CARING for your well-being is important and even more than that, employers cannot stop you. Make a mockery of mental health with these: 

‘Manifesting multiple duvet days’

A day off work to lie in bed is fine occasionally, even back in the days when you used to have to lie about it. You’re not so vital to your employer that they will notice. Six days in a row without even the figleaf of a doctor’s note? Coming back in saying Better Call Saul is ‘well worth a binge’? Come on.

‘Self-diagnosing an emotional well-being affair’

Long-term relationship going through a tough patch? Not what you feel a bad bitch like you deserves? Then sex with a stranger is necessary for your self-esteem and morally a must. It is for others with less evolved senses of self to grit their teeth and begrudgingly accept yet another compromise.

‘Practising drinking boxed wine’

Any bollocks activity can be made respectable by prefacing it with ‘practicing’. Even something as ridiculous as mindful colouring books sound legitimate with the P-word. But emptying a box of room temperature Country Manor white from Tesco pushes the theory to breaking point.

‘Connecting with a fortnight in St Lucia’

Or, as it is more commonly called, ‘going on holiday’. The mental health benefits of spending a fortnight in the Caribbean are so well-known that it’s difficult to dress them up as therapy. Your holiday is not more special than anyone else’s even if you journal about it.

‘Reflecting on retail therapy’

Running up credit card debts on a new outfit from Joseph is a fast and dirty way to lift your mood with long-term consequences. Pausing to contemplate on how grateful you are for taking the first steps towards extending your overdraft may lead to the terrifying contemplation of the abyss of debt repayment. You don’t want that. It doesn’t make you feel centred.

‘Putting yourself first’ 

A wonderful euphemism for ‘cancelling plans’. Don’t want to drag yourself across three underground zones for a friend’s birthday? No longer keen on that family visit? Put yourself first and hope nobody relates this to a previously known behaviour termed ‘being a selfish bastard’. That wouldn’t be accepting of your authentic self on its own terms.