A new study found that mentally challenging jobs lead people to have sharper minds even after retirement.
A mentally challenging job may be stressful now but it has many benefits as you grow older. At least that's what the findings of a new study suggest. University of Michigan Institute for Social Research found that people who have mentally challenging jobs tend to have sharper minds even after retirement.
"Based on data spanning 18 years, our study suggests that certain kinds of challenging jobs have the potential to enhance and protect workers' mental functioning in later life," said Gwenith Fisher, lead author of the study, in a press statement.
For the study, researchers analyzed the data of 4,182 participants in the U-M Health and Retirement Study. All participants were interviewed about eight times between 1992 and 2010. They were all aged between 51 and 61 years at the start of the study, worked in a wide variety of jobs and had been doing the same type of work for more than 25 years on average before they retired. Job types included analyzing data, developing objectives and strategies, making decisions, solving problems, evaluating information and thinking creatively.
The researchers examined the mental requirements of each job. They also assessed participants' mental functioning, using standard tests of episodic memory and mental status. The tests included recalling a list of 10 nouns immediately after seeing it and also after a time delay, and counting backwards from 100 by sevens. Factors like participants' health, symptoms of depression, economic status, demographic characteristics and years of education were taken into consideration.
Researchers found that people who worked in jobs with greater mental demands were more likely to have better memories before they retired and more likely to have slower declines in memory after retiring than people who had worked in jobs with fewer mental demands.
"It's likely that being exposed to new experiences or more mentally complex job duties may benefit not only newer workers but more seasoned employees as well," Jessica Faul, an ISR assistant research scientist said. "Employers should strive to increase mental engagement at work and, if possible, outside of work as well, by emphasizing life-long learning activities."
The study was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology and primarily funded by the National Institute on Aging with additional funding provided by the Social Security Administration.
