The essay below 
The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
For most commuting American workers, getting to and from the office takes nearly an hour a day. This averages 26 minutes each way and 7.7% of his workers spend more than her 2 hours traveling.
Many people consider commuting to be a chore and a waste of time. But while his remote work has surged due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some journalists interestingly noted that people were. – I miss my commute. One woman said that even though she was working from home, at the end of her workday she would schedule a regular appointment to make some private time and mark her transition from work to non-work roles. He told The Washington Post that he was sitting in his car in the driveway.
As business scholars who study the intersection of people’s work and personal lives, we tried to understand what people were missing out on when their commuting suddenly disappeared.
A recently published concept study claims that commuting is a source of “marginal space.” This is a time freed from both home and work roles that provides an opportunity to recuperate from work and mentally switch gears home.
During the transition to remote work, many lost built-in support for these important daily processes. Without the ability to mentally switch gears, a person can blur roles and lead to stress. People can experience burnout if they are not mentally freed from work.
We think this loss of space helps explain why so many people miss their commute.
Commuting and marginal space
In our study, we wanted to know whether commuting provides that time and space, and what the impact would be if it were no longer available.
We reviewed research on commuting, role transitions, and job recovery to develop a model of the commutable marginal space of the typical American worker. Our research focused on two cognitive processes. Psychological detachment from work roles – mental liberation from the demands of work – and psychological recovery from work – rebuilding the storehouse of mental energy expended during work.
Based on our review, we developed a model that shows that marginal spaces created during commuting created opportunities for isolation and recovery.
However, we also found that day-to-day variation can affect whether this boundary space is accessible for isolation and recovery. For example, train commuters need to pay attention to route selection, monitor arrivals or departures, and make sure they get off at appropriate stops, while car commuters need to pay attention to driving consistently.
On the one hand, we found that paying attention to the act of commuting meant less attention was devoted to relaxing recovery activities such as listening to music or podcasts. People may have more time to recover at a distance.
In our own, unpublished follow-up study, we examined a week’s commute of 80 university employees to test our conceptual model. Employees completed morning and evening surveys asking about the characteristics of their commute, whether they felt relaxed by “shutting off” work during the commute, and whether they were mentally exhausted when they got home.
Most of the workers who participated in this study reported using the commuting marginal space to mentally transition from work to home roles and to begin psychologically recovering from the demands of the workday. increase. Our study also confirms that daily variation in commuting predicts the ability to do so.
On days when the commute was longer than average, people reported higher levels of psychological detachment from work and were found to be more relaxed during their commute. However, on days when the commute was more stressful than usual, they reported feeling less psychologically detached from work and less relaxed during their commute.
Create bounding space
Our findings suggest that remote workers may benefit from creating their own commuting patterns to provide limited space for recovery and transition.
Our preliminary findings are consistent with related research suggesting that those returning to work may benefit from using their commute time to relax as much as possible.
To enhance detachment from work and relaxation during the commute, commuters avoid ruminating on their workday and instead opt for activities such as listening to music or podcasts or calling friends during their commute. You can focus on personal enrichment. Other modes of commuting, such as public transportation and carpooling, may also provide opportunities for socializing.
Our data show that commuting stress impairs isolation and relaxation during commuting more than shorter or longer commutes. As such, some may find it worth taking the time to take the “scenic route” home to avoid a tense driving situation.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. Please read the original article.
