We’ve all had days where we felt like just sending in our resignation and getting out of the office solely because we were completely drained, haven’t we? We hear how people work erratic shifts, long hours and meet unrealistic targets, just to get on with their jobs and to earn a source of income. But, let’s be honest: not all of us love working so crazily. There just doesn’t seem to be any work-life balance anymore. Everyone wants to be better than their competition and that forces us to punch in long hours at the office to meet someone else’s targets.
A study conducted by researchers in Japan found that people over 40 worked better if they worked thrice a week. They found that middle-aged volunteers who worked for more than 25 hours a week led to tiredness and stress. Huffington Post reports that to maintain a healthy brain, middle-aged and older people should work less.
Most countries have now increased their retirement age, so that means most people work longer than usual, and they work even into the later stages of their life even though they’re technically supposed to be recipients of their pension payments instead. “Work is basically a double-edged sword, where it does stimulate brain activity, but also increases fatigue and stress, thus potentially damaging cognitive functions,” said Professor Colin McKenzie one of the study’s author.
So, if you’re someone over the age of 40, well then, there might be something for you to rejoice, because it looks like science has got your back. According to a report published by the Melbourne Institute Worker Paper, people over the age of 40 are at their most productive when they work three days a week or less. Does this raise your hopes and dreams of being able to spend the remaining four days of the week relaxing, but without a pay cut?
Newser explains how the research was carried out on men and women separately. The study was done on 3,000 male and 3,500 female volunteers. The volunteers were asked to complete cognitive tests during the study and researchers then analyzed work habits, memory, executive and abstract reasoning of these participants. The cognitive test included asking the volunteers to read text backward, read words aloud, and match numbers and letters under a time limit.
The paper did not focus on labor market participation, but on working hours. They examined the causal impact of working hours on cognitive functioning for middle-aged and older adults using a cross-section sample from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. “We deal with the potential endogeneity of decisions on working hours by using the instrumental variable estimation technique,” said the survey, to explain how they conducted the study.
The study’s empirical evidence shows the effects of working hours on cognitive functioning are non-linear. When working hours are less than around 25 hours a week, working hours have a positive impact on cognitive functioning. However, when working hours are more than 25 hours per week, working hours have negative impacts on cognition. These results suggest that aged people can maintain their cognitive functioning by working part-time between 20-30 hours a week.
In conclusion, the casual impacts of working hours on the cognitive ability of middle-aged and older-aged males and females were studied. This study focused more on the intensive margin than the extensive margin, which means that they took the working hours into consideration than the labor force participation. “Using the test scores of memory span and cerebral dysfunction for the respondents, it is found that working hours up to 25–30 hours per week have a positive impact on cognition for males depending on the measure and up to 22–27 hours for females,” claims the study.
After the mentioned time span, it was seen that working hours had quite a negative impact on cognitive functioning. This shows that the differences in working hours are an important factor for maintaining cognitive functioning in middle and older adults. “In other words, in the middle and older age, working part-time could effective in maintaining cognitive ability. It is worth noting that our findings did not show any statistically significant gender differences in the effects of working hours on cognitive functioning,” concludes the study. So it does seem that working too long can actually have adverse effects on the cognitive functioning.
- life.shared.com