Rates of remote work quadrupled in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now researchers have uncovered a sharp rise in mental distress over the same period for workers in remote-friendly roles.
The impacts, driven by rising isolation, were concentrated among those who live alone. According to Harvard economist Amanda Pallais, analyses of American Time Use Survey data reveal “this huge increase in the number of days that people are spending with no human contact whatsoever.”
The rise of remote work, Pallais concludes, explains about one-third of the generalized increase in isolation and mental distress over the past 15 years.
Workers have long struggled with striking the right work-life balance for optimal physical and mental health. In recent years, remote work was held up as a powerful remedy for this challenge.
In a new paper for Science, economist Amanda Pallais examines an overlooked cost of this arrangement: When people stop working alongside others, their mental health suffers.
Pallais, Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics, began studying remote work in 2015. Her initial questions on the subject revolved around flexibility.
“We found that workers valued the ability to work remotely more than other forms of workplace flexibility,” she said. “It has large benefits. You may be saving 50 minutes on a commute. You don’t have to get dressed.”
The drawbacks took Pallais longer to unearth. In research that continued after the 2020–21 pandemic — a period over which remote work quadrupled in the United States — she found increasing evidence that this new way of working came with a steep toll on mental health, driven by rising isolation.
Pallais’ new study draws on five nationally representative surveys, with a sample size topping 580,000 respondents. To ensure the effects captured stemmed from remote work itself, rather than the upheaval of COVID, Pallais and her co-authors set aside the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Instead, they compared the years before the pandemic to the more settled period that came after.
When people don’t go to the office, they spend more time alone during the workday and they are less likely to go out for drinks or dinner afterwards.
Amanda Pallais
Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics
To avoid reverse causality concerns — whereby workers with mental health problems were more likely to request remote work — U.S. workers in occupations that could be performed remotely, like software engineering and marketing, were compared to workers in jobs that could not, like mechanical engineering and nursing.
Results showed remote work rising far more for workers in jobs that could be done remotely. By 2024, these employees were spending about 30 percent of workdays fully remote.
Also documented was what the co-authors characterize as a “precipitous” rise in mental health problems for workers in remote-friendly roles. The pattern held across various measures of mental distress, including a widely used screening tool called the K-6 Generalized Psychological Distress Scale and the self-reported prevalence of seeing a mental health professional or taking medication for depression or anxiety.
The negative effects were concentrated among people living alone. The American Time Use Survey, collected continuously by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, allowed Pallais and her colleagues to compile self-reported data on hours spent in the company of others, both during the workday and after hours. They found the lack of interactions adding up over the periods they studied.
“Particularly for people living alone, we saw this huge increase in the number of days that people are spending with no human contact whatsoever,” Pallais said. “When people don’t go to the office, they spend more time alone during the workday and they are less likely to go out for drinks or dinner afterwards.”
A large body of literature correlates this type of isolation with negative health outcomes. Indeed, some studies equate the dangers of isolation with smoking or unchecked high blood pressure. The rise of remote work, Pallais’ paper concludes, explains about one-third of the generalized increase in isolation and mental distress found between 2011 and 2019 as well as the post-COVID period of 2022 to 2024.
In a related paper, now forthcoming at the peer-reviewed Quarterly Journal of Economics, Pallais and colleagues show remote work also contributing to joblessness for young workers, potentially responsible for “about two-thirds of the increase in young college graduates’ unemployment since the pandemic,” Pallais said.
“Remote work has obvious benefits that people really value,” the economist said, including benefits for people unable to work in conventional office settings.
However, the downside is that it “worsens mental health, particularly for people who live alone,” as well as depriving young workers of valuable networking.
Ultimately, Pallais said, “the benefits may be more obvious than some of the costs.”
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