The reasons we don’t call in sick when we are ill

Readers explain the pressure they feel to go to work even when they’re ill.

You've woken up feeling terrible: aching limbs, nausea, a killer headache. You have a decision to make. Should you push through the pain and drag your sorry self into work, even if you're on death's door? Or are you more likely to pull the blankets back over your head and call in sick?

While common sense says that downtime will aid your recovery, the question of whether to take a sick day — or be stoic — might not be as straightforward as you'd like.

iStock

A demanding boss, job insecurity, workaholic tendencies or peer pressure from colleagues might all factor into the decision of whether to haul yourself out of bed — even if you feel rotten. You may also feel the need to go into the office when ill to actually prove you're not faking it, like a kind of sickly show and tell, before you feel justified slinking off home. Indeed, studies such as this one and this one, indicate you're not alone. And, with the option to work remotely in these tech-driven times, is there any reason to not be pulling your weight, no matter how ill you are?

Following on from a recent story about the psychology behind why we work when ill, we posed the question to you, our readers on the BBC Capital Facebook page, asking, “have you ever felt pressured to go to work sick?” Your responses are enlightening and answer that question with an overwhelming “yes”. But why?

They’re watching you

For starters, the human resources machine at some companies keep a close count of days workers spend away from the office. That's certainly the case for John Stokes, “Every time I claim sick leave, the payroll program pops up with a stern warning about my "absenteeism rate".

This means he sometimes dips into his annual leave when ill to avoid drawing undue attention: “I can telecommute, so I usually try to work from home when sick. If I'm too sick to work and I've exceeded the ‘recommendation,’ I take vacation time,” he writes.

More trouble than it’s worth

For others, like Abigail Brownell, there's the guilt of burdening her colleagues with extra work when she's off sick. And, as a teacher, she still needs to spend several hours preparing work for her students before she can hand off to someone else and head home to curl up. Her conclusion? Taking a sick day isn’t worth it if you're a teacher.

“I always feel the pressure to work even if I am sick,” she writes. “There is a shortage of substitutes so if I take the day off, colleagues have to take on my job and their own.”

Alamy

Saumy Prateek Jha agrees there's a lot of pressure to push through the pain: “If I take sick leave then the coming days at [the] office are hell.”

And even doctors are not immune from the pressure to work when ill. “Being a doctor, I worked many, many times while sick,” Imperial Ahmed writes. “The guilt of not being able to care for patients and the pressure not to burden my partners with my patients' workload kept me on my feet and working even when I had pneumonia.”

Sick? What’s that?

Other work places are more pragmatic. For Karolina Ibranyi-Matkovits, working from home or even taking time off when stick isn't a problem due to flexible working arrangements and provided you manage expectations.

“If not well but [we] have deadlines to meet, we just work from home. We are indeed well enough to work but not well enough to travel or move around. Not to mention spreading germs. This allows [you] to manage workload as well as allow yourself to get better,” she writes. “And if you are very sick, well then you are sick and you take the day off.”

But for others, the situation is more serious.

iStock

 “I am free to take as many sick days as I wish,” writes Victoria Kalinin. “However, in my case ‘taking a sick day’ just means that I am expected to work from home remotely.”

This type of pressure to perform is not unusual where she works, she adds. “Working on sick leave, weekends and vacations has become the norm and everyone is expected to do it. If you don't, then you are hammering a nail in your own coffin.”

Indeed, this type of pressure eventually led Lorena Marianne to resign. “It was happening all the time. Not just pressured when unwell, but also often on weekly off days so would sometimes end up working a full month without a single [day] off,” she writes, “Eventually had to quit my job.”

To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to ourFacebook page or message us on Twitter