As someone who has worked from home as a freelance writer for about 11 years now, I’m here to tell you—working remotely definitely can compromise your mental and physical health, your social life, your home life, and your career. Isolation from human contact can start to feel like the norm, and when things feel normal, they become routine, and routines are hard to break.
The problem is it’s not like you’re in solitary confinement. You are still dealing with people like content managers and editors when you work remotely, so the feeling of loneliness doesn’t seem as present if you even feel it at all. Much like a teenager who has no friends at school, but has 2000 friends online when he or she plays on their social media accounts or multiplayer video games – it is in a sense human contact – but it’s not the same as real face-to-face human contact.
Not Good For Your Health
Regardless of whether you feel alone or in the company of others while you are working remotely with others on the same project, isolation from human face-to-face contact is still not good for your mental health.
Sometime after my first few years of working remotely, I stopped showing up at the pub to hang out with friends, stopped going to family gatherings, forgot birthdays and holidays, and even stopped answering my phone.
You get so used to being alone, you just want to be alone.
Now, I’m not sure how it plays out for someone who works from home and has a significant other and possibly kids, but I have communicated with some remote freelancers who have the family situation, and some have still claimed to have battled the same type of issues. When you work, let’s say a 9-5, your significant other knows when to expect you home. But as a freelancer, you can always get out of things (family responsibilities, etc.) by saying I have this project, and it’s on a tight deadline or something like that, paving the way for you to disappear into your office with no questions asked. You can try that when you have a typical job with the same shift every day, but you can also spend most of your free time convincing your significant other you’re not having an affair.
Substance Abuse
Since you’re not in solitary confinement, just a prison of your own, you can still get access to things that can really help destroy your life. Alcohol is the worst – it’s legal, you can get it anywhere, and I’m pretty sure you can find a way to hide your substance abuse when your only contact with the people you work with is through a computer. The problem is your substance abuse will put you even further into an isolation rut. You probably don’t want people to know you’re already tipping the bottle at 9:00 AM, so staying away from social situations will seem like a good idea.
Once you find your poison that fills the void of having limited interaction with other people, even if that poison is something as simple as overeating, it becomes a comfortable part of your routine, a routine that becomes extremely hard to change.
How Do You Make Changes?
I found that the best way to avoid the isolation that can lead to depression and destructive behavior is to treat social responsibilities and other responsibilities as just another part of my job as a remote freelancer. If I had to show up to a 9-5 or any other type of job every day, I know I would eventually have to interact with someone I don’t want to talk to or run an errand or fix something that’s going to complicate my day even more at work, but I’d do it because it’s part of the job.
When I Started Treating Social Life As Part Of My Job
When I was done working for the day, I knew that whatever social things I could be doing, I could also just walk to the fridge, make myself a sandwich, and in less than ten minutes, I could be relaxing on the couch in front of the TV. No shave, no shower, and no looking for clothes to wear—you don’t even have to worry about the weather outside—just another relaxing quiet night-in. And if the mood strikes me, I can walk about 15 feet back to my office to get some more work done.
But unfortunately, this type of thought process isn’t good for any one person or their business. Having human contact with your loved ones and friends puts you in a better mood. Knowing that people care about you and what you’re up to releases endorphins in your brain, plus it keeps your personality alive. Being isolated for too long can cause you to forget how to interact socially in an effective way.
What happens when that wedding or funeral comes up that you know you have to go to, and your ability to interact with people effectively feels like it has gone away thanks to inadvertently isolating yourself? Standing on the wall all by yourself just looks and feels pathetic. What used to be second nature to you has now become a lost talent.
Save Your Career and Your Social Life
Just like with any job, hobby, sport, etc., you have to make an effort to get something positive out of it. If you work alone from home, and the only people you socialize with throughout the day are other people who are on the same project, possibly hundreds of miles away, most likely, the only communication you’ll have with them is going to be through the computer and only about the project. You need to make an effort to seek out human contact. Go to the park with your kids, visit your parents, hang out with a sibling or a friend, anything to get you out of the house.