During Labor Day weekend I noticed a local restaurant was shut down with a sign on its door that read, “We will be closed on Labor Day so our staff can enjoy some time off.” Our favorite gelato place also closes down for a few weeks in the winter to give the staff some “much-needed rest.”
This always makes me smile because being a child of the '80s, I remember when a lot of stores were shut down on Sundays and people valued it. Fast forward to being a career woman in the late '90s to early 2000s and my company was open on Easter. Then, the whole Black Friday thing went on steroids and service workers were expected to work on Thanksgiving to accommodate the early shoppers.
Now in 2021, after COVID knocked us all around quite a bit, it looks to me like people are realizing what’s important and what isn’t.
In short, taking care of yourself and your mental and physical health trump everything else. And for moms, having enough left over to care for our families is essential. We can’t do that if we are constantly hustling, working our fingers to the bone, and thinking that we have to check every single work email as soon as it hits our phone.
Some people are so irritated about a restaurant being closed on their day off, but what about the workers?
They deserve to have some time off, too. We’ve grown to think that working (only) 40 hours a week is for the unmotivated. We glorify those who put in 60-plus hours. We are constantly praising those who get all their stuff done regardless of the state they are in.
We are praised if we come into work the day after a loved one's funeral or a surgery. And if we voice that we need more time off, we are viewed as a slacker, weak, and someone who isn’t driven.
We need to normalize taking more time off.
We need to normalize that it’s more than OK to take mental health days.
We need to normalize that we don’t have to be deathly ill or deeply suffering to take a day off.
I don’t know anyone who would say the five-day work week is working for them really well.
We are scrambling on our days off to catch up on life, then we are returning right back to work. The breaks are few and far between. We are taking work with us everywhere we go, thanks to our devices, and it’s affecting our health.
We suffer from intense burnout and feel guilty about relaxing when really, all we need is some extra downtime. It shouldn’t be something we feel we have to fight for.
I applaud small businesses for shutting down a few days a year.
I’m sure their employees appreciate it and they return to work feeling more refreshed than they would have if they had not had that time off.
I know it’s not possible for every business to shut down for a day. But it is possible for us not to travel everywhere feeling like we have to be glued to our phones and be working every hour of every day.
It is possible for us to put our physical and mental health first and let go of guilt and take every drop of time off we can.
It is possible for employers to recognize their employees work better if they feel appreciated and aren’t expected to be working themselves into the ground without enough time off, personal or otherwise.
