‘The Mindy Project’ suggests taking heartache days. Should we?

In the second season of The Mindy Project, a lovelorn Dr. Mindy Lahiri (or Mindy Kaling as we know her) once made a strong case for “heartache days”: a phrase she coined but a concept that has the potential to be universal.

After breaking up with her fiancé in Season 2, priest-turned-DJ Casey Peerson (Anders Holm), Mindy is understandably a wreck. Casey is one of Mindy’s better love interests but his fickle career path is at odds with her focus and ambition as an obstetrician/gynaecologist, leading to the relationship’s demise. Episode 4 tackles the aftermath of this breakup.

“The week after a breakup is the worst,” Mindy says as the characteristically charming episode begins. Cue the montage: our heroine orders a meal for one for the first time in a while, refuses to take off an oversized hoodie, and has multiple breakdowns in various locations amid a state of continually pouring rain. Upon her return to the office, Mindy tearfully tells the rest of the practice that Casey and she are no longer getting married.

“Obviously I’m really sad and I’m in no condition to work. So I’m going to take my heartache days and I’ll be back here when I feel better.”

“Obviously I’m really sad and I’m in no condition to work. So I’m going to take my heartache days and I’ll be back here when I feel better,” Mindy tells her colleagues unassumingly. Dr. Jeremy Reed (Ed Weeks), the office symbol for law and order, stops her: “You don’t get heartache days. In fact, they don’t exist”. There goes Mindy’s chance to heal.

As the episode progresses, she inadvertently causes chaos in the workplace, after pursuing and instantly rejecting Nurse Morgan (Ike Barinholtz). Morgan, in turn, nearly sues the practice for $200,000 — unless Mindy takes him on a date. Mindy accusingly tells her colleagues: “If you let me have heartache days, we wouldn’t be in this situation”.

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Mindy’s sentiment isn’t out of the ordinary. While heartache days may not be officially offered by workplaces, there is demand for such a system.

Jules, a 26-year-old journalist who asked to have her name changed for this story, tells Mashable that heartbreak had tangible consequences on her professional life. Last year, she faced romantic rejection from a man she had hooked up with twice, someone who she “deeply wanted to have a relationship with”.

“Being rejected left me feeling very erratic and short-tempered at my job, where I was working in-office as a receptionist,” she tells Mashable, also stating she felt “disoriented and unfocused”. “There was one day at my job where I’d left the office before fulfilling all of my duties for the day because I was emotionally drained.”

Shortly after, Jules was given “make-or-break warnings” from her managers and put on notice. Going to therapy at this time helped her address the pain of romantic rejection, working on negative thought patterns and engaging in weekly writing exercises. Eventually, she left her job on her own terms and is now in a happy relationship.

Jules could have benefited from heartache days. And her story isn’t uncommon.

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Walter Matthews, a 42-year-old entrepreneur says he takes “pride and joy” in his work, but experiencing breakups have been “a much larger distraction than one could initially fathom”. After a recent breakup, he says he found himself “gazing off into the distance” and “not focusing” on his job. He tells Mashable that he believes, “a breakup [does] have a toll on not only your heart, but also your ability to perform at work and in many other avenues of your life”.

This idea shouldn’t be so surprising: breakups can lead to acute emotional stress, anxiety, and trauma. In fact, the pain caused by a breakup or lost love is sometimes considered analogous to physical sickness. We even use similar words to describe heartache and physical pain (“punch in the gut” comes to mind).

There’s science behind this, too. A study by the Journal of Neurophysiology actually found that romantic rejection and heartbreak can register as physical pain or distress. Another study from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found similar brain activity when participants burned their arm and when they viewed pictures of former partners.

Trish, a 27-year-old press officer based in London, tells Mashable that she took a couple weeks away from work last year, after “a really toxic breakup”. She doesn’t recall telling her workplace why she took these days. But Trish remembers how she felt: she says it was “hard to function in a working environment”, describing feelings of overwhelm and grief.

“I think ‘breakup days’ should fall within the same type of sickness leave you would take,” Trish says. She also said that people have a tendency to treat breakups as “silly” or more minuscule than other types of pain, leading employees to bounce back to work faster than they would for other personal emergencies.

“There is a level of guilt that you put on yourself to go back to work, which might push you to go back before you need,” she says. But “the need to take time out for yourself” can be important in the period after heartbreak, Trish believes. The time she took to herself allowed her to spend time with friends and family, attend therapy, and focus on self-care.

“You need time to acknowledge what’s happened, come to terms with it and get your self in order so you can get back on with your life,” she says.

Our relationship to work is evolving, with more employees seeking environments that foster empathy and compassion — and allow for personal circumstances.

So Mindy may have been onto something. People facing the end of a relationship are oftentimes in need of so-called heartache days, not only to perform in a professional capacity but to deal with what is essentially a loss.

Our relationship to work is evolving, with more employees seeking environments that foster empathy and compassion — and allow for personal circumstances. Heartache falls in this space, and maybe it’s time for companies to take note.