Is working from home actually good for you?

For many, being able to work from home is a boon: saving time on your commute, working in your sweatpants, throwing in a load of laundry before a meeting. People say it makes them happier. But a new study suggests that, despite all the advantages, working from home isn’t creating a happier workforce. It’s making people more socially isolated. We get into all the details with NPR mental health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee https://www.npr.org/people/578890280/rhitu-chatterjee. Interested in more everyday science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with NPR's mental health correspondent, Ritu Chatterjee. Hi, Ritu.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Hi, Emily. It's good to see you.

• 0:30Emily Kwong?

  And we are looking directly at each other.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 0:33Emily Kwong?

  We're in person at NPR headquarters, but sometimes you and I do work from home. A lot of people do.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  A lot of people do. Remote work has quadrupled since the pandemic, to be precise. And I've been speaking with one researcher who's been looking at this, and her name is Natalia Emanuel. She's an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Studies have found that workers are willing to give up 4% to 10% of their earnings in order to have the ability to work remotely.

• 1:01Emily Kwong?

  That sounds like a lot, but I'm not surprised because of the flexibility.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Oh, the flexibility is huge. And I can tell you that as a parent of two little kids, I love the flexibility remote work gives me because I can pick up and drop off my kids without having to worry about getting to work on time.

• 1:17Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  And the fact that I can work from home even when one of the kids is homesick, you know, makes a big deal. And there's also data showing that working from home increases productivity and job satisfaction. But we don't yet understand how remote work is affecting various aspects of the workplace and even ourselves, our own sense of well-being.

• 1:42Emily Kwong?

  Oh.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I spoke with Nicholas Epley. He's a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And he says he gets asked about the effects of remote work all the time.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Everybody wants to know, how is that changing things? And usually the answer is, we can't really tell.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  But a recent study published in the journal Science does give us some insight into the effects of remote work on our sense of well-being. Unfortunately, it suggests that despite all the advantages of remote work, you know, the flexibility, the productivity, working from home isn't creating a happier workforce. In fact, it's making workers more isolated and unhappy.

• 2:27Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, some new science to answer a very difficult question. What does working from home do to our health and our sense of well-being? I'm Emily Kwong.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  I'm Ritu Chatterjee.

• 2:38Emily Kwong?

  And you're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 2:50Emily Kwong?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 2:54Speaker 00

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• 3:58Emily Kwong?

  This message comes from EasyCater. Making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees, and manage food spend all in one place at easycater.com. OK, so, Ritu, just to be clear, this is only one study we're talking about today. I know it was in a very prestigious journal. Science is like, one of the big ones.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yes, we are talking about one recent study, which was interestingly titled, "Home Alone."

• 4:28Emily Kwong?

  I wonder what Macaulay Culkin thinks about this.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Anyway, it looked at a ton of data on US workers to explore whether there was any link between remote work and workers' mental health.

• 4:39Emily Kwong?

  All right, let's dig into the paper. How did researchers even go about answering this question?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  So the researchers used data from five large surveys of American workers that together gave them a ton of information about a whole lot of things, about the kinds of jobs people are in, workers' daily lives, their overall health and wellbeing. And the researchers grouped workers into two groups based on the kind of jobs they are in. One group was in what they called "remotable" jobs, such as software engineering, marketing, you know, maybe journalism was in there as well. The second group was in what they call "non-remotable" jobs, like surgery and mechanical engineering.

• 5:24Emily Kwong?

  OK, so the study defined "non-remotable" jobs as those that require someone to go someplace to work, like my cousin who makes helicopter parts. He's working on a big piece of equipment every day.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:34Emily Kwong?

  So what did they find?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  What they found firstly was that those in "remotable" jobs were a lot more socially isolated than those going to work in person. Here's study author Natalia Manuel again.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  They've seen a 58% increase in hours alone and then a 72% increase in the chance of spending a whole day with just no human contact, not even like a wave to a barista, not, you know, somebody also checking for ripeness of the avocados at the grocery store, just no human contact at all.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  And you know, those who live alone had the highest rise in social isolation. They had an 83% increase in chances of spending their days with zero social contact.

• 6:19Emily Kwong?

  Wow.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Natalia and our colleagues also found that workers in "remotable" jobs have seen an increase in symptoms of mental distress or anxiety and depression over the past few years.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  This shows up in self-reports, in seeing a mental health care professional, in using mental health prescription medications. And so really, across the board, we're seeing disproportionate shift toward greater mental distress among people in remotable occupations relative to people in non-remotable occupations.

• 6:50Emily Kwong?

  That's interesting. But wouldn't also working from home give you more flexibility to see a therapist or get mental health care? How do we know that the rise in in mental health care visits and prescriptions isn't just because of that?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  That's a great question, Emily. By that logic, you should also see a rise in people visiting their doctors, too, right?

• 7:11Emily Kwong?

  Oh, fair.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  And that's something that the authors did look into because they wanted to make sure that this wasn't a sort of a false signal that they were getting. And they found that there was no increase in visits to physical health care providers.

• 7:24Emily Kwong?

  That is fascinating. How do we know these things are causally linked? That one leads to another?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  This study does not prove causation. What it does is show a very strong link. Now, there have been other studies looking into this connection between work location and mental health. One study found that workers who exclusively work remotely have a slightly higher risk of anxiety compared to those who work in a hybrid setting. And another study found that remote workers who have more frequent phone calls with friends, family, caregivers, were at a lower risk of anxiety and depression than remote workers who have such calls less than once a week.

• 8:06Emily Kwong?

