Digital nomadism is often sold as a particularly modern form of freedom: work from anywhere, choose your own schedule and trade the fixed office for a life built around mobility. New research suggests that the psychological reality is more complicated. For people whose work is heavily mediated by technology and weakly anchored to a conventional organisation, autonomy may be valuable only when it comes with the ability to control where work ends and non-work life begins.
A peer-reviewed study published in BMC Psychology on 26 September 2026 surveyed 540 digital nomads and examined how locus of control, technostress, telepressure, boundary control and offline social interaction were associated with subjective well-being. The strongest positive pathway in the model ran through boundary control: people who felt more able to decide when and how they moved between work and personal life tended to report better well-being.
The findings do not show that becoming better at setting boundaries will necessarily cause well-being to improve. The study was cross-sectional, based on self-reports and recruited participants through online communities. But it offers a detailed picture of an increasingly important workforce whose apparent flexibility can coexist with constant digital demands.
The freedom of working anywhere can create a new kind of pressure
Digital nomads differ from many conventional remote employees because they may work as freelancers, contractors or platform workers while moving between cities or countries. That can mean fewer organisational structures setting working hours, availability expectations or recovery time. The same technologies that make location-independent work possible can also make workers continuously reachable.
The researchers framed this tension through the Job Demands-Resources model and Conservation of Resources theory. In their model, technostress and telepressure operate as demands that consume psychological resources, while boundary control acts as a resource that can help people protect recovery time and regulate work intrusions.
Technostress captured three related experiences: technology overload, technology invading personal life and the complexity of continually adapting to digital tools. Telepressure was narrower. It referred to the psychological urge to respond quickly to work-related messages and remain available. For a digital nomad, that pressure may be particularly difficult to escape when client relationships, ratings or future work depend on responsiveness.
Researchers surveyed 540 digital nomads
The research team recruited participants through remote-work communities, digital-nomad forums and social-media groups. The final sample contained 540 valid responses. Women made up 70.7% of respondents and men 29.3%. The largest age group was 40 to 49 years at 30.0%, followed by 18 to 24 years at 26.3%. Just over half, 55.0%, held a bachelor’s degree, while 16.5% had a master’s degree or higher.
One feature of the sample is important for interpreting the results. Although participants were classified as digital nomads, 64.3% reported only zero to 10 hours of remote work per week during the previous month. The authors acknowledge that the boundary between digital nomads, mobile freelancers and longer-term remote employees can be porous, particularly when status is established through platform screening and self-reported work characteristics.
Participants completed measures covering locus of control, boundary control, offline social interaction, subjective well-being, telepressure and three dimensions of technostress. Subjective well-being included positive affect, calmness, vitality, feeling rested and interest in daily activities. The researchers also collected demographic variables including age, gender, education, occupational category and remote working hours.
The team analysed the relationships using partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, and used 5,000 bootstrap resamples to estimate the significance of paths, indirect effects and interactions. Reliability and convergent validity checks met the thresholds reported by the authors. The predictors together explained 41.1% of the variance in subjective well-being in the structural model.
Boundary control stood out in the results
A stronger internal locus of control was strongly associated with greater boundary control, with a standardised path coefficient of β = 0.530, t = 13.379 and p < 0.001. Locus of control explained 28.1% of the variance in boundary control. In practical terms, respondents who more strongly believed that their actions could influence outcomes also tended to feel more capable of governing the transition between work and non-work roles.
The same control orientation was associated with lower technostress, β = -0.329, p < 0.001, and lower telepressure, β = -0.186, p = 0.001. The direct relationship between locus of control and well-being was not the central story. Instead, the analysis suggested that control beliefs were connected to well-being indirectly through the way people experienced digital demands and managed their boundaries.
Boundary control was the strongest positive predictor of subjective well-being among the mechanisms examined, β = 0.345, t = 7.702, p < 0.001. Offline social interaction was close behind at β = 0.332, t = 6.561, p < 0.001.
