Open-plan offices are usually criticized for noise and interruption. The more consequential effect is subtler: they reduce the small private intervals in which people recover.
Recovery happens in gaps, not in breaks
The stress response resolves during periods when demand drops, and those periods are mostly short — a minute staring out a window, a few seconds between tasks.
Those gaps are unglamorous and largely unnoticed, which is why they disappear from an environment without anyone objecting to their removal.
An office where every pause is visible converts these intervals into something that looks like idleness, and people fill them with performance instead.
Being observable is its own demand
Working within sight of others adds a low-level monitoring task: managing posture, expression and the appearance of engagement.
The demand is small at any moment and continuous across a day, which is the profile that accumulates rather than the profile that spikes.
It also explains why people describe open offices as tiring even on quiet days, when the noise explanation would predict no effect at all.
Interruption costs more than its duration
A question that takes twenty seconds to answer costs considerably more than twenty seconds, because returning to a suspended task requires rebuilding what was in mind.
Where interruptions are frequent, the work fragments into pieces too short for the more demanding kind of thinking, so that thinking migrates to evenings and weekends.
The cost therefore shows up outside the office, which makes it hard to attribute to the office.
Why headphones only partly work
Headphones address sound and leave visibility untouched. They also signal unavailability, which is often the actual reason people wear them.
That signal is a workaround for a missing feature: a way to be unreachable that does not require a physical door.
Where organizations formalize such a signal — agreed quiet hours, bookable enclosed rooms — the workaround becomes unnecessary and the recovery gaps return.
What layout can and cannot fix
Physical changes help at the margins: enclosed rooms available without booking, sightlines broken up, a genuinely separate space for calls.
They do not address workload, which is the larger determinant. A quiet room does not reduce the number of things due on Friday.
Where sustained work stress is producing sleep problems or persistent low mood, the appropriate response is a licensed professional rather than a rearrangement of desks.