Remote Work May Take A Mental Health Toll, Especially On People Living Alone

Millions of Americans traded their office commutes for kitchen-table desks and never looked back. Working from home promised flexibility, autonomy, and relief from long commutes. But a sweeping new study published in Science has found a darker side to the remote work revolution. It appears to be leaving many workers, especially those who live alone, more isolated and at greater risk of mental distress, and the damage is real enough to show up in prescription drug data.

Drawing on five nationally representative surveys covering more than 588,000 Americans from 2011 to 2024, the study indicates the rise of remote work accounts for roughly a third of the overall increase in mental distress Americans experienced in the years after the pandemic’s peak. For people who live alone, the toll is steeper still.

Rather than simply asking remote workers how they feel, the researchers compared workers in jobs that can be done from home, such as software engineers and marketing professionals, against workers in jobs requiring physical presence, like nurses and mechanics. That comparison allowed them to separate remote work’s effects from broader social trends.

The Loneliness Hidden in Your Home Office

Before the pandemic, remote work was relatively rare, just 7% of American workers in 2019. By 2023, that number had risen to 28%, a shift far more pronounced in fields where the work can be done on a laptop. That difference became a natural experiment: if two groups of workers had similar mental health trends before the pandemic and one group’s jobs suddenly moved home while the other’s didn’t, any gap that opened up afterward is a strong signal of what remote work is doing.

A gap did open up. Workers in remote-eligible jobs spent approximately one additional waking hour alone per workday compared to on-site counterparts. They were also more likely to spend entire days without any social contact at all, not a word exchanged with anyone, not even the incidental brush of being around other people at a coffee shop or gym.

Research cited in the paper indicates that even brief, casual interactions with strangers can improve a person’s mental state, often more than people expect. Strip those away entirely, and the cost accumulates quietly.

Remote Work and Mental Health: Numbers That Show Up at the Pharmacy

Mental distress didn’t only show up in survey responses. Workers in remote-eligible jobs became more likely to seek out mental health professionals and filled more prescriptions for depression and anxiety medications. To rule out the possibility that schedule flexibility was simply making it easier to see doctors, the researchers checked whether those same workers also got more routine checkups or filled more prescriptions for unrelated conditions like cholesterol medication. They did not. The spike was specific to mental health.

Scores on a clinically validated psychological distress measure called the Kessler scale rose among workers in remote-eligible jobs, a finding that held up across multiple surveys. The researchers also checked whether anxiety about artificial intelligence, a reasonable concern for tech-adjacent workers, might be driving the distress rather than isolation itself. It wasn’t. Mental health effects tracked with how remote-friendly a job was, not with AI risk, and held regardless of political affiliation.

Living Alone Makes Remote Work Far Harder

The study’s sharpest finding involves people who live without a partner or children. For those living alone, the rise in extreme isolation was much larger: a 7 percentage point increase in spending the whole day alone, compared with just 0.7 points among those living with family. For days with no ambient human contact at all, the gap was 3.9 points versus 0.3 points.

Their mental distress scores reflected this. Before the pandemic, people living alone in non-remote jobs had slightly worse mental health than their remote-eligible counterparts also living alone. After the pandemic, that flipped. The relative increase in distress amounted to roughly the equivalent of going from feeling nervous some of the time to nervous most of the time. Their use of prescription mental health medications jumped at a rate more than twice as large as the overall effect.

The researchers note that the pattern makes sense: if colleagues aren’t in the office and home is also empty, the workplace was likely a person’s primary source of human connection.

Why Remote Workers Don’t See the Costs Coming

Workers largely still say they want to work remotely, with studies consistently finding people will accept lower pay for remote options. The benefits, skipping a commute, running errands during the day, are immediate and obvious. The mental health costs are not, and that may be exactly the problem. As the authors write, “a large body of research in psychology shows that people underestimate how much brief social interactions can improve their mental well-being, making it hard to project how losing everyday workplace encounters can undermine mental health.”

People previously employed in remote-eligible jobs who were no longer working did not show the same mental health deterioration, pointing to the working arrangement itself as the driver. Among American workers, remote work quadrupled in five years, and the policies firms set today will shape the daily social lives of millions. For anyone who assumed that flexibility was a straightforward win, this study makes a strong case for reading the fine print.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on observational research and reflects associations found in the data, not definitive proof of cause and effect. The study covered American workers only and could not fully separate the effects of fully remote work from hybrid arrangements. Individual experiences with remote work may vary.

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