One of the more surprising psychological revelations of the remote work era is the rehabilitation of the commute. Once universally decried as one of the worst features of office-based working, the daily journey to and from work is now viewed by many former commuters with something approaching nostalgia. The commute, it turns out, was doing something psychologically important — and its absence is felt in ways that illuminate both the mechanics of work-from-home fatigue and some potential remedies for it.
Remote work became mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained so. The elimination of the daily commute was among the most celebrated aspects of the shift to home-based working. Workers calculated the hours they had reclaimed, the money they had saved, the stress they had avoided. The commute’s absence was treated as an unambiguous gain. Over time, however, a more complicated picture has emerged.
The commute, whatever its frustrations, served several important psychological functions. Most fundamentally, it provided a transition — a period of time between the home self and the professional self that allowed the brain to shift modes and prepare for the demands ahead. This transition is what psychologists call a liminal space: a threshold moment that separates different domains of experience and allows the identity shifts that healthy functioning requires. Without it, the transition between home and work modes happens abruptly, incompletely, and within the same physical space.
The commute also provided predictable periods of movement, sensory variety, and social exposure — even the passive social exposure of being among strangers on public transit serves mood-regulatory functions. It marked time, creating a clear temporal structure to the day that helped workers pace their energy and maintain a sense of the day’s progress. And it provided a decompression period at the end of the workday that allowed the stress and demands of professional life to be metabolized before arriving home.
Recreating the psychological functions of the commute in a remote working context is possible through deliberate design. A walk at the beginning and end of the workday, a consistent routine that signals the shift between personal and professional modes, and deliberate periods of movement and sensory change during the day can all restore something of what the commute provided. The goal is not to recreate the commute itself but to honor the psychological functions it served.