Almost 600 thousand workers participated in the research and the results have been quite undeniable.
A study conducted on 588 thousand workers in the United States found that remote working has a significantly negative impact on mental health. In recent years, remote working (in Italy we call it smart working, while in the English-speaking world it is called remote working or work from home) has transitioned from an emergency measure to a pillar of the labor market. A single figure explains its increasing prevalence: between 2019 and 2026, the number of people working from home has quadrupled.
Although so far the public and scientific debate has focused almost exclusively on the benefits in terms of productivity, corporate costs, and mental health brought by remote working, a new and extensive study published in the journal Science tells a much more complex and concerning reality. According to the study, remote working has a profoundly negative impact on the health of those who practice it, causes social isolation, and harms mental health. The research, conducted by economists Natalia Emanuel from the Federal Reserve, Emma Harrington from Harvard, and Amanda Pallais from the University of Virginia, analyzed data from over 588 thousand American workers, active between 2011 and 2024. To avoid the risk of including individuals already predisposed to depression in the research, the scholars compared entire sectors of employment: on one side, jobs with a high rate of “remotability,” such as computer programmers, copywriters, graphic designers, and marketing experts, and on the other, professions that necessarily require physical presence, such as nurses or mechanical engineers.
Those who work from home spend an average of one more hour alone each day compared to colleagues who work in person. But the most alarming data concerns leisure time: remote workers tend to avoid social activities even after office hours, drastically reducing opportunities to meet friends and acquaintances. For this category, the probability of spending the entire day without any type of “real” interaction (i.e., with another person physically present in the same space and at the same time) with another human being is extremely high, even 83 percent. The psychological consequences are obviously disastrous: the study found a net increase in emotional distress among those who work from home, a distress that even doubles among those who live alone compared to those who at least share a home with family. The data is confirmed by the frequency of depression diagnoses, access to psychological care, and, above all, the high consumption of antidepressant medications, which has unequivocally increased precisely in that segment of the population considered by the research.
This is demonstrated by research from World Weather Attribution, which analyzed climate data from 854 cities in 30 European countries.
