Why I Tell My Team I'm Taking a Mental Health Day
How leaders can break the silence around mental health and model psychological safety through honest self-care.
Mental health is still taboo. And that silence is costing people more than productivity—it’s costing them their health, their relationships, and in the worst cases, their lives. That’s not dramatic. That’s realistic.
Being a leader isn’t just about setting the vision or telling people what to do. It’s about demonstrating what good leadership actually looks like. And good leadership requires transparency and psychological safety—not just as concepts you talk about in a team meeting, but as things you model through your own behavior consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable. So let me tell you what that looks like for me.
I have CPTSD, ADHD, and OCD.
I work for a startup approaching its tenth year. That combination is, to put it plainly, a perfect storm for nervous system dysregulation. I have healthy self-care practices, and I work hard to stay regulated. But there are days I wake up and simply cannot give my team what they need because I need to care for myself first. Those days are not frequent, but they happen.
When they do, I don’t log on and say I’m not feeling well. I say: “Hey team, I will not be in today as I need a mental health day. I will see you all tomorrow.” That’s it—no over-explanation, no apology—just honesty. But that honesty doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every other day that I show up, I am demonstrating what taking care of myself actually produces. My team sees the difference. They see a leader who is regulated, present, and able to give them what they need because she is not running on empty. The mental health day only carries weight because of the consistency that surrounds it. Transparency without that track record is just words. Together, they build trust.
What that sentence does is more than give me a day to recover. It signals to my team that it is safe to take care of themselves too. It shows them what sustainable leadership looks like in practice. They don’t see it as flaky or irresponsible because they don’t operate under the false belief that a leader should be available every second of every day. They understand there is a human behind every leader, and that understanding gives them permission to be human too, which ultimately allows them to show up as the best leaders they can be.
This matters more than most organizations want to acknowledge.
According to the World Health Organization, 70% of the U.S. population has experienced at least one trauma, more than 80% of U.S. workers report experiencing work-related stress, and roughly 15% of working-age adults globally are living with a mental disorder. And that data is from 2024—before two more years of global instability, injustice, and collective exhaustion have had their full effect. The numbers have almost certainly grown.
Now imagine being part of that 80%, 70%, or 15% and having no safe person or place to say: I am exhausted. I just need a day. I’ve been there, and I ended up in the hospital.
We are all human. As leaders, we are not perfect. We don’t have all the answers. We don’t know everything. But we do need to show up as regulated as possible, and for that to happen we have to care for ourselves, even when it’s a workday.
Too often, people suffer in silence because they’ve been conditioned to believe that needing rest is weakness. That silence leads to spiraling, degrades your overall health, impacts your family, and sometimes leads to something far worse.
Rest is not a privilege. It is a right.
When I name my mental health day out loud, I am not oversharing. I am leading. I am showing my team that the human behind this leader is someone who takes her own wellbeing seriously—and that they are allowed to do the same.
That is what psychological safety looks like when it moves from conversation to action. Not a policy or a slide in a deck, but a leader being honest and showing her team the way.
What would it mean for your team if they watched you take care of yourself without apology?