  Call your grandma, everybody.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Exactly, or your neighbor. So you're getting this signal from other studies, too, that the social isolation aspect of working remotely is having an impact on people's mental health. And by the way, there's just a wealth of research that show us that social isolation, loneliness is bad for our mental health and in the long run, our physical health, too. You know, I talked about this with Nick Epley, who we heard from earlier. He wasn't involved in the new study, but has spent years researching social connection and health.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Being alone compromise your immune system functioning, your cardiovascular. System functioning and it's correlated with mortality even. People who live alone die sooner.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  And as I've reported before, one of the biggest predictors of health and well being is the quality and even the variety of our social relationships. Social connections don't just boost our mood, they also improve our overall health.

• 9:11Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. We are such a social species. We've evolved to connect with each other.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:17Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. So if social connections are this central to our well being, why do people, if given the choice, I don't want to speak for all people, but it does seem like there's such an appetite to work from home.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is.

• 9:29Emily Kwong?

  So what's that about if it's also kind of hurting people?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Well, it's not either or, right? There are genuine advantages to working remotely. And it's easy for people to know and prioritize those advantages. And we talked about some of this earlier, right?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  People are very attuned to the sort of short run, very salient things like not having to do their commute.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  However, as Natalia and Nick pointed out to me, it's much harder for people to understand and estimate the longer term impacts of missed social connections from not going into work.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  It's a slow motion effect in many ways, right? It feels a little better in the moment, but it's hard to anticipate a month, a year, two years from now. Friends you'll have that you don't have now, conversations you've had that are meaningful that you haven't had now.

• 10:24Emily Kwong?

  This sounds exactly like how people talk about exercise. They don't have time, the equipment, it's hot, I'm out of shape. But over time, long term impacts shows muscle loss, bone density is being impacted. I mean, the longer term calculation can be hard to prioritize in the moment.

• 10:43Emily Kwong?

  When you're just tired and you don't feel like calling up somebody.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  It's very human, you know, even that reaction.

• 10:48Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And Emily, I have to mention one other reason why people play down the value of their social interactions. It's because our brains lie to us when it comes to judging ourselves in social situations. That's what psychologist Gillian Sandstrom told me.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  This phenomenon where two people who meet for the first time afterwards tend to think that they liked the person they talked to, but the person they talked to didn't really like them.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Gillian's at the University of Sussex and she studies how talking to strangers and acquaintances affects our mood.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  So that's us feeling like, you know, oh, I didn't tell that story very well. You know, I should have said this, I shouldn't have said that. So we have this, you know, this voice that's telling us that we didn't do a good job.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  And so Gillian says that for people who are spending the bulk of their days alone, being isolated, that negative voice in their heads is the one that becomes more prominent, telling them that they aren't great at social interactions.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  If you're not seeing other people, you're not getting that sense that people care about me, I matter to people, that maybe they help you feel like you're not the only one going through this.

• 11:57Emily Kwong?

  For people who don't have offices to visit and don't have a coworking space, what can they do to combat these negative side effects of the social isolation that comes with working from home?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Well, so I asked Gillian exactly that question. She recommends being more intentional and seeking daily human interactions. She says she works from home herself, and so for her, that means?

• 12:22Speaker 05

  I leave the house every day. I go for a walk, I see my neighbors, I pet some dogs. You know, I have my activities that I do, I play tennis. I have hobbies that mean that I see other people.

• 12:32Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so it's about like planning for social connection. What do you think all this means for return to office mandates? There's a lot of push even at NPR to get our newsroom back into the office more regularly.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So I'll just paraphrase what Nick Epley said to me. He said, "These results as clear of a link as it shows to poorer mental health."

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Does not mean that workplaces require every worker to come back. Because remember, there are clear advantages, right? Especially to certain vulnerable groups like caregivers. You know, I mentioned I'm a parent with two little kids.

• 13:11Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then there are many people who are caring for their kids and elderly parents. So more responsibilities.

• 13:18Emily Kwong?

  It certainly allows more caregivers to be in the workforce, period.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 13:22Emily Kwong?

  Having a policy like that.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I've also heard from a couple of neurodivergent individuals who say that working from home makes them less anxious because it takes away the stress and anxiety of trying to fit into a neurotypical workplace.

• 13:35Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  But for companies who do want people to return to the office, Nick Epley says they need to make the office more attractive.

• 13:48Emily Kwong?

  Ha, I love this twist.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  What they're providing that's rewarding at work is social interaction, social connection. But you've got to coordinate that, make sure that everybody's in on the days when everybody's in.

• 13:59Emily Kwong?

  Honestly, NPR has one of the biggest attractants to getting people into the office possible, which is the Tiny Desk Concerts. The fact that you and I can go up to the fourth floor and see a concert that will be posted later on YouTube is like ridiculous.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  You're right, it is a great privilege. And the fact that you can have those moments of connection with your coworkers makes work feel less transactional and more human.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Those moments of human connection are what keep us going. They're what make us want to work. They bring new information and make us work better. And so sacrificing them adds up to something bigger than it seems, I think.

• 14:38Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, being reminded that you matter and that you're a part of something.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you want to make something bigger with your colleagues.

• 14:46Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. Ritu Chatterjee, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure, Emily.

• 14:56Emily Kwong?

  This episode was produced by Arun Nair and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  I'm Ritu Chatterjee.

• 15:06Emily Kwong?

  And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 15:27Emily Kwong?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can count every device, every login, and every contractor. Almost none can count their AI agents. Take control of your agentic workforce with one view across every platform and tool, showing what's driving revenue, what's drifted, and who signed off on it. Visit dataiku.com. That's data i k u dot com.

• 15:55Speaker 06

  This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections. And this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it day by day, through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.