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“Hey Shortwaveers, Emily Quang here with NPR's mental health correspondent, Ritu Trader J. Hi, Ritu.”
Hi, Emily. It's good to see you. And we are looking directly at each other, exactly. We're in person at NPR headquarters, but sometimes you and I do work from home. A lot of people do. 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. 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. That sounds like a lot, but I'm not surprised. Because of the flexibility. 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. And the fact that I can work from home, even when one of the kids is home sick, you know, makes a big deal. And there's also data showing that working from home increases productivity and jobs satisfaction. But we don't yet understand how remote work is affecting various aspects of the workplace. And even ourselves are own sense of well-being. Oh, yeah.
And I spoke with Nicholas Epley. He's a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Boots School of Business. And he says he gets asked about the effects of remote work all the time.
Everybody wants to know how is that changing things? And usually the answer is we can't really tell.
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. Share 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 Quang. I'm Rita Chatterjee and you're listening to shortwave from NPR.
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maximum fund.org or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, 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. Exactly. Yes, we are talking about one recent study, which was interestingly titled Home Alone. I wonder what McColley Callkin thinks about this. 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. All right, let's dig into the paper. How did researchers even go about answering this question? So the researchers use 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. They're overall health and well-being. And the researchers grouped workers into two groups based on the kind of jobs
they are in. One group was in what they called remoteable 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. Okay, so the study defined non-remotable
Jobs as those that require someone to go someplace to work.
parts, he's working at a big piece of equipment every day. Exactly. So what did they find?
“What they found, firstly, was that those in remoteable jobs were a lot more socially isolated”
than those going to work in person. Here's study often Natalia Manuel again. 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 the rightness of the autocados at the grocery store, just no human contact at all. 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. Wow. Natalia and our colleagues also found
that workers in remoteable jobs have seen an increase in symptoms of mental distress or anxiety
and depression over the past few years. This shows that 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 remoteable occupations relative to people in non-remotable occupations. That's interesting. Well, wouldn't also work from home give you more flexibility to see a therapist or get mental health
care? How do we know that the rise in mental health care visits and prescriptions isn't just
“because of that? That's a great question, Emily. By that logic, you should also see a rise in people”
visiting their doctors too, right? Oh, fair. 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. That is fascinating. How do we know these things are causally linked that one leads to another? This study does not prove causation. What it does is show a very strong link. Now, there've 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. Oh, your grandma, everybody. 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. Yeah. 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 he spent years researching
social connection and health. Being alone, compromise your immune system functioning, your cardiovascular system functioning, and it's correlated with mortality, even people who live alone die sooner. 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. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. We are such a social species.
We've evolved to connect with each other. Absolutely. 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. Yeah, there is. So what's that about? If it's also kind of hurting people? Well, it's not either all 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. Yeah. Right. People are very attuned to these sort of short run, very salient things like not having to do their commute. 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. 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. This sounds exactly like how people talk about exercise. Maybe they don't have time, the equipment, it's hard. I'm out of shape, but
Over time, long-term impacts shows muscle loss, bone density is being impacted.
the longer term calculation can be hard to prioritize in the moment. Yeah, when you're just tired, you don't feel like calling up somebody. It's very human, you know, even that reaction. Yeah. And Emily, I have to mention one other reason why people play down the value of their social interactions. It's because our brains lied to us when it comes to judging ourselves in social situations.
“That's what psychologists Jillian Sandstrom told me. 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. Jillian's at the University of Sussex and she studies how talking to strangers and acquaintances affects our mood. 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. And so Jillian 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.
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. For people who don't have offices to visit and don't have a co-working space, well, you may do to combat these negative side effects of the social isolation that comes with working from home. Well, so I asked Jillian 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 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 at play tennis. I have hobbies that mean that I see other people. 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. So I'll just paraphrase what Nick
Epley said to me. He said these results as clear of a link as it shows to poor mental health
“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. And then there are many people who are caring for their kids and elderly parents. So more responsibilities. It certainly allows more caregivers to be in the workforce period. I'm having a policy like that. 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. But for companies who do want people to return to the office, Nick Epley says they need to make the office more attractive. I love this twist. What they're providing that's rewarding at work is social interaction, social connection. But you've got a coordinate that makes sure that everybody is in on the days when everybody's in.
“Honestly, NPR has one of the biggest attractions to getting people into the office possible,”
which is the tiny desk concerts. The fact that you and I can go to the fourth floor and see a concert that will be posted later on YouTube is like ridiculous. 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. 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. Yeah, being reminded that you matter and that you're a part of something. Yeah. And you want to make something bigger with your colleagues. No. Retutaturgy. Thank you so much for bringing us
this reporting. Always a pleasure, Emily.
This episode was produced by A Room Nire and edited by Rebecca Romeras. Tio Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. I'm Ritutaturgy and I'm Emily Quang. Thank you for listening to shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. For decades, Chicago has dominated Illinois politics, now rule residents say they're fed up. They're come to time and reckoning and we're getting very close.
On the Sunday story, why suggestion is brewing in the land of Lincoln.
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