How work from home has ‘changed our brains’

Extraordinary new research has shown that working from home has created a round-the-clock environment that has rewired our brains. This is what you need to know.

Overwhelmed and unsettled. Emotionally fragile or just feeling really flat. In the brave new world of blended work, dispersed workmates and flexible hours between home and office, these feelings are not imagined.

Covid and all its sidekicks – isolation periods, quarantine rules, social distancing, the use of technology over in-person meetings, ever-shifting rules and inability to plan ahead with any certainty – have caused endless changes in our work lives. The rug, it seems, is never beneath our feet for very long.

Big changes in how we go about our lives have caused a persistent cycle of stress that has, for millions of people, had a physical effect on our bodies. For many of us, our brains have actually changed.

Dr Fiona Kerr, founder of the Neurotech Institute, says a “stress brain loop’’ can physically change the shape of a brain, in some cases shrinking it in size and rewiring it to work differently.

Dr Fiona Kerr, founder of the Neurotech Institute, is an expert in cognitive neuroscience, human connectivity and the impact of technology.

Based in Aldgate, outside Adelaide, in South Australia, Kerr, 64, is a prominent “thought leader’’, researcher, public speaker and expert in cognitive neuroscience, human connectivity and the impact of technology.

She advises and works with companies and governments internationally, ranging from robotics companies and the health sector to the US Department of Defence and Finland’s artificial intelligence (AI) program and even performance troupe Cirque du Soleil.

She is currently advising a Victorian state government department on best practices for a hybrid or blended workplace – where work is a combination of home and office, digital and in person. Since Covid began, Kerr says millions of people have been affected by cognitive, virtual and change fatigue.

“With Covid we have a high stress situation, an emerging environment and it creates an anxiety base. We are in an environment where we can’t plan,” she says.

“Also, when you are working from home, suddenly we become 24-7. There’s an awful lot of people who are weary, not just from Zoom fatigue, but because they don’t turn off.

“You then get a stress loop and that changes your brain and it changes your body.

“A stress brain loop can actually change the size of your brain, it can actually shrink it. It changes the structure and rewires the brain to work differently.

“Chronic stress means that some parts are firing more than they should.

“The cortisol goes up in your bloodstream because the cortisol receptors are not working as well.”

Kerr says this stress loop can lead to inadequate sleep, poor nutrition and emotional distress and, over time, creates cellular changes in the brain’s hippocampus leading to problems with attention, short-term memory, learning, word finding and perception.

“It makes real physical changes,” Kerr says.

“This is why you feel the way you do, why you feel flat. It’s a situation that is so much out of our control and so different from being in an office or a cafe or with family when we want to. Suddenly, we don’t have the capacity to make those choices.”

Hybrid or blended work arrangements can mean working “24-7’’.

There are also many Covid changes such as physical “sneeze barriers” between workers, various mask requirements and social distancing.

Sometimes, Kerr says, people want to “stay in the bubble”, locking themselves off from the world that has changed so much.

“Sometimes, we’d rather stay at home and not have to deal with it,” Kerr says.

“Very often people won’t come out. There is a cycle where the brain is working differently.

“When you are in isolation you do a couple of classic things that mirror depression. One is that you stop interacting with other humans and you stop exercising and interacting with the environment. To an extent, what is happening in the brain is that feedback loop of now acting like you are in depression.”

Kerr has qualifications in complex systems engineering, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and anthropology, making her an expert in human connectivity and when technology should and, importantly, should not be used.

She has expertise in human and technology interaction; human and AI interaction; how humans shape each other; how technology shapes humans; and how future technology, including the ethical use of AI, should be used.

She says there is a growing knowledge about what does and doesn’t work over screens and how direct human interaction changes the way we think, feel and work.

In a new working era of flexible and dispersed workers, hybrid or blended working arrangements and meetings are, Kerr says, “critical to get right”.

The science of human-to-human interaction is quite fascinating with humans possessing a “neurophysiological radar” for other human beings.

“When humans are together, we have what is called interbrain synchronisation,” Kerr says.

“We have chemicals that we swap with people as soon as we are in the same physical space. That’s why people like coming together.

“We start to synchronise with people mentally, emotionally and physically as soon as we interact with them. We don’t do that when it’s virtual contact.

“Touch is a massive connectivity.

“There are so many electrochemical changes as soon as you touch someone or look at someone.

“We change each other’s brains through human interaction and proximity and that leads to aligned values, higher collaboration, creativity, better complex decision making, higher strategic capacity and trust.

“(Technology) tools are fabulous but you’ve got to understand how to use them, how to allow people to choose them and what you don’t turn on.

“The secret is to ask, ‘Does technology have any role in this?’ It might enable the best outcome but not always.”

And for those who think a conversation over a video conferencing platform such as Zoom is better than a regular, old-fashioned phone call, think again.

Kerr says Zoom calls may be more stressful than phone calls due to the massive influx of information taken in over a screen, such as tiny lag times. Also, looking at the screen or at yourself instead of directly into the camera, your brain scrambles to take it all in.

And simply turning off the Zoom camera is not the answer because you will still tend to look at the screen. Then, Kerr says, your brain is saying, “they don’t want to look at you”.

Video calls can be more stressful than phone calls as the brain scrambles to take in tiny lag times and where to look.

Queensland Brain Institute research fellow and cognitive neuroscientist Dr Dragan Rangelov says Covid and our changed behaviour has been something of a “natural experiment”.

“We could never create this sort of experiment where people are isolated and changing the way they work but with Covid we can now use it to see how adaptable the brain is or how sensitive the brain is,” he says.

“The most common changes are dynamic changes in the way the pathways in the brain are organised. These brain networks would change when having to switch between different work environments.

“It imposes extra workload for the brain. Having to switch is definitely more effort than using the old pathways over and over.

“People tend to make more mistakes and they approach tasks in a different environment at a slower pace, potentially to compensate for the risk of making errors.

“People may report feeling more stressed, that they are more tired because it is more demanding psychologically.

“Responses to those changes will depend on whether or not people like working at home or if they prefer their regular work office. But at the end of the day, it will be more demanding.”

Queensland Brain Institute research fellow and cognitive neuroscientist Dr Dragan Rangelov.

A Microsoft 2021 Work Trend Index annual report found flexible work is here to stay with hybrid work “inevitable”.

The report identified challenges in this environment including teams that have become more siloed, and “digital exhaustion” that is a “real and unsustainable threat”.

Among seven hybrid work trends, the report found high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce.

This is blamed on the speed and urgency of virtual work and technology creating a “digital static” – the gap between what is communicated online and what is actually understood.

In-person conversations, in contrast, give our brains a chance to also assess “tone, social cues and body language”.

The report states: “As that digital static increases, so does employee fatigue, anxiety and burnout rates – while motivation and engagement decline”.

The good news is, among all the workplace changes and stress this has brought, control can be regained.

Kerr says there is much companies and workplaces can do to make people feel comfortable at work and it is vital CEOs and managers understand what effective hybrid work systems look like.

“You’ve got to think about the basic science of human interaction – when you need to get people together and what this does to decision making skills, to creativity, bonding and trust,” Kerr says.

“Those things are key to knowing how often and why you get people in the one space.

“It’s educating people on the science of the interesting, fascinating and wonderful aspect of exactly what happens when humans interact with each other.”

Originally published as How work from home has ‘changed our brains’