Science Easily Explains Why Working From Home Makes Us Happier

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

When you stop and think about it, working in an office has to be one of the strangest ideas humankind has ever conceived of. Throwing a bunch of people who might never get along otherwise into a drab cubicle-scape menaced by fluorescent lights and essentially trapping them there for eight hours a day doesn't seem like the most healthy thing. But for decades this has been how many people have spent their days. Of course, the human spirit always finds a way to overcome the drudgery and for the most part we all got used to plodding our way to an office block, sitting down for most of the day, and then repeating that same process every week — even while pretty much all the research says most people are only productive for about four to five hours each day.

Now, the world has changed. In a post-pandemic society, it seems many are waking up to the idea that being physically present in an office isn't actually all that necessary. But it might also be unhealthy, as multiple studies have now shown the negative impact working on-site can have. Now, a new study from the University of South Australia, published in PLOS One, has shown that working from home significantly boosts happiness, health, and our overall well-being.

In the study, "Changes in diet, activity, weight, and wellbeing of parents during COVID-19 lockdown," researchers tracked changes in participants' physical activity, sedentary time, sleep, recreational physical activities, diet, weight, and wellbeing from before COVID-19 restrictions were put in place to after they were established. As Ty Ferguson, Carol Maher, and Rachel Curtis, three of the study's authors, wrote in an accompanying article published in The Conversation, the investigation into the participants' activity patterns began prior to COVID restrictions being imposed; but after those restrictions were put in place, the researchers kept tracking the data for a full four years and found that, overall, working from home was great for people's physical and mental health.

The team determined that people working from home not only slept for almost half an hour longer (though how much sleep we actually need depends on several factors) than they would otherwise, they actually did more work in the extra time they gained from not having to commute . The authors note that, prior to the pandemic, Australians typically spent 4.5 hours commuting each week, but gained back around an hour and 18 minutes of extra time each week after transitioning to teleworking. Around 43% of that time was used to do extra work, but it also allowed workers to handle household or caregiving responsibilities. About a third of the extra time was also used for leisure and physical activity.

Workers' diets also changed for the better. While snacking and alcohol consumption initially increased, overall, participants moved toward eating healthier meals with an increase in fruit, vegetable, and dairy consumption and more home-cooked meals. When it came to productivity — a big concern for managers and higher-ups who might be reluctant to let their teams work off-site — the study backed up what the majority of other statistics have shown: Workers were just as, if not more, productive when teleworking.

It should be noted that working from home doesn't necessarily make us all happier by default. But the University of South Australia study certainly makes the case for allowing workers the choice of whether they work on-site or not. It's also worth noting that the type of office we work in has a big effect on our well-being. A study from Karlstad University published in Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health looked at associations between office type and how easy employees felt it was to interact with coworkers, their subjective well-being, and job satisfaction. The team found that the more workers there were in an office, the less satisfied those workers were with their jobs, resulting in lower overall well-being.

There are similar studies backing up these findings, including one from Lund University which found that after a year of working in an open-plan office, employees' health, job satisfaction, and performance had deteriorated. Another study from the University of Sydney, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, also demonstrates the deleterious effect of open-plan offices. 

But even without looking at the science, it's easy to see why working in offices might not be conducive to our mental health. In his book "A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard," Simon Jenkins makes the point that "a building is not a painting, a sculpture or a piece of music, our contact with it confined by space and time. It is like an exhibition that is ubiquitous and inescapable." In other words, the buildings and interiors we choose to construct are like an exhibition that we're all forced to look at whether we like it or not. Imagine an exhibition that we have to attend for eight hours — five days a week — for 260 days of the year. Now imagine that exhibition is a collection of monitors, desks, and bright white 5,000 Kelvin light bulbs. Our environments have an effect on our internal well-being, and offices seem almost designed to have a negative impact.