Imagine that you are walking to your car after a particularly stressful day at work. Or perhaps instead, your day got off to a bad start with a crowded bus ride into the office. Do the experiences that we have during our workday affect our behavior and perhaps even influence our safety when commuting home? Can a difficult commute to the office undermine our ability to have a happy, healthy, and productive day at work? Questions like this reflect a phenomenon referred to as commuting spillover, which is when workday experiences affect experiences during the commute and vice versa.
The way we commute is changing (increasing availability of vehicles with driver assistance features), what we do while we commute is changing (more frequent distracted driving extending from smart phone use), and the commuting conditions we face are also changing (greater traffic congestion), so it is essential that we understand connections between our commuting and work experiences to evaluate critical inputs to our health, wellness, and productivity inside and outside of the workplace. That’s why there is a growing emphasis in the scientific community on measuring and understanding commuting spillover.
People are also reading…
The science of commuting spillover illustrates numerous interesting and important findings that help us understand how our lives at work and during the commute connect. For example, as you may have guessed from my opening questions, a more demanding day at work does appear to lead to less safe driving on the commute home. Even this relationship may be more complex than it seems though, as recent work suggests that encountering workday demands that are challenging, interesting, or engaging may help boost energy and attention that could support safe driving on the way home. Investigators have even demonstrated that the commute can be helpful to recovering from a demanding workday in some circumstances, such as when focusing on your commute allows you to feel that you are mentally leaving work behind for the day. As you can see, even the simple suggestion that a challenging day at work may make it difficult to concentrate when driving home is more complex than it seems.
What about if we instead think about how our experiences during the commute before work affect our upcoming workday? This was the question that first drew scientists to the commuting spillover topic, with the earliest research centered on determining whether a tough morning commute leads to worse job performance at work. We are still learning about the role of the morning commute in job performance. But studies are helping us better understand the interplay between the commute and the work day. For example, there is evidence to suggest that engaging in more physically active forms of commuting (walking or cycling to work) may lead to better job performance, a finding that makes sense when considering that physical activity can enhance energy and attention needed to perform at work. Accordingly, how we commute to work may inform whether the commute influences our subsequent workday in a positive or negative way.
One issue that remains poorly understood is whether and how major disruptions to commuting, such as the Interstate 95 bridge collapse in Philadelphia, influence commuting spillover. On the one hand, when the commuting conditions we face are more unpredictable, this tends to be one of the most reliable recipes for stressful commuting. However, it is possible that some adaptation to difficult commuting conditions may occur over time that allows commuters to feel more in control of their commute, such as different route choices and altering commuting times. Such avenues to enhancing control over the commute are a major pathway to reducing commuting stress.
Commuting stress can stick with us during our workday, and work stress has the potential to be an unwelcome distraction on the way home. Awareness of complexities in commuting spillover can go a long way towards making our commutes safer and our workdays better.