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.”
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. 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.
“We have a big problem with presenteeism in this country,” says Ashley. “It’s counterproductive. Being terminally ‘on’ prevents employees from getting the physical and mental rest they need and can trigger burnout.” While the prevalence of burnout in the UK peaked during and immediately after the pandemic, she says, “data shows that one in five remain at high risk”.
Cashman suffered burnout in her previous job as a GP. It was what led her to move into a career focusing on workplace wellbeing (a role, she says, that barely existed prepandemic). She is an advocate of the Dramma model for workplace wellbeing – an acronym that stands for detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning and affiliation (neatly mirroring Sonnentag’s findings on recovery experiences).
I couldn’t help noticing, while writing this piece, that Sonnentag and I were communicating out of hours. When I point this out, she says “working at the weekend per se isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s about defining the boundaries that work for you.”
Cashman agrees. “With tech and workplace culture blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork time, we are tasked with creating our own. This may be putting an out of office reply on outside working hours. I even put one on if I’m having a particularly busy day or week – it helps take the pressure off and manages others’ expectations.”
“Boundaries shouldn’t be perceived as shirking or making life difficult for others,” says Ashley. “In fact, communicating your boundaries clearly makes not just your life but others’ lives easier, as they know what they can expect of you.”
Once you’ve established your work-related boundaries, you must stand by them. “It can be challenging,” says Ashley, “especially if you are a people pleaser – but it gets easier over time.”
It’s tempting to frame work as an energy-sapping stress – something we do because we have to. But this disregards the fact that many people love their work. In a 2023 Randstad workmonitor report, surveying more than 35,000 people in 15 countries, 48% of people said they would “quit their job if it was preventing them enjoying their life”, implying that the demands of the 21st-century workplace aren’t necessarily viewed negatively.
If you live and breathe your job, is there any real need to enforce a boundary between work and play? Ashley believes there is. “Most cases of burnout begin with people loving their jobs,” she says. “Everyone needs downtime.”
Sonnentag’s research shows that when we reflect positively about work during the evening – our role in general, or specific achievements or successes – it improves “affective wellbeing” (mood and positive thoughts); a benefit that is carried forward to the next working day.
“However, even positive thoughts about one’s work can be exhausting in the end,” she says.
