We can expect to spend roughly 40 years of our life working. As we get older, the stresses of work seem to take more of a toll – and then the era of crack-of-dawn alarms, commutes and canteen queues finally comes to an end. Retiring, then, should surely boost your health, right?
Not necessarily. Unfortunately, retiring can worsen your wellbeing – work, after all, keeps our brains engaged and our bodies active. Often a sudden change, retirement can also exacerbate challenges associated with ageing more generally, like declining health and the loss of social connections.
Whether retirement is overall better or worse for your health is entirely dependent on your circumstances – as psychologist Dr Laura Brown, who specialises in later life health and wellbeing at the University of Manchester, explains.
“One important factor is the type of work you’re doing before you retire,” Brown says. Retiring from a job where you’re on your feet all day may affect someone physically in very different ways to retiring from a desk job.
“It also depends on the reasons for retiring – people might stay in the workforce longer now, but then what drives them to retire might be deterioration of health.”
Getting your retirement right is key to stopping your health from spiralling as you age.
According to research scientist Dr Amanda Sonnega at the University of Michigan, the past decade of retirement research suggests that retirement is “an inflection point” in our lives. Yes, it depends on your circumstances – but taking time to prioritise health and wellbeing may help tip the scales in your favour.
“Retirement provides increased time to prepare healthy meals and maintain a healthy diet, increased time to spend engaging in physical activity and increased time to spend engaging in socially healthy activities such as volunteering,” Sonnega says.
It’s a tricky thing to study – scientists can’t randomly assign 60-year-olds to retiring and non-retiring groups in order to compare the effects, akin to what they might do to test a drug. What they can do, though, is compare people’s lives before and after they retire.
Long-running studies like the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), take this approach, following tens of thousands of people over decades.
While we need to accept that the road through the retirement transition could be rocky, there’s every chance that by arming ourselves with the right information and making careful choices, we could reach a better place on the other side.
Here are what the top studies say on the best ways to plot your own path ahead.
1. Get the timing right
When you think about retiring, you might imagine hitting pension age and just giving up work – the ‘cold turkey’ approach. Some of us, though, prefer to let our turkey cool more slowly.
In the UK, as many as 42 per cent of over 50s now reduce their working hours, or plan to, as they approach retirement age, according to 2024 research by pensions provider Standard Life.
Employers are also catching on to the idea of a gradual retirement, offering schemes that allow retirees to start drawing from their pensions whilst remaining in work part-time.
Increased flexibility can help cater to our personal situations – financial strain may, for example, lead us to carry on working, while increasing health issues may mean we need to operate on a lighter schedule.
But these factors aside, is it actually better for you to retire slowly? It depends how you look at it. One 2023 study involving over 10,000 Japanese workers found that phasing out work more gradually led to fewer physical health problems than stopping abruptly, but increased the risk of developing depression.
The other question is: does retiring later (or earlier) have any effect on your lifespan? In 2021, researchers studied people who delayed their retirement by a year due to the 1993 French pension reforms. They found that the extra year of working made no detectable difference to their risk of dying before age 79.
Other studies, meanwhile, have shown very few positive effects related to early retirement.
Like many aspects of retirement, it comes down to a choice about what’s right for you. “If it’s within people’s control, and they feel like it’s a good idea, there’s no evidence against [gradual retirement],” says Dr Georg Henning, a retirement expert at the German Centre of Gerontology.
“But I wouldn’t warn people off just stopping full-time work.” It’s the sense of control, he says, that’s key. An unplanned retirement that comes as a shock due to health problems or a company closure is more likely to lead to negative effects on mental health.
If you do decide to carry on working past the usual retirement age, there is some suggestion that reducing your hours brings benefits. A recent Dutch study followed 1,247 older workers over three years as they negotiated retirement, noting improvements in energy and fatigue levels when they lightened their workloads.
While those who retired fully did see more pronounced benefits, reduced hours made an important difference for those with heavy workloads or caring responsibilities, or who were in poor health.
2. Find a purpose
In Japan, having ‘ikigai’ refers to having a sense of meaning or purpose in life. One 2008 Japanese study found that not having ikigai increased people’s chance of dying in the next seven years by 50 per cent. But these rather bleak findings can also be interpreted another way: your purpose might help you live longer.
A more recent US study of over 50s supported this idea. Those with the strongest sense of purpose were at least half as likely to die within eight years compared to those with the weakest. Meanwhile, UK results suggest having meaning in life at retirement age decreases your risk of dementia within the next five years.
Not all of us lose our purpose when we stop work, though – your job may have been just a way to get paid while you pursued your purpose elsewhere.
Nevertheless, retirement gives us a chance to explore new opportunities, and through these we may find renewed purpose in education, the arts, sports or, like many retired people, giving back to our communities via volunteering.
“Older people will have lots of skills and experience,” says Brown. “And being able to use those in a new capacity, doing things you didn’t have a chance to do when you were working, is a great chance to feel like you’re giving back.”
