Psychology says adults who take the long way home aren't avoiding anyone. They're just giving one role time to end before another begins.

You've had a bad day. Back-to-back meetings, endless conversations and messages, a to-do list that somehow managed to get longer by 5 p.m. So instead of taking the fastest route home, you find yourself making a few extra turns, looping around a couple of extra blocks, maybe stopping for gas you don't actually need. You’re not lost. You are not wasting time. You might be doing something softly smart.

The commute is doing more for you than you know
For many Americans, the drive or ride home has always felt like dead time, something to get through before real life begins. But that's starting to change. In a study in Work, Employment and Society, McAlpine and Piszczek found that the commute creates what psychologists call “liminal space,” a zone where you’re neither fully at work nor fully at home. You’re in the middle, and that middle is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your mental health.

The scientists tracked 80 university workers over a week of commutes. Employees did morning and evening surveys on how well they mentally “switched off” from work on the ride home and how emotionally exhausted they felt when they got in. The results were clear: when employees had longer-than-average commutes, they were more psychologically detached from work and more relaxed. The commute wasn't wasted time. It was time to recover.


Your brain needs a buffer, not a hard stop
Stress is sneaky like that. It doesn't just turn off the moment you walk through your front door. The work stress lingers in your body, in your mind, in the way you snap at your family over something trivial. What your brain really needs is a gradual off-ramp, not a sudden halt.

This is where psychological detachment helps. In a groundbreaking study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Sonnentag and Bayer found that employees who mentally detach from work during their leisure time report higher life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of psychological strain, without any reduction in engagement or productivity at work. In other words, fully switching off in the evenings doesn't make you a slacker. It makes you healthier and probably better at your job the next morning.

And a commute, especially a longer than usual one, can naturally provide that window of disconnection. You haven’t tackled dinner, the kids or household chores yet. You’re not in a meeting. You're just moving. And it turns out that movement is a surprisingly good reset button.

This is made harder by the hybrid and remote work era
For millions of millennial and Gen Z workers who have spent the last few years working from home, this buffer has all but disappeared. The commute went from 26 minutes (the average one-way commute time in the US) to about 30 seconds from the bedroom to the laptop. And scientists think that this decline is one reason a lot of remote workers reported experiencing more burnout and less-defined boundaries during and after the pandemic.

There was no commute, and so work and home collided with no break in between. There was no time to chill, no physical indicator to signal the end of the workday. The roles, employee and parent, coworker and partner, started to blur in ways that were quietly exhausting.

So what does this mean for you?
If you travel to work by car or train, don't hurry your journey home. Utilize that time. Create a playlist, listen to a podcast or nothing at all. Allow your mind to wander from deadlines. The longer route might not be avoidance; it might be exactly what you need.

If you’re working from home, research suggests you can create your own version of that liminal space. A short walk after you shut the laptop. One more coffee run to end the day. 10-minute drive with open windows. It’s less about the activity and more about the motivation for it. You’re going from one role to another, so your brain needs a moment to do that.

The long way home is not a wasted trip. It is the smart kind of silence.