At risk of ealy retirement

Finding other meaningful endeavours can prevent ill-effects of leaving paid work.

Research shows people benefit from the initial removal of work stress from their lives and treat retirement almost as a holiday, but then reality creeps up on them after a few years.

Theresa May has just become Britain’s 76th ex-prime minister. She has ceased to be the bearer of the Brexit burden and is released back into the community. Asked in the Commons last month what she planned to do next, she made it clear she would not be leaving Westminster to spend more time in a shepherd’s hut or in airport lounges. An early retirement at 62 is not on the cards. She will stay in the House of Commons on the backbenches.

For the sake of her mental and physical health that may be a good idea. We all know stories of people who retired early and appeared to go into a precipitous decline almost as soon as they had recovered from their leaving party.

Yet should those anecdotes about colleagues keeling over on the golf course within six months of quitting the office lead to a conclusion that early retirement is bad for you?

There is evidence that retiring at a relatively early age is not good for you. A study last year in Austria found that men retiring a year earlier than their peers had a 6.8 per cent increase in the risk of premature death and a 0.2-year reduction in age at death. In the US social security eligibility begins at 62 and a third of Americans start taking their pension then. Recent research found a 2 per cent increase in mortality among men immediately after they reached that age.

A 2014 survey of people aged 50 to 70, including early retirees, in 10 European countries found that the average effects of retirement on health and cognitive abilities were negative. London School of Economics researcher Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren has produced reports on the detrimental effects of retirement on physical and mental health. He highlights numerous papers, including one that drew on a longitudinal study of ageing in England that found retirement significantly increases the risk of being diagnosed with a chronic condition, especially severe cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Lifestyle changes are likely to be at the heart of this. Some retired people become less active, spend more time on the sofa, walk less, and eat and drink more. Where once they were abstemious consumers of alcohol during the week, they no longer need to be so careful. “You don’t need to get up for work,” Heller-Sahlgren says.

Not all the evidence suggests retirement leads to a decline. Some studies indicate a boon to general health. A survey of health and ageing in Europe estimated that retirement leads to a 35 per cent decrease in the probability of people reporting their health to be fair, bad or very bad.

Former British prime minister Theresa May has made it clear that an early retirement at 62 is not on the cards but plans to stay in the House of Commons on the backbenches. Picture: AFP.

In terms of cognitive function, one study in England showed “no observable difference” in the trajectory of change in memory of autobiographical events before and after retirement. However, research by Dutch and Belgian academics found a 10 per cent reduction in cognitive function that they said was caused by retirement. This was not immediate, but most of the impact was at the beginning of the retirement period. A study of retired British civil servants last year found a faster decline in verbal memory after retirement than before.

What happens to our mental health? Here the experts are even more divided. Martin Hyde, an associate professor of gerontology at the Centre for Innovative Ageing in Swansea, Wales, is optimistic. A review of longitudinal studies in 2013 found “strong evidence” for retirement having a beneficial effect on mental health (but conflicting evidence on its effect on general health).

Hyde adds a caveat: “What are you retiring from, and then the reverse of that is, what job are you staying in?” There is no health dividend in retiring for people with good jobs, he found. “They are in pretty good health before retirement and pretty good health after retirement. There’s no effect.”

For the likes of Judi Dench, 84, David Attenborough, 93, and Helen Mirren, 73, giving up the day job may be of no benefit. But, Hyde says, “for people who have bad jobs, the rate of decline up to retirement is enormous and then they get this huge benefit when they retire, a kind of kickback in terms of health recovery. If you retired from a job that was very stressful, had lots of demands placed upon you … then retiring had a positive effect on health.”

May’s voice cracked at the end of the speech in which she announced that she was resigning from “the job that it has been the honour of my life to hold”. An honour. But a pleasure? “After what she’s been through, I don’t really consider it to be a healthy workplace, but if she sees it as a job that she likes and she gets rewards from staying in that job, it would be good for her,” Hyde says. “If it’s a job where she feels that she doesn’t get the rewards from it, that it is very stressful, that the stress becomes chronic and unmanageable, then it will have been a bad job for her.”

May is also a classic case study for Hyde’s other caveat: “My studies have shown that retirement per se wasn’t the big deal, it was whether people chose to retire or were forced out of work.”

A study he did in Sweden found that those who were forced into unemployment or retirement were likelier to report depression or be prescribed antidepressant medication. “People forced out of work early, they do not do well at all. They are more likely to be depressed.”

Heller-Sahlgren says research that has found positive effects of retirement, or no effect, are limited because they do not separate the short-term impact from the longer term. Examining European countries, he found no effect on mental health in the short term but a couple of years later negative effects of retirement were felt. People benefit from the initial removal of work stress from their lives, but then reality creeps up on them.

“There may well be this honeymoon phase in the beginning; you treat retirement almost like a holiday. You can’t wait for it. We all want to stop working and enjoy ourselves. And that makes sense,” Heller-Sahlgren says.

“But then within a few years the reality kicks in that, you know, this is not a holiday. My conclusion is that in the slightly longer term postponing retirement tends to be good for everyone. You may expect that boost in the short term of stress decreasing, but in the long term you may get more stressed simply because you don’t know what to do with yourself.

“Many people are perfectly able to adapt to retirement because they can find other meaningful endeavours. Some people may choose to volunteer, some people may choose to travel and see their friends more. But what about those who do not like to travel or don’t have the means? What about those who don’t necessarily have friends?”

Men in particular can struggle in retirement when they no longer have the social networks they’ve developed through work. This year sociology professors Jonathan Gershuny and Oriel Sullivan of the Centre for Time Use Research at University College London published a book based on time diaries compiled by Britons across more than five decades. In What We Really Do All Day they found a link between older people, especially retired men, with too much time on their hands and reported feelings of low self-worth.

However, the professors also found older people to be less sedentary than their forebears in the 1980s and more involved in cognitive activities, social activities and volunteering. There is general agreement that physical and varied mental activities are required for good health.

Hyde was involved in a five-year study that examined the effects of volunteering among the retired and the results were intriguing. Those who regularly engaged in volunteering were at lower risk of self-reported cognitive complaints and being prescribed anti-dementia treatment than those who did not volunteer or did so only occasionally.

“There’s something about being active, so it’s not necessarily paid work but it’s doing something that keeps you cognitively engaged. So that could be volunteering, grandparenting, formal work; something that is not repetitive, that is challenging to you, but also clearly something that you enjoy doing as well, that doesn’t overstress you,” Hyde says. “Volunteering genuinely seems to have a positive effect on health and wellbeing. There’s a physical side to it. A lot of volunteering requires going off and doing stuff — in a shop or gardening. I think the social side of it is huge in terms of people’s sense of wellbeing.

“There was some research that actually suggested that the thing that people miss most from work when they retire is not income, not daily structure, it’s co-workers. So if you can find another group of people that you can hang out with, then that replaces some of the functions that you get through work.”

Encore is a US project that matches active older people to charities needing expertise and skills.

“The idea is that the older employee might want to do something different after X years in the same job or look to gradually retire,” says Hyde, who is helping the project.

He has spotted one potential recruit: a woman famous for her sense of duty who might be looking for a fresh opportunity to actually do things — something that proved difficult in her most recent job.

“Certainly a number of our former prime ministers have had encore careers, some more dubious than others,” Hyde says. “Maybe the advice for Mrs May is not to stay in parliament but to find a third-sector organisation and use all those skills that she’s got in terms of conflict management and babysitting.”

The Times