Remote work has soared in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic.But, a new study suggests the practice has made workers more socially isolated, anxious and depressed compared to people who work in-person in offices and other settings."Other 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," says Natalia Emanuel, an economist at Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the main author of the new study published in the journal Science.
"So there is a great desire for remote work."And yet, she and her colleagues found that people in remote jobs have seen a rise in hours spent alone during the workday, and more visits to mental health care providers.In self-reports, they also assess their own mental health negatively.The findings suggest that "people might be choosing poorly," when it comes to their wellbeing, says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, who wasn't involved in the study.Want the latest stories on the science of healthy living? Subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter.That's probably because "it's very easy to recognize that the commute is a pain in the neck and the traffic sucks," compared to anticipating how missed social connections at work will impact us down the line, he says.
His own research has documented that people "underestimate how well things will go when we actually reach out to connect with other people," he adds.Epley says Emanuel and her colleagues found a way to answer a question he gets asked often: "What work from home does to us?""Everybody wants to know how is that changing things? And usually the answer is we can't really tell," he explains."We can't really tell because people weren't randomly assigned to work from home or not as a terrible experiment."To get around that problem, Emanuel and her colleagues looked at data from five large national surveys on American workers, both in jobs that...