Marilyn Monroe once said: “A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.” Only these days, you can. The march of technology, the rise of hybrid and remote working, and an increasing culture of presenteeism (working longer than contractually required, or when sick) have blurred the boundaries between work and leisure.
Research by Business in the Community (BITC), a UK-based responsible business network, shows that 55% of employees feel pressed to respond to calls or check emails outside work, while high workloads drive two in five to work overtime. Yet switching off from work when you aren’t working (psychological detachment, to give it its scientific name) is vital not just for your health, but for productivity.
“Empirical studies have identified a positive relationship between psychological detachment – which includes refraining from job-related tasks as well as mentally disconnecting during nonwork time – and job performance,” says Sabine Sonnentag, a professor of work and organisational psychology at the University of Mannheim, Germany. “Conversely, a lack of psychological detachment is associated with negative mood and impaired wellbeing.”
The irony is that the greater the level of work stressors – including an excessive workload, time pressures or conflict with colleagues – the harder it is to achieve psychological detachment, which increases the likelihood of an evening of rumination, or even sneaking off to open your laptop. Sonnentag calls this the recovery paradox: “Greater exposure to job stressors simultaneously calls for but prevents recovery,” she explains.
Claire Ashley, former GP and author of The Burnout Doctor , recommends ending each working day with the same specific act or routine. “Practising a daily ritual serves as a cue to deactivate the stress-response system,” she says. “I like to do some movement, other people might want to put on loud music and jump around, or do Wordle. Over time, it becomes like a Pavlovian response, signalling to your body that the work day is done.”
People working remotely often put in longer hours compared with office-based workers
Creating a clear division between work and leisure is especially important if, like 40% of Britons, you now work either fully or partly from home. While hybrid or home working has advantages – avoiding the time, expense and stress of a commute, making your own lunch, greater flexibility around working hours – people working remotely often put in longer hours compared with office-based workers (though the researchers in this US study note that this could be due to more breaks and interruptions). In a survey of more than 8,000 people who had shifted to remote working as a result of the pandemic, 52% said they regularly worked longer hours than before.
“It can be really challenging when your home doubles as your workplace,” says Ashley. “You need physical, as well as mental, separation. Without a designated workspace on which you can close the door, it’s even more important to ‘clear your desk’ and put work things out of sight.”
Before you do, however, it could be worth tying up loose ends. A study from Ball State University, Indiana, found that leaving work tasks unfinished, especially important ones, is associated with poor psychological detachment in the evening. This isn’t about pulling an all-nighter: “Taking a few minutes before you leave to note down some thoughts about how you will address the unfinished task the next day helps enable you to switch off,” says Sonnentag.
Scheduling after-work activities is a good ploy for those who find it difficult to draw the working day to a close
Scheduling after-work activities is a good ploy for those who find it difficult to draw the working day to a close. Arrangements that involve a commitment, financial or social – such as booking a fitness class, time in a pottery studio, or meeting up with friends – are particularly helpful. But don’t disrupt your downtime by checking in with work, warns Ashley. If muting notifications isn’t sufficient, take the relevant apps off your phone when you aren’t at work. Better still, have a separate work phone – with a voicemail greeting saying what your work hours are, or when you’ll be next checking it.
Getting active is a good way to switch off after work. It was one of three successful strategies identified in a 2023 study on post-work recovery conducted at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. The other two were spending time with friends and family, and engaging in hobbies, such as sewing or gardening.
Sonnentag, however, believes what we are thinking and feeling (the recovery experience) during any given activity, be it knitting, baking or meditating) is more important than the activity itself, when it comes to how effectively it helps us recover from work. “Our research identified four important recovery experiences for recuperation and unwinding,” she says. These are psychological detachment – as in forgetting about work (relaxation, mastery) and the successful completion of tasks or challenges that boost feelings of self-worth and autonomy, meaning a sense of control over how you spend your leisure time.
Having options is particularly important if you’re trying to solve the recovery paradox, because “an activity that offers a recovery experience for one person may not be helpful to another”, Sonnentag says. The oft-suggested long, candlelit bath might be the last thing you need.
Regardless of whether you work from home or not, the connectivity of the digital age ensures that work is never far from our fingertips, says Louise Cashman, a business psychologist and wellbeing manager at a large consultancy. “Constantly bombarded with notifications, there is a sense of an ever-increasing demand on our time and attention, a need to always be available.” This can take its toll. A recent study by the University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University found that engaging with work email during leisure time was associated with poorer physical and psychological health.
However, a compulsion to be on the end of the “electronic leash” when not at work isn’t a personal failing. It’s frequently driven by workplace culture. In the Manchester study, over a third of workers reported that their boss regularly emailed them outside normal working hours and a quarter said there was an expectation of responding to emails during leisure time.
