Office workers walk to their jobs on Mission Street in the Financial District of San Francisco in 2022.
Felix Uribe/For the S.F. Chronicle
Drivers make their way into San Francisco on the Bay Bridge in 2021. The Bay Area remains a national center of remote and hybrid work, making it a key testing ground for research on work and mental health.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
A study published this month in the journal Science carries what sounds like a concerning message for those still working from home — one that may be particularly relevant in the Bay Area, where rates of remote work remain higher than nearly anywhere else in the country.
While working from home can offer flexibility with caregiving and childcare, cut commutes and improve job satisfaction, the study found that working remotely may harm your mental health by making you feel more isolated, anxious and depressed.
It’s one of the few studies to examine how remote work impacts workers’ long-term mental health, not just their productivity and retention rates.
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But there’s a notable limitation to the study’s conclusions.
The researchers did not look at the mental health of hybrid workers — although many people in the Bay Area and across the country now split their workweek between home and the office. Other research suggests that a hybrid work schedule appears to be the best for workers’ well-being and productivity.
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The study, led by an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, compared changes in the mental health of remote workers and non-remote workers from 2011 to 2024 and found that remote workers experienced greater increases in mental health distress, were more likely to see a mental health professional, and were more likely to take prescription medications for mental health conditions.
The researchers analyzed surveys from about 588,000 U.S. workers from 2011 to 2024, excluding the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Remote workers included positions like software engineers and marketers; non-remote work included such jobs as nursing and mechanical engineering.
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Remote workers spent more workdays entirely alone and socialized less after work, the study found. Those living alone were especially isolated.
But experts said the distinction between fully remote and hybrid work schedules can make a critical difference in mental health impacts.
Working remotely two days a week seems to be the sweet spot that gives workers both work-life flexibility and social interactions at work, said Adolfo Cuevas, an associate professor at NYU School of Global Public Health who was not involved in the study but has researched the impact of remote work on mental health. But working remotely three or more days a week is linked to higher risk of depression, he said.
“We’ve found there’s a Goldilocks effect where people who tend to work from home two days a week tend to show better mental health due to the fact that they have a better work-life balance,” Cuevas said. “They’re able to have better connections with their families and neighbors, given that flexibility. At the same time, they get that nurturing from the workplace.”
Social interactions at the workplace don’t necessarily need to be with your co-workers to be positive, he said. They can be small interactions with a barista or a maintenance worker that you wouldn’t get if you were working remotely.
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“Those things actually go a long way to show you’re part of a community,” Cuevas said. “And when you’re doing remote work, you often forget you’re part of a larger community. That’s what’s often triggering the feeling of being isolated.”
The study’s findings track with what researchers know about social isolation and how it can harm your mental and physical health — and how social connectedness can boost it.
“Social support is not only good for your mood, but it’s good for your health,” said Dr. David Speigel, a Stanford psychiatrist who researches stress and health and was not involved in the study. “It’s very clear that social isolation is bad for your health, mental and physical.”
Many studies show, for example, that social support may help promote longer survival time in people with cancer and that in-person interactions may improve the health of nursing home residents who were isolated during the pandemic.
One study conducted during the pandemic showed that people who primarily had in-person interactions had lower levels of loneliness than people who had mostly virtual interactions — even when the virtual interactions were more frequent, said Dr. Ashwin Kotwal, a UCSF geriatrician who studies loneliness and social isolation.
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“When we extrapolate that to the work situation, you can imagine with stressful scenarios at work, it makes a big difference to be next to the person and get support, rather than be on your own at home navigating these stresses,” Kotwal said. “Those in-person interactions provide a lot of intangibles.”
The study’s findings don’t necessarily mean all workers should rush back to the office full time or that employers should impose return-to-office mandates, experts said. Rather, it’s an opportunity to consider the pros and cons of remote work at a time many Americans are turning to work as their main source of social interaction because other practices that once connected people — like religious services, volunteering and community participation — are fading or dispersing.
“Many people would say work shouldn’t be playing that social role and we should be filling those needs elsewhere,” Kotwal said. “But the reality is, society is shifting in a way where work is playing a more all-encompassing role in our well-being, including meeting our social needs. So at least in the short term, we need to consider that and think about ‘how can we improve that sense of community, including through work?’”