A new look at the mental health impacts of working from home

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Remote work comes with perks, including time saved commuting and fewer interruptions.

Online search traffic, recent surveys, court cases and union fights against return-to-office orders suggest many in Canada feel it’s the best option for them. But is it?

While the perks may still make it worth it, recent research looked at the broader mental health impacts of remote work, which may be worth keeping in mind if you work from home, especially if you live alone.

When researchers Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais looked at changes in well-being of workers in remote jobs before and after the pandemic, one major pattern stood out: people who worked remotely and lived on their own were not happy, especially when compared to those in non-remote jobs.

“They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental health care, and antidepressants increased acutely,” editor of the academic journal Science Ekeoma Uzogara wrote in a summary of the research.

The peer-reviewed research published last week involved information from five American surveys conducted between 2011 and 2024. The sample size was significant at 588,322 people, and data from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21), when isolation went significantly beyond the workplace, was left out.

What they found generally was that workers in remote jobs spent an average of one more hour a day alone per workday than those who worked in-office or otherwise on a job site. Remote workers occasionally had entire days where they were alone. Gone were the typical, small interactions some take for granted, like a brief greeting from a co-worker or small talk at the coffee shop.

Calling it a “rise in extreme solitude,” researchers noted that not only were remote workers alone more during the workday, but they also were less likely to socialize with friends after work, adding to feelings of isolation. The researchers said alone time has been increasing overall in the U.S., but estimated about 36 per cent of the change is related to working from home.

Researchers noticed increases in mental distress, which was higher for remote workers generally, but especially for those living alone. The distress level for that population was twice as high as in those who lived with family or others.

The research looked at antidepressant prescriptions and mental-health-care use in an effort to get a better sense of the impacts, and found significantly higher use in remote workers – but only those who lived alone.

There was a general increase in distress among workers of all types, researchers said. They estimated that remote work accounted for one-third of the increase.

Their key takeaway is that working from home may “substantially increase isolation and (worsen) mental health, particularly for those living alone.” And they noted workers may not actually notice the impacts for some time.

Emanuel, Harrington and Pallais wrote: “Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate.”

Limitations to the research include that it looked only at U.S. residents, isolation data could not be fully validated, and it could not fully take into account the lasting mental-health impacts of the pandemic. Researchers said they also couldn’t distinguish between remote and hybrid work, speculating that hybrid jobs might have protective or minimizing impacts.

They recommend employers offering remote work options take measures to make it less isolating, such as co-ordinating in-office days or encouraging online interaction.