Pressurized Suits, Pressurized Minds
What decades of extreme-work research say about Mars
2 January 2026
Mars is often described as a hostile environment. The phrase usually refers to radiation, thin atmosphere, lethal cold, and the vast distance from Earth. But hostility, in this context, is misleading. Mars is not actively antagonistic. It is simply indifferent. The real question is not whether Mars can sustain human technology, but whether human systems can sustain themselves under conditions that remove most forms of psychological relief.
Any long-term human presence on Mars will also be a workplace. People will wake up, report for tasks, collaborate with colleagues, manage conflict, experience fatigue, and attempt to rest. The difference is that the workplace will be total. There will be no commute, no boundary between professional and personal life, and no option to step outside the system when pressure builds. In that sense, Mars represents the most extreme version of a problem occupational psychologists have been studying for decades.
Dr. Craig Jackson, a professor of occupational health psychology at Birmingham City University, has spent much of his career examining how work affects mental health in environments where isolation, danger, and confinement are routine. His research spans Antarctic research stations, offshore oil platforms, desert-based extraction sites, and other remote workplaces where stress does not arrive as a crisis, but as a slow accumulation.
When considering Mars, Jackson does not frame the challenge as novel. He frames it as familiar, intensified.
“So whichever way you look at the issue about moving to other planets, the technology isn’t a problem. It’s the carbon-based stuff, it’s the brain, it’s the flesh and the viscera that’s the weak link in all of this, that human frailty.”
Stress Is Individual. Systems Are Not.
One of the central findings of occupational psychology is that stress is not evenly distributed. The same working conditions can be invigorating for one person and psychologically corrosive for another. Some individuals experience conflict as stimulating. Others experience it as destabilizing. Long hours can feel purposeful to one worker and punishing to another.
These differences are not matters of character. They reflect variation in personality, past experience, emotional regulation, and tolerance for ambiguity. People bring their full psychosocial histories into the workplace, including trauma, attachment patterns, and expectations about control and autonomy.
Extreme environments do not erase these differences. They amplify them.
“The technology isn’t a problem. It’s the carbon-based stuff.”
Most high-risk workplaces rely heavily on self-selection. Individuals who are deeply uncomfortable with confinement rarely volunteer for submarines or Antarctic overwintering missions. Over time, this produces what researchers call a “healthy worker bias,” where those who remain appear unusually resilient. But willingness is not the same as suitability. Jackson notes that many people only discover their psychological limits once isolation becomes real. Homesickness, anxiety, and interpersonal strain often emerge in individuals who were confident they would cope.
Motivation does not override human variability. It only delays its consequences.
Isolation Magnifies What Already Exists
When breakdowns occur in remote environments, they are often treated as anomalies. A single unstable individual. An unfortunate coincidence. But decades of research suggest a different explanation. Isolation alters social dynamics in predictable ways. When people cannot leave, small irritations accumulate. Power dynamics harden. Social norms shift. Minor grievances lose their usual outlets.
Antarctic research stations provide one of the clearest windows into this process. Crews are highly trained, medically screened, and psychologically assessed. And yet, incidents involving harassment, violence, and severe interpersonal conflict continue to surface. These are not failures of screening alone. They are consequences of environments where work, life, and survival collapse into a single closed system.
Isolation does not create dysfunction from nothing. It magnifies existing tendencies. Mars will almost certainly do the same.
The Early Days Are Often the Most Vulnerable
Contrary to popular intuition, psychological strain in extreme environments does not always peak at the longest duration. Research on polar expeditions, remote industrial work, and long-duration simulations shows that vulnerability often rises in the first one to two weeks. Sleep disruption accumulates. Novelty fades. The nervous system recognizes that escape is not imminent.
This is not a failure of resilience. It is a biological response to sustained uncertainty and confinement.
Sleep research has consistently shown that circadian disruption and cumulative sleep loss increase anxiety, irritability, and emotional reactivity. Fatigue acts as an amplifier. It does not create problems on its own, but it intensifies conflict, impairs judgment, and reduces tolerance for others. In safety-critical industries, fatigue is treated as a hazard, not a wellness issue.
