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Comment by jpalawaga | Hacker News Reader

No, vacation is paid time off so you can enjoy life. Not so you don’t have a mental breakdown at work.

Put differently, mental health is health too.

A perfectly healthy person can get a cold, need a day or two off, and then be back at 100%. I don't think a day or two off is going to take someone from the verge of a mental breakdown, to 100% mentally healthy. So they're not really equivalent.

>I don't think a day or two off is going to take someone from the verge of a mental breakdown, to 100% mentally healthy.

Fuck this attitude. I've avoided burnout by taking short-notice leave, a day at a time. I have used it to get clothes ready for the next work day, cleanup house, take care of my dog, play video games, or pursue hobbies. It keeps my mental health at a reasonable level. Maybe not 100% but you can't really put a percent on physical health either. And it's easier to take one day to recover(going from e.g. 20% to 80%) than to need months of recovery when you do get totally burned out.

That's been 100% my experience as well. The real choice for me is "do I want to sit in front of my keyboarding spiraling down further and being mostly useless (and feeling guilty about that), or do I want to spend a little time addressing the problem and come back when I can function." Often times even just 3-4 hours is enough to do that. Getting FMLA protection for my chronic health condition has been amazing for that as it removed the guilt I used to feel about taking time, and I'm more productive than I've been in years despite taking a few hours a week. Recovering from burnout is seriously hard and it honestly needs it's own DSM diagnosis at this point.

It’s not normal to recover to 100% from a cold after a couple of days. Well enough to work, sure, but not 100%.

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