Remote days bring 15 minutes more sleep and 45 minutes more sitting, Finnish accelerometer study finds
Researchers at the University of Turku fitted thigh-mounted accelerometers to 99 hybrid workers and measured the same people across both office days and remote days. On remote days, participants slept about 15 minutes longer and spent about 45 minutes longer sitting or lying down. Standing, light activity and moderate-to-vigorous activity all fell.
Because the study measured the same individuals on both day types, it avoids the usual problem of comparing remote workers with office workers who may differ in other ways. The measurements came from devices rather than self-reports, which matters: people are unreliable narrators of their own sitting.
Why this matters
The extra sleep is a real benefit and worth naming — a quarter of an hour a night, repeated across every remote day, is a meaningful amount of recovered rest for anyone who has ever set an alarm around a commute. The trade sitting alongside it is that three-quarters of an hour of movement disappears, and it disappears from the part of the day nobody notices.
Lead author Kristin Suorsa identifies where the loss actually comes from, and it is specific enough to act on. Most of it is lost standing time, because standing workstations are rarely available at home, with the rest coming from the walking and cycling of a commute being replaced by sitting. That points at two concrete things rather than a general instruction to move more: a way to work standing for part of the day, and a deliberate walk that replaces the journey you no longer make.
Context
The study was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (DOI 10.1186/s12966-026-01959-0). Ninety-nine participants is a modest sample, and all were hybrid workers, so the findings describe the difference between day types rather than the effect of working remotely full time.
It fits a pattern in the research: remote work tends to improve the things the commute was taking — sleep, time, autonomy — while quietly removing incidental physical activity that nobody chose in the first place.