You may know the feeling. You’re supposed to have finished work for the day, but later, during your evening meal, you start mentally preparing for tomorrow’s meeting. Or just having a quick check of your emails while you half watch TV.

You might not mean to, or even want to. It’s just something that you end up doing as part of the price of enjoying some autonomy at work.

For a while now, research has claimed that professional autonomy was a good thing. Being able to decide how, where and when you worked was considered a major plus in terms of motivation, job satisfaction and overall health.

And although those benefits still exist, we now know that more autonomy can often also mean more work and less downtime.

Research shows that workers with a high degree of autonomy struggle to leave work behind at the end of the day. When you have control over your job, it can stay on your mind as you run through decisions and ponder unresolved problems. Switching off becomes difficult.

But the capacity to stop thinking about work during personal time, what’s known as “psychological detachment”, is a form of emotional and........

© Japan Today