A mental health day works best when you treat it with the same intention you’d give a sick day for a fever: rest, recovery, and doing things that actually help your body reset. That means resisting the urge to fill the day with errands or scroll through your phone for eight hours. The goal is to lower your stress levels, restore your energy, and return to your routine feeling noticeably better than when you stepped away.
Spend Time Outside, Even Briefly
One of the most effective things you can do on a mental health day is get outside. Spending 20 to 30 minutes in a natural setting produces the biggest drop in cortisol, your body’s primary stress hormone. That doesn’t require a hike or a trip to a national park. A walk through a neighborhood with trees, sitting in a garden, or even spending time in a park near your home counts. The key is immersion: leave your headphones out, look around, and let your attention shift at its own pace.
If you can extend that time, even better. But if the day feels heavy and getting outside sounds like a lot, even a short walk around the block gets your body moving and your nervous system out of fight-or-flight mode.
Calm Your Nervous System on Purpose
Stress keeps your body in a state of high alert, and a mental health day is your chance to actively reverse that. Several simple techniques stimulate the vagus nerve, the long nerve that runs from your brain to your gut and controls your body’s ability to calm down.
- Slow, deep breathing. Inhale as deeply as you can, hold for five seconds, then exhale slowly. Repeat for several minutes, watching your belly rise and fall. This directly activates the calming branch of your nervous system.
- Cold water on your face. Splashing cold water on your face or holding a cold pack against your face and neck for a few minutes slows your heart rate and redirects blood flow. It sounds odd, but the effect is fast and noticeable.
- Humming, singing, or chanting. Your vagus nerve runs through your throat and vocal cords. Humming a song, chanting a single word, or just singing in the shower creates vibrations that help calm your body from the inside out.
- Gentle movement. Yoga, stretching, or any slow, relaxed movement paired with deep breathing helps reset your heart rate and breathing patterns. This isn’t the day for an intense workout unless that genuinely feels restorative to you.
- Laughing. A real belly laugh stimulates the vagus nerve too. Watch a comedy special, call the friend who always makes you laugh, or revisit a movie that reliably cracks you up.
You don’t need to do all of these. Pick one or two that appeal to you and give them real time.
Nap Strategically
If you’re exhausted, sleep. But how long you nap matters. A nap under 20 minutes boosts alertness for a couple of hours afterward without making you groggy or disrupting your sleep that night. If you have time for a longer rest, aim for about 90 minutes, which allows you to complete a full sleep cycle and wake up from a lighter stage of sleep.
The danger zone is around 60 minutes. Waking up in the middle of deep sleep causes significant grogginess that can make you feel worse than before you lay down. Set an alarm for either 20 minutes or 90, and you’ll avoid that heavy, disoriented feeling.
Eat Foods That Actually Help
What you eat on a mental health day can either support your recovery or undermine it. A few nutrients are particularly useful when your body is stressed.
Protein matters more than you might think. The hormones and brain chemicals that make up your stress response are built from amino acids, which come from protein. Eggs, salmon, sardines, chicken, tofu, and beans are all solid choices. Magnesium helps with both sleep and anxiety, and you’ll find it in leafy greens, salmon, and dark chocolate. About 90% of your body’s serotonin is produced in your gut, so foods that support gut health, like yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, and high-fiber fruits and vegetables, can improve your mood from the bottom up.
If you want something warm and calming, chamomile or peppermint tea contains an amino acid called L-theanine that produces a calming effect by supporting brain chemicals that reduce anxiety. Green tea has the same compound combined with a small amount of caffeine, which can gently sharpen your focus without the jitteriness of coffee.
Step Away From Your Phone
You don’t need a full “dopamine detox,” which isn’t actually how brain chemistry works. Your brain needs dopamine to function normally, and you can’t meaningfully reduce it in a day. But taking a deliberate break from social media, news, and the constant pull of notifications does something important: it removes the cycle of stimulation that keeps your stress response active.
Try putting your phone in another room for a few hours, or at least turning off notifications. The point isn’t deprivation. It’s giving your attention a chance to rest. Read a physical book, cook something, sit outside and do nothing. Notice what your mind does when it isn’t being pulled toward a screen every few minutes.
Do Something That Feels Like Play
Mental health days shouldn’t feel like a clinical protocol. Once you’ve rested and given your body a chance to come down from stress, do something that genuinely brings you pleasure. That might be drawing, playing a video game, gardening, baking, organizing a room that’s been bothering you, or rewatching a favorite show. The only rule is that it should feel chosen, not obligatory.
This is especially important if your burnout comes from a sense that everything in your life is a task. Doing something purely because you want to, with no productive outcome, reminds your brain what it feels like to not be “on.”
Recognizing When You Need One
Burnout is common. A 2024 poll from the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that 54% of mid-level employees and 40% of entry-level employees reported burnout symptoms. If you’re wondering whether you need a mental health day, the fact that you’re asking is often the answer.
Specific signals include feeling unmotivated or exhausted by demands that didn’t used to drain you, being more irritable or short-tempered for no obvious reason, sleeping poorly, feeling more anxious or sad than your baseline, or noticing that you’re reaching for alcohol or other substances more often. A drop in productivity despite trying harder is another reliable sign. These aren’t character flaws. They’re symptoms of a nervous system that hasn’t had time to recover.
Asking for the Day Off
You don’t need to explain your mental health to your employer. Saying you need to handle a personal matter is enough. If your workplace is generally supportive of mental health, you can be more direct, but you’re never obligated to share a diagnosis or detailed reasoning.
For people dealing with ongoing mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, or dissociative disorders, the Family and Medical Leave Act provides job-protected leave for serious health conditions, including mental health conditions that cause occasional periods of incapacity and require treatment at least twice a year. Employers can ask for a certification from a healthcare provider, but they cannot require a specific diagnosis. They also cannot discourage you from taking protected leave or threaten to disclose information about your mental health condition.
A single mental health day typically falls under standard sick leave or PTO policies rather than FMLA, but knowing your rights matters if you’re dealing with a pattern of burnout or a chronic condition that needs more sustained support.