Is there a correlation between evening ‘recovery’ and a person’s mood at work the following day?

The quality of recovery a person experiences on a given evening after work may affect their mood when they start working again the next day, according to new research published in The Guardian. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

The study, which was based on the diaries of 124 employees over 887 days, found that people who had a higher quality of recovery during the evening than usual had higher levels of alertness, calmness, and cheerfulness when they started working the next day. However, people’s wakefulness and calmness tended to decline more strongly during the workday after the evening with a higher quality recovery.

These results indicate that employees benefit from daily recovery, but that these benefits subside during the workday. Therefore, it is important to engage in recovery on a daily basis.

“Our study shows that daily recovery from work during time off work is really beneficial for the mood of employees; however, these benefits do not last throughout the working day. Thus, our results highlight that the benefits of nighttime recovery are relatively short-lived,” said corresponding author Mike Arnold, MA, from the University of Mannheim in Germany.”We further found that some but not all of these benefits could be explained by better sleep quality after a good evening recovery.”