It may not come as a surprise, but the nursing workplace and profession is filled with occupation stress.

This has become a serious problem, as more nurses are starting to suffer from mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety. This could be caused by the unrelenting requirements of the trade.

A study conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative (INQRI) has shown that nurses experience clinical depression at twice the rate of the general public. In other words, while depression affects around 9% of the general population, this debilitating mental disorder affects approximately 18% of nurses.

Nursing is a complicated field: providing care to complete strangers, who do not know your circumstances and other responsibilities, can require equal amounts of energy, patience, dedication, and knowledge. The stress and requirements of the job can also make nurses prone to developing mental disorders.

In fact, nurses have to participate in “survival culture” to secure their place. Nurses have to constantly deal with precarious work conditions such as being understaffed, withstanding verbal and physical harassment by patients and doctors, and working long, 16-hour shifts, sometimes back-to-back. All of these conditions can weigh heavily on someone’s psyche and can place nurses under a state of permanent duress.

These disorders also seriously hinder a nurse’s performance in the workplace. In other words, a depressed or anxious nurse may have difficulties concentrating on the job, communicating with their peers, managing their time, and providing adequate care to their patients. These factors, in turn, weigh heavily on the person’s mental health as they begin to feel inadequate for the task at hand, which can cause delays in patient care, medication errors, and lapses in nursing judgment.

While depression is a dangerous condition by itself, nurses are also acquainted with anxiety. New nurses are prone to feeling anxiety than their more experienced peers. Specific tasks like taking IVs, or floating to an unfamiliar unit, can contribute toward feelings of fear as the nurse struggles to complete their functions adequately. As you become more experienced, the anxiety will decrease. However, even veteran nurses still feel anxious during certain tasks, such as interacting with a superior or communicating with family members. According to the Mayo Clinic, if left untreated, this mental disorder can create several symptoms, including:

• Consistent worrying and anxiety
• Overthinking certain plans and solutions
• Looking at situations as threatening, even when they’re not
• Not being able to handle uncertainty
• Indecisiveness and fear
• Inability to stop worrying
• Difficulty relaxing, feelings of restlessness
• Issues concentrating, the feeling of your mind going blank

In this sense, it comes as no surprise at all that nurses, like all other professionals in the world, require a day off now and then. Regardless of how much you enjoy your job, your tasks can still cause lasting complications if performed for extended periods of time without ever taking a breather. Please consider that, if you’re not feeling good, then you cannot provide the best possible attention to your patients.

In this regard, self-care is just as important as the services you perform on a daily basis. If that wasn’t enough, here are three other reasons why mental health days are also important:

1. It can help you unwind and focus on the task at hand. If you have any issues in your life that are chipping away at your attention, it’s possible that you won’t be able to perform at peak efficiency at work. Mental health days give nurses the opportunity to address issues both inside and outside the workplace, in hopes of improving their performance.
2. It gives nurses the opportunity to care for themselves, and only themselves. Providing care to patients can be a challenging task, which often requires that the nurse neglects their health in favor of giving a better service. Mental health days offer nurses the opportunity to pamper themselves, to take a day off to go to the spa, get a massage, or catch up with old friends.
3. Nurses need to look after their health, too. In this sense, they can take a day or two off from work to see their physicians for a regular checkup, or their counselor to take a load off. Being at 100% is not just about staying in good shape physically; your mental health is just as important.