UC Irvine

Introduction: Occupational stressors are workplace conditions that provoke harmful emotional and physical responses and, when chronic, contribute to anxiety and depression. These stressors are embedded within work organization through policies, procedures, and environmental arrangements. One increasingly prevalent yet understudied organizational arrangement is working from home (WFH). While WFH may reduce certain stressors, it may also introduce new risks for burnout and poor mental health. Evidence on WFH and mental health is mixed, particularly when comparing the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 periods. As mental health morbidity continues to rise in the United States, it is critical to understand how WFH influences mental health and how its effects vary across periods of societal disruption. This study integrates established occupational stress frameworks to examine the association between WFH and severely poor mental health among U.S. workers during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that the pandemic period would modify the association between WFH and mental health, such that WFH would be associated with worse mental health during COVID-19 but not post-COVID-19.Methods: We conducted a comparative cross-sectional analysis using data from the Healthy Work Survey, a U.S.-based, standardized online questionnaire designed to assess workplace psychosocial hazards and work organization. The analytic sample included 5,255 employed adults aged ≥18 years surveyed between 2020 and 2025. Severely poor mental health was defined as experiencing more than 14 days of stress, depression, or emotional problems in the past 30 days. Logistic regression models estimated the association between WFH and severely poor mental health overall and stratified by COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 periods. Models were adjusted for age, gender, industry, socioeconomic status, and a comprehensive and validated set of occupational stressors. Results: In the combined COVID and post-COVID sample, WFH was significantly associated with lower odds of severely poor mental health. After adjustment, individuals working from home had 25% lower odds of reporting severely poor mental health compared with those working in person. In stratified analyses, WFH remained protective in the post-COVID period, with a 37% reduction in the odds of severely poor mental health among remote workers. In contrast, during the COVID-19 period, WFH was associated with a non-statistically significant 15% increase in the odds of severely poor mental health. Conclusion: These findings indicate that the relationship between working from home and mental health varies across periods of societal disruption. COVID-19 appears to have acted as an effect modifier, transforming WFH from a potential risk factor during the pandemic into a protective factor in the post-COVID period. Our results suggest that WFH itself is neither inherently harmful nor beneficial; rather, its mental health impact depends on how remote work is structured, supported, and integrated into broader work systems, particularly during times of crisis.