Mental health challenges hold workers, and the economy, back. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression, anxiety, and stress cost the global economy nearly $1 trillion yearly in lost production. Increasingly, employers have found that the best way to combat these losses is to give workers a new benefit: mental health days.

While mental health challenges may not always be as visible as other kinds of illnesses, they also require time to heal and need to be treated in a serious manner. For instance, Stress and anxiety can be just as paralyzing as the flu. In fact, flu-like symptoms are common symptoms of anxiety disorder. It can be easy to accept mental health challenges like anxiety as “normal,” but workers should be empowered to take their mental health seriously.

Here’s why all organizations should offer mental health days:

“Prevention is better than cure.” This phrase from the Dutch philosopher Erasmus is nearly 500 years old, but it still holds today. A mental health day can help prevent an employee from burning out. Burnout can lead to missed workdays or even more severe issues.

Refreshed employees are also more productive. Psychologists often use the Yerkes-Dodson law to explain the relationship between stress and performance. The Yerkes-Dodson law looks like a standard bell curve where the x-axis represents employee performance and the y-axis shows employee stress. 

What’s more, research shows that mental health days directly reduce healthcare costs. Industry giant Cigna released a 2021 study demonstrating this. Ultimately, the study found that proactively managing mental health, including common conditions like depression and anxiety, decreased healthcare costs by $1,377 per person per year; and an average of $3,109 every two years. 

Mental stress can often lead to physical stress. Allowing employees to have time to reduce their mental stress helps them stay physically healthy, reducing the number of workdays missed due to illness. 

When an employee’s workplace causes stress, it can become a vicious cycle. Dealing with stress from work is bad enough, but compound that with a fear of being reprimanded for taking time off to recover, and workers’ mental health challenges could worsen.