Work strain and burnout have been significant occupational health issues for decades, reflecting what some have called the “violence” of work. Interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has made aspects of working life simultaneously easier and harder.

On the upside, an increase in telecommuting has meant many employees are travelling less for work and have more flexibility about how they work. On the downside, their performance and productivity have been challenged by several novel challenges, such as coping with social isolation, managing family-work boundaries and the supervision of children learning from home.

To this can be added another challenge, but not one that’s especially new…

Leaving work-at-work

Psychological detachment from work is defined as gaining mental distance from one’s work while being away from work situations. This type of subjective separation is important for employees because it’s known to help job-stress recovery and wellbeing.

In simple terms, someone who psychologically detaches from work doesn’t think about it during their free time. By doing so, mind and body get a chance to return to an ‘even-keel’, which helps restore their functioning to pre-demand levels.

Unfortunately, 21st century technology has made leaving work-at-work difficult to do. For many people, smartphones have become the primary device for work communication, AND for personal communication. As a result, it is easy for one to impact the other…and they often do.

Workplace telepressure

Recognising the challenges smartphone use has for employees, researchers have begun to study “workplace telepressure”. In simple terms, this is the pressure workers can feel to remain ‘online’, to stay alert for incoming messages, and to respond quickly when called upon. According to recent Dutch research, workers who report feeling telepressure are less able to detach from work and are less engaged on days they use their smartphones intensively for work.

But this is not surprising. It is easy to imagine how an employee could wind up being perpetually “on” when the addictive qualities of a smartphone interact with sources of external pressure (e.g., a CEO who expects immediate answers) and internal pressures (e.g., a strong sense of duty).

Relating this back to life in lockdown, the dangers of work strain and burnout seem accentuated. Sure, we’re working from home in comfortable clothes, but we’re doing it surrounded by domestic distractions, a fracturing of our social world, and with technologies that can make it difficult to ‘switch off’ and benefit from the flexibility that working from home provides.

Well, just go for a walk then!

Not surprisingly, the natural consequence of telepressure and an inability to psychologically detach from work is fatigue. Because knowledge workers ‘think for a living’ and rely heavily on mobile communications, the fatigue they experience is often mental. If unaddressed, task performance can decline (through poor concentration, memory lapses, etc), along with relationship quality (through difficulties managing fatigue-induced emotions, like irritability or impatience).

As such, the minimisation of fatigue is critical to sustainable high performance. At first glance this would appear to be quite simple: Take a break. Stretch your legs. Get out for a walk. Or a run. Or a swim. Whatever.

Just get out! Whilst this is all very sound advice, there’s no guarantee time away from the (home) office will make any sort of difference. It all depends on how you do it.

A little sociobiology

“Biophelia” is a term that’s been used to describe human beings’ innate love of life and living systems. In the 1980s, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson argued this attraction is linked to our success as a species, with evolution selecting behaviours that connect us to nature because they improved biological fitness.

Put simply, in the same way that speed and agility has had survival value (by helping us evade predators), so too apparently has “getting back to nature”.

This has prompted the question…how?

According to environmental psychologists, natural environments are therapeutic because they change the way we pay attention to the world. Nature helps to pause the intense, controlled way that we focus on the world, and a more involuntary form of processing. Whenever it fascinates us, our attention becomes effortless, and we begin to rest.

What makes a good mix?

Research has shown that natural settings are most helpful when they:

Transport people to a secluded psychological state
Provide a coherent other world
Are compatible with personal inclinations
Result in feelings of fascination (with attention directed involuntarily).

However, not all natural settings are created equal. Studies have shown that different natural settings deliver different experiences. For example, sitting in a well-kept garden for 30 minutes is likely to be more restorative than sitting in a garden overgrown with weeds and unpruned hedges. This is likely to be because it is easy to make sense of the garden (coherent), enables escapism (transport), and leads attention to become free-floating (fascination).

Importantly, exposure to natural environments can positively impact performance, with multiple studies showing improved control over attention, and enhanced accuracy, decision-making, short-term memory and cognitive flexibility on a range of tasks.

Disconnection needs connection

The challenge of detaching from work can seem like a deceptively simple, with common sense solutions. Prioritise breaktimes - get out of the office - go for a walk. Whilst unquestionably positive, these actions are not guaranteed to trigger detachment or a restoration response, especially if one is prone to telepressure and finds it hard to separate from their mobile device.

So, the message is simple. Sustained high performance relies on sustained regular recovery. And that recovery is likely to be best when a person can both physically separate AND psychological detach from their work. Fortunately, nature can help us do that, depending on how we engage it.

In a recent book, Wallace Nichols used the label “blue mind” to refer to our instinctive attraction to water. I would say we also have a “green mind” that’s equally important. Luckily both inclinations can be satisfied in a myriad of ways: bushwalking, snorkelling, picking wild berries, fishing, or using the land or sea as a subject for sketching, painting or photography. Whatever we invest time in, the dividend we get from it will be governed by how much we can be “in” it.

At the very least that means leaving the smartphone at home, so that the world gets a chance to weave its magic over us!

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