Remote Work and Mental Health: Why New Places, Movement and Contact Matter

In 2025, 25 percent of all employed people in Germany worked from home at least occasionally, up from just 13 percent in 2019. Remote and hybrid work are here to stay. At the same time, the evidence on one question is getting sharper: what does a lot of remote work do to mental health?

Science study: remote work explains a third of the rise in distress

In June 2026, the journal Science published one of the largest analyses on the topic to date. Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais drew on five nationally representative US surveys covering 588,322 workers from 2011 to 2024 (excluding the peak pandemic years 2020–2021), comparing "remotable" occupations with jobs that require on-site presence.

• Workers in remotable jobs spent roughly one additional hour alone per workday after the pandemic.
• Among those living alone, the likelihood of spending an entire day without social contact rose by 7 percentage points — an increase of 83 percent.
• Psychological distress (Kessler K-6) rose by 0.1 standard deviations, with roughly twice the effect for people living alone compared with those living with family.
• Mental health care utilisation and antidepressant prescriptions rose too, while non-mental-health doctor visits and prescriptions did not.
• The authors estimate remote work accounts for about one third of the increase in isolation and distress between 2011–2019 and 2022–2024.

Nico Dragano, director of the Institute of Medical Sociology at Düsseldorf University Hospital, frames it plainly: working from home itself is not the problem — the way it is designed is.

Factor 1: new places lift mood

People who visit varied places in daily life feel measurably better. A US research team tracked more than 100 participants over months via GPS, surveyed their mood by text message and examined resting-state brain activity in a subset. The finding: novelty itself — not time spent — triggers positive affect, accompanied by stronger functional connectivity between the hippocampus (memory) and the nucleus accumbens (reward).

Working from home quietly removes that variety: the walk from bed to desk replaces the commute, the canteen, meeting rooms and the route home.

Factor 2: movement reliably increases energy

A May 2026 individual participant data meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour put the movement–well-being question on a new footing: 67 datasets, 321,345 smartphone mood ratings and nearly 1,000,000 hours of accelerometer-measured physical activity from 8,223 participants.

• Everyday physical activity is positively associated with energetic arousal, positive affect and valence, with energy showing the strongest link.
• The association runs both ways: activity improves mood, and better mood predicts subsequent activity.
• Notably, the relation to calmness is negative — movement activates rather than automatically soothes.

Study coordinator Markus Reichert summarises it: everyday physical activity makes people more energetic, reliably, regardless of context. People who are neurobiologically more vulnerable to mental illness benefit disproportionately — and carry a greater risk when inactive.

Factor 3: social contact as the bridge

Supportive contacts improve well-being directly and act as a mediator between mood and physical activity: people who feel socially connected move more. Irina Timm, who researches movement and well-being in daily life at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, also points to a compensation effect: being alone hurts mood less if you were physically active beforehand.

What this means for employers

The key insight: the mental health risks of remote work are not solved by return-to-office mandates alone. What matters is whether the working day leaves room for varied places, movement and genuine encounters — wherever the work happens. Five levers for HR and leadership:

1. Purposeful presence instead of quotas: office days work when they create encounters — shared team days, workshops, lunches. Attendance percentages do not. Build a workable framework with our Hybrid Work Policy Generator.
2. Design for people living alone: they are by far the most affected group in the Science data. Buddy systems, open virtual rooms, fixed team rituals and a guaranteed office day help.
3. Build movement into the workday: walking calls, camera-free phone meetings, a real break culture, sports or bike subsidies. The meta-analysis shows ordinary daily activity is enough to matter.
4. Take psychological health and safety seriously: risk assessments must cover psychological strain — including at home. Start with our free home office risk assessment.
5. Equip the home workplace properly: someone fighting back pain at the kitchen table has energy for neither movement nor contact. Get concrete measurements from the home office ergonomics check.

And cities? "Good urban planning is health planning"

Irina Timm also puts responsibility on municipalities: green spaces, walkable paths and varied neighbourhoods are health policy decisions, not just aesthetic ones. For employers, the smaller version of that applies to site strategy, satellite offices and coworking allowances.

Conclusion

Working from home is neither a cure nor a risk in itself. The 2026 evidence is consistent: isolation, missing variety of place and lack of movement are the real strain factors — and all three are designable. Companies that build hybrid work deliberately around encounter, movement and proper equipment win twice: healthier teams and a working model people can sustain.

Sources: Emanuel N., Harrington E., Pallais A.: "Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health", Science, Vol. 392, Issue 6802, 4 June 2026; Rehder J., Timm I. et al.: "An individual participant data meta-analysis of how physical activity relates to affective well-being in daily life", Nature Human Behaviour 10, 1297–1315 (2026); "Association between real-world experiential diversity and positive affect relates to hippocampal–striatal functional connectivity", Nature Neuroscience (2020); Federal Statistical Office, press release N024, 22 April 2026; tagesschau.de: "Kann viel Homeoffice die Psyche belasten?", 5 June 2026.