ve been busy, but I was mentally exhausted from picking up the phone. And because every day we communicate in Slack, we communicate in emails, we communicate, I think, here information here and there. And at the end of the day, I want to shut down. I just want to put the stupid show on TV. I watched The Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, and I’m ashamed of it.

Just watch it, you know, like something in the background. What? A horror movie which I love. And, watch horror movies which makes me relax, which I know.

[00:14:22] Speaker A: Very weird.

[00:14:23] Speaker B: Very weird.

[00:14:24] Speaker A: I know, I love it. I love it. Sometimes, we’ll have to discuss what horror movies you like the best. But that’s for another day.

[00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah.

It is really important to stop and say, I’m not okay or need to push. The only thing I hate is that people keep asking you about it. Like, yeah, it’s when you take a day off, you say, I’m not feeling well; I want to take it off. Then the message is after, how do you feel today? How? Some people are nice and friendly and want to support you. But when you feel that the question asked a couple of times, you feel like, like the pity look that you being kind of a little bit like, should we worry about you? And that. That word kills me. Like, I’m fine; I’m not going to do anything. I’m fine. It’s just one time off with myself. That’s why I don’t know; I separate my worlds, which is why I have devised this method during 8 hours or 9 hours at work. I just, I’m going to be happy. If someone makes a joke, I’m going to laugh. If there’s chocolate, I’m going to eat it.

I’m going to bother my colleague Ty. So I’m going to annoy typo. I’m going to do this. I’m going to go with an about. I’m going to just go around fully. After that, I just give myself 1 hour every day. Suppose I’m sad if I want to cry, and even sometimes if I want to listen to a sad song and cry about it. Just let go of the energy. But every day, for 9 hours, I just focus my full positivity and give the best of it. And at the end of the day, I just let it go down. Whatever, whatever happened. Yeah, it is.

We have a really good healthcare system here for those who are burned out or need help. And I hope that sometimes people worldwide will have the same support you can get here.

[00:16:23] Speaker A: I wish they did too. I wish I did.

The US.

[00:16:31] Speaker B: The health care system is good, but for me, sometimes challenging. May I prepare what I’m going to say in Dutch, because, come on, like even your language, sometimes the medication or what the doctor said, like need to pose? What are you talking about? For me, it’s an exhausting trip. So I prepare before I go.

[00:16:52] Speaker A: I am. I went to the doctor about two weeks ago and started some new medications for high blood pressure. And they gave me a medication for fibromyalgia that is also an antidepressant, anti-anxiety. I’m feeling a little better, which is a good thing, which is a very good thing. And I do want to mention that it isn’t only negative things that can cause us stress and anxiety. Positive things do, too. Right? So if you have a baby, that is something that’s very stressful, even though it’s joyous. If you move into a new home, that’s exciting, but it’s also very stressful. New jobs, new bosses, getting married, you know, getting divorced. Like, for me, getting divorced was a happy thing, but it was also very stressful.

All of those things, whether they’re negative or positive in your life, can still cause you to be burned out, to have anxiety, to have depression, to be stressed. And so I just want to acknowledge that too, because sometimes when things are going really well, you feel anxious, stressed, and depressed, and then you start to feel guilty about those emotions as well. And, you know, whatever your emotions are around something is valid. It’s your own psyche, your own body’s reaction to what’s happening in your life. And so don’t feel guilty about being sad or happy or any of those things because that will only compound the issues that you’re experiencing if you also start to feel guilty about it.

Yeah. So guard your burnout for sure.

And pay attention to mental health. I was just going to look at this article that we had and see if it says that the benefits of a mental health day are clearing your mind, having fun, and doing things you enjoy. For me, photography and legos. I just got another Lego set this weekend.

[00:18:45] Speaker B: Nice.

[00:18:47] Speaker A: I know it’s a point setup. I have it for the holiday.

Improve your sleep quality, process your emotions, promote relaxation, and reduce stress. And last week, I didn’t even know this until I saw this today. Last week was World Mental Health Day. World Mental Health Day is October 10 every year, so we’ll have to remember to celebrate that next year, too. Thank you. But the signs of burnout, you really have to pay attention to that because signs of burnout can include decreased motivation or performance, negative thoughts about yourself or others, and physical and mental exhaustion. But they might look different for you than they look for me. We can all experience stress and things a little bit differently. And how we process those are different as well. You can reset your perspective a little bit. You can rest and take a step back to evaluate by taking time off work or school if you need to relax. Some things you can do. Or maybe go to a yoga class. It’s not my thing, but other people like it. Getting a massage.

[00:19:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yoga. I don’t know. Who enjoyed, who enjoys yoga? Me. I don’t like it.

I’m forcing myself to do it. So now. Nope, nope.

[00:19:56] Speaker A: You could go for a swim or take a walk or, like I do, just go for a drive. Right. You could maybe eat something healthy or maybe treat yourself to an ice cream I. Something that is one of those things that you enjoy that helps you kind of break that pattern. So whatever it is for you who are listening, and you, Sama, and me, Michelle, whatever it is that brings joy and helps you take a step back and center yourself, ground yourself, whatever words you use for that, I encourage you to do that.

And I hope so many people listen to our podcast that next week everybody’s taking a day off to help themselves.

[00:20:32] Speaker B: I don’t think the companies will like us, but anyway, go for it.

[00:20:39] Speaker A: But Michelle and Samantha said, too, if you’re listening and you have other ideas, tell us on Twitter. Send us a message. If there are ideas of ways that you find relaxing and ways to de-stress and avoid burnout, we’re happy to share those with others as well.

We really do hope for the best for everybody. We talked about the wars that affect our community that have been going on for over a year now affect your family. I don’t have personal connections except through you, but friends in all those places, and that weighs heavily on everybody. And those are things that we can’t. And there’s the election here in the United States, which is very stressful. Only three weeks left, thank goodness.

Depending on who wins, you will feel, you know, if you live here and even if you live elsewhere, it will affect you. Especially if your own candidate, the one you want to win, doesn’t win. It can be very stressful for you and can cause a lot of stress over time, too. So be careful with your mental health. That’s my message: take the time you need to feel good, do the best that you can, not dwell on the negative, and avoid burnout.

[00:22:02] Speaker B: And I will add, I want to make you laugh slightly. I want to say, find someone for me. A woman is successful with kids, married, happy, thin, sleeping well, and athletic. And she’s in a good mood and good mental health. And we can find the unicorn.

[00:22:23] Speaker A: That’s right. She also does all the baking for the bake sales at school and runs the carpool.

[00:22:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And then she’s a successful businesswoman.

It’s impossible to have it all, but it’s okay to have it all and to take care of ourselves.

[00:22:41] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:22:41] Speaker B: And I love it. Maybe next year I’m going to take the 10 October. It’s a day off. I’m not going to go sick. I’m just going to treat myself nicely. Yeah.

[00:22:53] Speaker A: Perfect. All right. Well, I don’t know what we’ll talk about next week, but it’ll be something good, too. We hope that what we say every week positively affects those who listen. And, yeah, send us your ideas. We’re happy to talk about the things that matter.

[00:23:09] Speaker B: Bye-bye.

[00:23:13] Speaker A: If you’re interested in using our database, joining us as a guest for an episode, or just saying hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.