The Benefits You Didn’t Know You Were Allowed to Use

There’s a quiet category of resources that most high-achieving women have access to and rarely use. FMLA. Short-term disability. Intermittent leave. Long-term disability. These benefits are often introduced once, during onboarding, and then filed away in our minds as something for a different kind of situation. A surgery. A baby. Something with a clear before and after.

If you’ve been managing anxiety, burnout, or a mental health condition while still showing up and performing well, this is worth understanding.

What These Benefits Actually Cover

Most employers offer these protections because federal law requires it, and most HR departments genuinely want employees to use their benefits appropriately. Under federal law, mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, and other diagnosable conditions can qualify as a serious health condition, the same category that covers a surgery recovery or a difficult pregnancy.

A few distinctions worth understanding:

• FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) protects your job for up to 12 weeks in a 12-month period if you're eligible. FMLA itself guarantees your job is protected and keeps your health insurance active, but it doesn't guarantee pay on its own. In practice, it's often paired with accrued paid sick leave or vacation time, or run alongside short-term disability coverage, so most people aren't going fully unpaid during that window. Worth confirming with your HR department exactly how your leave would be paid before you need it.
• Intermittent FMLA allows leave to be taken in smaller increments rather than all at once. A few hours for a therapy appointment, a day during a difficult flare-up, or a temporarily reduced schedule. This option exists specifically because many health conditions, including mental health conditions, don't require continuous leave to be effectively managed.
• Short-term disability typically covers a portion of income, often somewhere around 60 to 70 percent depending on the policy, for a limited window, and can include anxiety, depression, and stress-related conditions, not only physical ones. The documentation requirements for mental health claims are often more detailed than for physical conditions. That's a feature of how these plans are structured, not a sign that something is wrong with the request.
• Long-term disability applies when a condition affects someone's ability to work over an extended period, and it can sometimes pick up where short-term coverage or FMLA leaves off.

Why So Many Women Don’t Use Them

In practice, many women think of these benefits as reserved for a different kind of situation than the one they’re in. Burnout and anxiety don’t always look like an emergency from the outside. They look like still meeting deadlines, still being dependable, while managing a lot internally.

Because it doesn’t look like a crisis, it can be easy to assume it doesn’t qualify. There’s often an added layer of hesitation, a sense that using this kind of support says something about capability or resilience, when in reality it reflects the same kind of proactive self-management that’s valued in every other area of a high performer’s life.

These benefits are also simply underused across the board. Awareness, more than eligibility, tends to be the gap. Most people don’t use what they don’t know is there.

It’s also worth knowing that FMLA leave is legally protected. Employers are required to keep medical information confidential, separate from general personnel files, and cannot penalize an employee for using protected leave appropriately and in good faith.

Something to Consider Before Making a Job Change

If burnout is part of what’s driving the idea of a job change, it can be worth exploring available benefits before making that decision. These protections are tied to current employment and are typically not something that carries over. Understanding what’s currently available, whether that’s a short leave, a temporarily reduced schedule, or disability coverage during a difficult stretch, can be a useful part of deciding what’s actually needed before deciding what’s next.

This isn’t about staying somewhere that isn’t the right fit. It’s about making a fully informed decision with all the resources already available factored in.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Do you know what's actually included in your benefits package?
• If you needed a reduced schedule or a short leave, would you know how to start that conversation with HR?
• Have you talked with your therapist, your PCP, or your psychiatrist about whether they'd be able to provide the documentation these processes typically require?
• What would it look like to treat your own well-being with the same proactive planning you'd apply to any other part of your career?

Resources to Learn More

• U.S. Department of Labor, Mental Health and the FMLA
• U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet 28-O: Mental Health Conditions and the FMLA
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Depression, PTSD, and Other Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace: Your Legal Rights
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, The Mental Health Provider's Role in a Client's Request for a Reasonable Accommodation at Work
• Social Security Administration, Disability Benefits