For many people, the ability to work from home is one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most enduring changes. Remote work has increased significantly since the start of the pandemic, rising from roughly 7% of US workers in 2019 to 28% in 2023. But a new study suggests that the shift away from the office may have come with a cost: more time spent alone and poorer mental health.
For the study, published last week in Science, researchers found that workers in jobs amenable to remote work spent significantly more time alone and reported greater psychological distress than workers whose jobs require at least some on-site work. The effects were especially pronounced among people who live alone.
For the study, researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Virginia, and Harvard University analyzed data from five nationally representative surveys of 588,322 working adults conducted from 2011 to 2024 (the team omitted the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021).
The investigators compared trends among workers in “remotable” occupations such as software engineering and marketing with those in occupations that generally require physical presence, such as nursing and mechanical engineering.
Even brief interactions can boost well-being
Compared with workers in nonremotable jobs, those in remotable jobs spent about one additional waking hour alone each day since the onset of the pandemic and were more likely to spend their whole day alone (a 1.9-percentage-point [pp] rise; 50% relative increase).
Remotable workers also reported more days without any human contact (1.0 pp, 72.2% relative increase), with “no idle chitchat with a barista, no hello from a co-worker, no smile from a passerby at the grocery store,” write the researchers. “This isolation is particularly potent given the evidence that even the briefest of social interactions can improve mental well-being, often more so than people expect.”
They estimate that remote work accounted for roughly 36% of the national 4.3-pp increase in people spending entire days alone after the onset of the pandemic.
This isolation is particularly potent given the evidence that even the briefest of social interactions can improve mental well-being.
The amount of waking time remotable workers spent inside their homes quadrupled after the onset of the pandemic, a finding that might help explain one of the study’s more surprising findings: Remotable workers spent less time than nonremotable workers socializing with their friends. The researchers hypothesize that working from home may introduce more obstacles to getting together.
“Remote work tends to shift when and where work is done,” coauthor Emma Harrington, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia, tells CIDRAP News. “While office work typically means that people are all downtown and done working around 5 pm, remote work often means that people end work in different places and at different times. As a result, it is harder to agree on a time and place to socialize with friends or pop around the corner for an after-work happy hour.”
Social isolation worse for those who lived alone
Compared with remote workers who lived with other people, those living alone experienced far larger increases in social isolation.
The researchers found that workers in remote-friendly occupations who lived alone were 10 times more likely to spent an entire day alone than those who lived with family (7.0 pp vs 0.7 pp). And those who lived alone were 13 times more likely to spend a full day without any human contact at all (3.9 pp versus 0.3 pp).
People who lived alone were also less likely to socialize with friends outside of work (2.0 pp vs 0.6 pp), although this difference was not statistically significant.
Increased psychological distress
Psychological distress increased for many people as COVID became a fact of daily life, but it increased significantly more for those who worked remotely.
The researchers used the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-6) to measure psychological distress and found that generalized psychological distress rose by 0.1 standard deviations for those in remotable jobs compared with those in nonremotable jobs.
“We saw deterioration in each of the six subcomponents of the K-6 distress scale: feeling worthless, hopeless, restless, nervous, that everything is an effort, and so sad that nothing can cheer them up,” they write.
Before the pandemic, people working in nonremotable jobs reported marginally more psychological distress than those in remotable jobs.
For remotable workers living alone, the increase in psychological distress was roughly twice as large as those who lived with others. Among people living alone, reports of distress severe enough to interfere with daily life were roughly 15% more common among those in remotable jobs than among those in occupations that required onsite work.
The findings also showed greater use of mental health medications among remote workers who lived alone—a 5.1-pp differential increase in depression and/or anxiety prescriptions and a 5.3-pp increase in all mental health medications.
‘Puzzling’ findings
The authors note that their findings may seem “puzzling,” given that many workers say they prefer remote work. One possible explanation is that the upsides of remote work are more immediately apparent than the downsides.
“We suspect that the benefits of remote work, such as skipping a commute, are more salient than the longer-term consequences of less socialization,” says Harrington. “So it would make sense if some people are not cognizant of the costs of remote work to their wellbeing.”
The authors also note that people may find it hard to determine whether the effects of remote work or other factors, like illness or divorce, are contributing to their psychological distress.
The researchers can’t speak for every remotable worker, Harrington adds, and for some, the benefits of remote work may exceed the costs. “Our data, however, indicate that these people are in the minority,” she says.
The researchers say their findings could help guide individuals, organizations, and policymakers in shaping workplace arrangements.