Inside: How to Switch Off After a Demanding Workday: Four Ways to Recover, According to Research. Collaborative post.
Elena could always tell how her day had gone by what happened in the car. Some evenings she drove home with the radio on and her mind blank. Others she sat in the drive with the engine off, replaying a phone call from a patient who’d been in tears at the front desk of the GP surgery where she worked. She’d said the right things. She knew that. But the call came home with her, through dinner, through bath time, and into the hour after the children were asleep when she was supposed to be resting. By ten she was lying awake, still on the phone.
If you have a job that involves other people’s worries, you may know this loop. The good news is that researchers have studied it closely, and they’ve found that switching off is less a matter of willpower than of a few specific habits.
What “Recovery” Means in Research
Psychologists Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz developed a framework in 2007 for describing how people unwind from work. In a paper in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, they identified four kinds of “recovery experiences” that help people recuperate in their time away from the job. The paper reported on a study of 930 employees, mostly women, with an average age of about 38, drawn from organisations including schools, call centres, hospitals and nursing homes.
The four experiences were psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control. Each one is simple enough to describe in a sentence.
Psychological detachment is the sense of being away from the work situation, which the authors describe as leaving the workplace behind in psychological terms. It’s the difference between being home and actually being off.
Relaxation is a state of low activation and increased positive mood, usually reached through activities that take little physical or mental effort.
Mastery experiences are off-job activities that distract from work by offering challenge and learning in another area, giving a sense of competence and proficiency. Learning a language, a sport or a craft would count.
Control during leisure time is the degree to which you can decide which activity to do in your free time, and when and how to do it. It’s the feeling that your evening belongs to you.
The four recovery experiences were linked to better wellbeing. They showed negative relationships with health complaints, burnout, depressive symptoms, a felt need for recovery, and sleep problems, and positive relationships with life satisfaction. Of the four, psychological detachment showed the strongest relationship with impaired wellbeing, which suggests that fully leaving work behind may matter most.
As with most research of this kind, these are associations rather than proof of cause. People who are struggling at work may find it harder to detach, and the relationship may run in both directions. But it supports what many people feel intuitively: it isn’t only how hard you work that wears you down, but whether you ever get to stop.
A Familiar Scenario: The Call That Followed Her Home
Elena’s trouble was detachment. She wasn’t overworked in hours, but she was never off in her head. Nothing she did in the evening gave her mind somewhere else to go.
She started small. A twenty-minute walk before going into the house, which became the border between work and home. A pottery class on Thursdays that took enough concentration to crowd out the day. A rule that her phone lived in a drawer after nine. None of it was dramatic, but over a few weeks the replaying got quieter.
Ideas for Each Kind of Recovery
● Detachment: a clear end-of-day ritual, such as a walk, a change of clothes, or a short note of tomorrow’s tasks so your mind can let go
● Relaxation: a bath, music, stretching, or simply sitting without a screen
● Mastery: a class, an instrument, a new recipe, something where you’re a beginner at ease with it
● Control: protect at least one evening a week that you plan only for yourself
● Sleep: keep the hour before bed free of work messages
● Support: talk to a colleague or friend about the hard moments, not only the logistics
If your sleep or mood stays low for weeks and starts affecting everyday life, speak to your GP.
Why This Matters When Choosing Work
If you’re thinking about moving into a more emotionally demanding line of work, it’s worth thinking about recovery before you start. The question isn’t only what the job involves but what it will take from you and what supports it offers. Does the workplace expect staff to be available out of hours? Is there supervision? Are there colleagues to debrief with?
Reading how employers describe their teams can offer a few clues. A residential treatment programme in Wichita, Kansas, for example, lists full-time counsellor roles and describes a supportive, mission-driven culture and a collaborative, multidisciplinary team. The programme is American and a job advert can’t tell you whether that culture holds in practice, so it’s something to ask about directly. But it’s a starting point for the questions you’d want to bring to an interview.
Making the Evening Yours Again
Elena didn’t solve the problem in a week. She did notice, around the fourth week, that she’d gone through an entire dinner without rehearsing the phone call. The walk had become something she looked forward to, and the pottery class had a half-finished bowl waiting for her. The calls still came, and the work still mattered. But the evening, for the first time in a while, was hers.
● Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221.