(CFP)

"After work, we need silence," reads the caption beneath a key and a cellphone resting on a table in a photo posted on Han Ming's blog.

"It means after I get home, everything work-related gets blocked, including the phone," explained Han Ming, a travel agent in Beijing.

Han spends his nine to five either talking on the phone or dealing with customers at the office. " I talk too much at work, and sometimes it makes me feel dizzy and I even don't know what I am talking about," said Han, who revealed that his terseness at the end of the day caused his ex-girlfriend to break up with him.

"She said I didn't care about her at all, but that was not true. I just didn't want to talk," Han said.

After-work silence

According to a survey by the China Youth Daily last August, 83.1 percent of 2,750 respondents admitted that they were quieter after work, with 34.7 percent reporting feelings of melancholy. In addition, 75.4 percent of those surveyed said that their friends also exhibited "symptoms of after-work silence." Among respondents, 50.1 percent were born after 1980, with 45.5 percent living in big cities.

"This is not a new phenomenon in society," said Wang Fang, a psychology professor at Beijing Normal University. Wang revealed that a decade ago, psychologists found that people in communication-heavy professions such as teachers, doctors and police were more inclined to laconicism after work. Now it has spread to occupations conspicuously less social, such as IT engineering.

As for the causes of after-work silence, 59.6 percent of the respondents to the China Youth Daily survey blamed occupational pressures.

Zhang Ye is a very active saleswoman at a shopping mall in Shanghai and gets along very well with her coworkers. But after work, Zhang's extroverted Dr. Jekyll facade melts away, and she "Hydes" herself away to friends and family.

"I think the time sitting on the bus with no emotions on my face is the most relaxing moment in the whole day," Zhang said. "I smile to strangers, but give a cold face to my family."

Zhang also admitted that she hadn't been to any gatherings with friends for more than half a year, and doesn't want to go out at night or on holidays.

Yu Jie, a software engineer in Beijing, spends almost all his spare time playing computer games. "I think talking is more difficult than playing games," he said.

"It is normal for people with excessive concentration at work to be too tired to talk as their energy is almost sapped at the end of the day," said Wang, who added that it is a difficult habit to break.

Dong Haijun, an assistant professor at Central South University in Changsha, central China's Hunan Province, said that modern people have to play different roles at work and at home, it is not easy to balance these roles. When they cannot manage the switch smoothly, conflicts might occur.

Dong warned that long periods of after-work silence might result in coldness and hostility among family members.