What the passenger costs you

You've read this far thinking mostly about what the passenger costs the people at home, because that's what the title promised. This chapter is about what it costs you, because you're paying too, and some of it you've been calling something else.

It costs sleep. Querstret and Cropley's 719 workers showed that the fret was the strongest predictor of fatigue, and that sleep carried part of the link. Syrek's employees slept worse at the weekend when the week ended with loops open, and the fret was the route. Caitlin Demsky and colleagues surveyed 699 employees of the US Forest Service and found that rudeness at work was linked to insomnia symptoms, that going over the day was the path, and that the path was weakest for people who managed to detach and relax in the evening. The passenger doesn't stop at bedtime. The earlier book Nothing gets solved at three in the morning is about what it does then, and the short version is that the problem you took to bed is the one you wake up with at three.

It costs the evening's food, in a small way that surprised me. Cropley's 268 workers who did the most fretting reported eating more unhealthy food, and the people who detached least ate fewer cooked meals and more processed ones. That's one survey, and it can't say why. But an evening at the desk isn't one in which anyone cooks, and I'd guess you've noticed.

It costs energy in a way you've been calling the job. Wendsche and Lohmann-Haislah's pooled analysis linked low detachment to more exhaustion, more fatigue, worse sleep, lower life satisfaction and more physical discomfort, at small to medium sizes across tens of thousands of people. Those are correlations. But if you've been telling yourself you're tired because the job is hard, it's worth considering that you may be tired because the job is hard and then goes on for another five hours in your kitchen.

And it costs the evening itself, which is the one I'd most want you to count. Look at what the passenger has taken this week. Not what you did while it rode along. What you'd have done. The book read, the walk, the conversation with the shoe story in it, the film watched rather than sat in front of. You had those evenings. They were on the calendar. They happened to a body that was at the desk, and you can't have them back, and there'll be five more next week.

None of this is an argument that the passenger is a health emergency. It's an argument that the cost isn't zero, and that you've been booking it to the wrong account. The job takes its hours. The passenger takes yours.