Remote work is making Americans lonelier and sadder, new study suggests

Remote work is making Americans lonelier and sadder, new study suggests

Remote and hybrid work can have benefits, but a study involving more than 588,000 people suggest they may take a serious mental toll

When the pandemic hit, just like so many Americans, researcher Emma Harrington started working remotely . What shocked her most in those early days of COVID was how productive she was. Then a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, she found that she could still focus on her work despite being at home. But it wasn’t all positive: the “social ramifications” took a toll, particularly during periods when she lived alone. “I struggled with having just whole days where I couldn’t be sure that I would see people, even in brief ways,” she recalls.

It turns out that Harrington isn’t alone— new research by her and her colleagues suggests that the long-term shift to remote or hybrid work after the pandemic may have had an adverse effect on workers’ mental health. The study was published today in Science .

Importantly, the research compared workers’ mental health and alone time before and after the peak years of the pandemic in a bid to capture the effect of remote work outside of 2020 and 2021, when COVID was most acute and people were forced to isolate. Certainly, many workplaces have remained entirely remote or have a hybrid in-office policy. For example, a 2023 poll from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that as many as one in five people said they worked remotely.

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Harrington, now an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, and her co-authors analyzed the results of five surveys that were completed between 2011 and 2024 and included a total of 588,322 Americans. The team sorted workers into “remotable” jobs, such as software engineering or law, versus “nonremotable” careers, such as nursing.

What they found was stark: after controlling for confounding factors such as age, parental status and education levels, workers in remote-friendly jobs, particularly those who lived alone, reported spending much more time by themselves and having greater indicators of mental distress than their nonremote peers.