On Mars, fatigue will not be an individual problem. It will be a design problem.
“Small things build and build until that person cracks.”
Communication Delay Reshapes Work Itself
Mars introduces a condition no Earth workplace fully replicates: delayed communication. Messages between Earth and Mars can take minutes one way, eliminating real-time conversation. Clarifications arrive late. Reassurance misses its moment.
Research on asynchronous communication shows that delay changes how people think and collaborate. When feedback slows, individuals begin working without confirmation. Assumptions replace dialogue. Trust erodes quietly. Emotional connection thins even when information continues to flow.
NASA has identified communication delay as a major behavioral health risk for missions beyond low Earth orbit. As delay increases, responsibility must shift from ground teams to crews. Autonomy becomes mandatory rather than optional. This can be empowering, but it also increases cognitive load. Problems must be held internally for longer periods, allowing stress to accumulate rather than discharge.
Mars will not simply be farther away. It will require a fundamentally different communication culture, one designed around delay rather than in spite of it.
Screening Can Reduce Risk. It Cannot Eliminate It.
Modern psychological screening is sophisticated. Psychometric testing can assess personality traits, emotional stability, and risk factors across multiple dimensions. Clinical interviews can explore fears, motivations, and unresolved patterns. Simulations can reveal behaviors that questionnaires miss.
And still, uncertainty remains.
Psychological assessment is probabilistic, not predictive. People are not always aware of their own vulnerabilities. Some traits only emerge under specific combinations of isolation, fatigue, and interpersonal stress. No screening process can guarantee stability in all circumstances.
The goal is not to find perfect individuals. It is to design systems that recognize imperfection and respond before strain becomes fracture.
Designing Work That Does Not Harm
If Mars is to be a workplace, it cannot simply inherit Earth’s most punishing norms. Long hours, rigid hierarchies, and constant productivity may be familiar, but familiarity does not equal effectiveness. Occupational health research consistently shows that overwork degrades judgment, increases conflict, and erodes mental health long before it produces failure.
Jackson argues for a simple ethical standard: a day’s work should not leave a person worse off than when it began. If it does, something is wrong with the system.
Mars offers an opportunity to rethink work from first principles: how hours are structured, how rest is protected, how autonomy is balanced with support, and how meaning is sustained when environments are barren. Whether that opportunity is taken will depend less on psychology than on values.
Awe Does Not Cancel Strain
There is one psychological counterweight often invoked in discussions of space: awe. Astronauts frequently describe profound perspective shifts when viewing Earth from orbit, an experience known as the overview effect. Research suggests that awe can reduce rumination and promote a sense of shared identity.
Mars may offer its own version of this experience. But awe does not eliminate fatigue, isolation, or conflict. It coexists with them. Meaning and strain are not opposites. They often arrive together.
“The work isn’t the problem. It’s the isolation.”
The Old Problem, Far From Home
Mars will not ask humanity to become something new. It will ask humanity to confront itself without exits.
The lessons of occupational psychology are not arguments against exploration. They are reminders that work shapes health, identity, and behavior wherever it exists. Without intentional design, old harms will simply follow humanity to new worlds.
The weak link will not be steel or silicon. It will be the same system it has always been: the human one.
Signal Received
Mars will test technology, but it will measure something older. The limits of attention. The cost of fatigue. The way isolation reshapes conflict, and how work, when it becomes total, begins to act on the body and mind whether people notice or not.
Decades of research in extreme workplaces suggest that psychological strain rarely announces itself loudly. It accumulates. It hides inside routines, delayed responses, disrupted sleep, and small irritations that lose their outlets. Screening can reduce risk, but it cannot eliminate it. Motivation can carry people forward, but it does not replace recovery. Awe may provide meaning, but it does not cancel exhaustion.
The lesson is not that humans are unsuited for Mars. It is that humans do not change simply because the setting does. Work will still shape health. Systems will still amplify or buffer stress. And environments that remove exits will demand more care, not less.
Mars does not introduce a new human problem. It strips away distractions and reveals an old one, far from home. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Craig Jackson for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode "Workplace Anxiety on Mars" on 30 December 2025.