Will "Right to Disconnect" Laws Improve Our Mental Health?

Inspired by a similar law in France, the province of Ontario recently passed Bill 27, a law requiring employers to establish policies aimed to allow their workers to disconnect after work. This means, in theory, fewer workplace emails or texts in the evening when we are supposed to be “off.” Will this help many of those who increasingly report challenges of burnout or loss of work-life balance? Will it invite more opportunities for self-care and improve at-home interpersonal relationships?

While the effects of the law are still undetermined, one of the immediately positive things about this law is that it invites us to ask questions about the role of work in our lives, and in particular, its psychological and interpersonal effects. At a broader level, the law invites us to think about what we owe to our work and what we owe to the other areas in our life: individual reflection or "self-care," family and friends, and household duties and obligations. It also asks us to consider what we get from our work—how it depletes or replenishes us psychologically, and how it interacts, either positively or negatively, with our other relationships.

In the best case, this law could change the way that work negatively intrudes into private time and space, or at least give workers language to express this as an intrusion to their employers. This may be most likely to affect those for whom work is not a meaningful life activity but a means to an end. Many of my clients speak about being "triggered" by a late afternoon or evening text from a boss, reminding them of their workplace antipathy. It is an intrusion that colours their home life and reminds them of the unethical pull of their work on their supposed downtime. In the best cases, this law will help give policy support to this intrusion and empower employees to set more healthy boundaries with their employer.

For others, however, work is an extension or parallel to their life interests and broader goals; after-hours engagement is partly a reflection of vocational pleasure. For those lucky to find themselves in jobs that engage them in cognitive, interpersonal, or creative ways, working late or after-hours on a project can be a meaningful extension of their private or leisure interests. Having work that you want to continue after 5 pm can be a sign of purposive work, a lack of which often materializes clinically as depressive symptoms (“I don’t have meaningful pursuits that are self-generating”).

There is another relationship to work that I frequently see in my practice that the "right to disconnect law" doesn’t quite address: those who use excessive work as a distraction or coping means for unsuccessful home lives. I have seen this appear often in couple’s therapy, where one partner admits that they use work to escape an unhappy dynamic, and dread turning the key to come home.

For this type of client, having more excuses to remain plugged in to work at all times keeps the distressing home situation at bay. For many, it can be incredibly relieving to be "on-call" or take a long shift during the weekend and thus abstain from family events. While certainly, this can be a form of avoidance, it can also be a way of indirectly carving out personal space or self-care—claiming and prioritizing one’s own individual time and space apart from the family.

These cases invite us to consider the cause-effect dynamic between work and domestic or social life disfunction. Is it my gruelling schedule and constant emailing and texting that have caused wedges with my spouse? Or is work a satisfying and convenient way to avoid negative interpersonal habits with my partner? Sometimes an unsatisfying relationship can propel us into our work more deeply, either as an avoidance strategy or as a means of finding satisfaction or interpersonal validation in another location. In other words, it is sometimes difficult to clinically assess whether workplace intrusion into the home is the result of push or pull factors, which complicates our "right" to disconnect.

While I don’t personally believe that this law can solve all the many ways that we relate and engage with work, I argue that it does force conversations about the varied roles work plays in our lives, and indeed some of the mileage we get from an increasingly connected 24/7 work culture. Understanding how work serves or doesn’t serve the other non-work areas of our lives is one potentially productive consequence of this law, whether in France or Ontario.