By contrast, greater technostress was associated with poorer subjective well-being, β = -0.118, p = 0.010, while telepressure also showed a negative association, β = -0.135, p = 0.001. These coefficients describe relationships within the statistical model rather than percentage changes in well-being, so they should not be interpreted as saying, for example, that boundary control improves well-being by 34.5%.
The indirect pathways reveal why control may matter
The mediation analysis sharpened the picture. The indirect path from locus of control through boundary control to subjective well-being was β = 0.183, with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval from 0.132 to 0.241 and p < 0.001. That was considerably larger than the indirect paths through technostress, β = 0.039, p = 0.023, and telepressure, β = 0.025, p = 0.026.
This matters because it shifts the interpretation away from the simple idea that digital workers thrive merely by avoiding stress. In this sample, the ability to actively govern availability and role transitions appeared more important than either stress pathway on its own. Flexibility, in other words, may be psychologically useful when a worker feels able to exercise control over it.
That distinction is especially relevant for nomadic work. An employee in a conventional organisation may have formal working hours, managers, human-resource systems and shared expectations that partly define when work stops. A freelancer moving between locations may have to create those boundaries personally while also facing commercial incentives to stay visible and respond quickly.
Face-to-face interaction buffered one digital pressure, but not all of them
The researchers also tested whether offline social interaction changed the relationships between work pressures and well-being. It did, but selectively.
The interaction between offline social interaction and telepressure was statistically significant, β = -0.072, t = 2.346, p = 0.019. The authors interpret this as evidence that more face-to-face interaction weakened the negative relationship between telepressure and well-being. Offline contact may help people disengage from the same digital environment through which the pressure to remain responsive arrives.
But offline interaction was not a universal shield. Its interaction with technostress was not significant, β = -0.030, p = 0.385, and neither was its interaction with boundary control, β = -0.040, p = 0.264. Social contact may therefore replenish emotional resources without solving structural problems such as technology overload, tool complexity or weak control over working arrangements.
What platforms and remote workers could take from the study
The findings point toward a more nuanced approach to digital work design. Platforms can make constant responsiveness feel compulsory through notifications, response-time indicators and ranking systems. Features that support declared availability windows, delayed communication and customisable notifications could potentially make boundaries easier to maintain.
Yet the authors also identify a tension. Workers competing for projects may depend on fast responses and visible availability to build reputation and secure income. A platform that simply reduces emphasis on responsiveness could therefore disadvantage newer workers if clients continue to reward immediacy. The researchers suggest that responsiveness expectations may need to differ by task type, client relationship and service category rather than being removed uniformly.
For workers themselves, the results support practical attention to explicit availability rules, technology-free periods and routines that distinguish work engagement from recovery. The association with offline interaction also suggests that co-working spaces, local communities and face-to-face networks may provide something that another online community cannot fully replicate.
The study cannot establish cause and effect
The study has several important limitations. Because all variables were measured at one point in time, the direction of the relationships cannot be established. Greater boundary control might contribute to better well-being, but people with better well-being may also find it easier to maintain boundaries. Longitudinal or experience-sampling studies would be better suited to testing how these relationships unfold over time.
All major constructs were self-reported in the same questionnaire, creating a risk of common-method bias. The convenience sample was recruited through digital communities, which may overrepresent people who are already socially connected and highly engaged online. The sample also cannot be treated as representative of digital nomads globally, and cultural or institutional differences were not explicitly modelled.
Those qualifications make the results evidence of association rather than proof of a psychological recipe for successful nomadic work. Even so, the pattern is informative. The attractive promise of location independence may conceal a second requirement: people need not only freedom from a fixed workplace, but meaningful control over the digital boundaries that replace it.
Source Information
Study: How locus of control shapes digital nomads’ subjective well-being: the mediating roles of telepressure, technostress, and boundary control
Authors: Qi Cao, ZiRan Zhou, ZiXuan Xu, YiMo Han and Hui-Ling Hu
Journal: BMC Psychology
Published: 26 September 2026
DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05635-7
Study design: Cross-sectional survey of 540 digital nomads analysed using PLS-SEM and 5,000 bootstrap resamples.