One 2020 study of English pensioners found those who volunteered were more satisfied with their life and less depressed than those who didn’t. Overall, though, the impacts of volunteering are fairly small, and can also have negative effects like volunteering ‘burnout’.
We need to be mindful of pouring our time into activities that really benefit others but not so much our own wellbeing.
So, what’s the trick to finding your life’s purpose, then? According to Prof Alan Gow, who studies cognitive ageing at Heriot-Watt University, in Scotland, it's either going to be something you’ve always had a desire to do, or you may need to “come out of your comfort zone and try new things.”
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3. Strengthen your body
Losing work from your daily routine can seriously shake up your lifestyle, influencing when and how you eat, sleep and exercise. That said, it’s surprisingly difficult to discern any overall effect of retirement on our physical health – at least across the population as a whole.
“Retirement does appear to lead to improvements in sleep,” says Sonnega. “But there are no clear effects on physical health.”
The results of some studies on heart health in retirement seem to contradict each other, whilst recent Italian and Japanese studies reported no effects on body mass index (BMI). At the individual level, however, changes can still be marked – whether they are changes for the better or worse depends on how retirement alters our routines.
Interestingly, in one Chinese study, retired women did see their BMIs increase, but those who retired to help care for their grandchildren gained less weight.
One area where scientists often see a downturn is in physical activity levels. “A lot of time goes into just sitting at home, reading newspapers – doing the same things as before, but now with more time,” says Henning.
One Finnish study followed 9,000 public-sector workers for 20 years, showing that people’s activity levels initially increased around retirement age but then dropped below previous levels about two years later.
So, if you find yourself less active than you once were, what can you do? A good rule of thumb for sustainable activity is to sit less before incrementally moving more, one Canadian study suggests.
Retired women in the study successfully increased their step counts (and improved their blood pressure) over six months by taking part in group classes and personalised activity programmes to scale up their activity levels slowly.
Meanwhile, research in older people is increasingly extolling the virtues of Nordic walking – a pole walking technique that utilises the power of the upper body– not just for improving physical strength and cardiovascular fitness, but also mental health. And, of course, common sense dictates that if you want to keep doing something for the rest of your life, you’ve got to enjoy it.
With this in mind, you probably shouldn’t join a walking group unless you enjoy walking – or at least the tea and chat afterwards.
4. Rebuild your brain
Whilst giving up work can be associated with mental health benefits and increased life satisfaction, the general consensus is that it’s not great for our cognitive abilities – the brain skills we need to think, communicate and pay attention.
Data from around 9,000 European retirees who took part in the SHARE study suggests that retiring at statutory age (66 in the UK) tends to speed up normal, age-related cognitive decline. This was measured using a word recall test, in which new retirees tend to improve at first before results drop in the long term.
To combat this decline, we might adopt a ‘use it or lose it’ approach based on the idea that we need to replace some of the complex thinking we did during our working lives (depending on what job you retire from). This means doing more than the odd crossword.
One sure-fire way to engage your grey matter is to learn a new skill – and ideally something quite challenging.
A decade ago, US researchers showed that older people who spent around 15 hours a week for three months taking classes in either quilting, digital photography or both significantly improved their memory function compared to those who spent a similar amount of time doing activities they already knew how to do.
While sustaining such a high level of quilting might prove challenging even for the most enthusiastic pensioners, Gow notes that the learning doesn’t have to be so “intense”.
“What we need to do is think about what this might look like in a real environment,” he says. In his own smaller study, pensioners who learned to use a tablet computer for just two hours a week showed significant improvements in thinking speeds – tested by completing a set task within a time limit.
However, what working does for our brains is complex and manifold. So, when it comes to replacing it, it’s unlikely there will be one activity that can provide all the same benefits. It’s more a case of making “marginal gains”, Gow says, by combining different activities in the hope that the cumulative effects add up.
5. Stay connected
In 1938, Harvard University scientists started what is still the longest-running study of human happiness – the Harvard Study of Adult Development – tracking hundreds of students as they progressed through their later careers and retirement.
Almost 80 years later, the researchers found that one of the biggest challenges faced by participants when they retired was the loss of their social connections. They also showed that maintaining close relationships was more important to their happiness than money, and that it could help slow mental and physical decline.
More recently, data from the long-running SHARE study suggested that, though our social networks tend to shrink when we retire, the quality of our social connections increases as we substitute family members for friends and colleagues.
As for our wider social networks, the most efficient way to bolster them may be by making connections within groups where you can tick off other items on your healthy retirement checklist – such as exercise or ‘finding your purpose’.
And, as Brown points out, adding social aspects can also make things you might not love doing more palatable: “I think ideally you want to combine activities, so rather than saying ‘I’m going to walk on my own for half an hour a day’, instead say, ‘I’m going to meet with a friend twice a week and we’ll go for a walk together.’”
For UK men, one initiative that’s worth exploring for a multitude of benefits is Men’s Sheds, a kind of ‘repair shop’ run by local groups within their communities, which has featured in numerous studies mainly for its contributions to mental health and wellbeing.
There’s some evidence suggesting that men may be worse than women at making and keeping friends, and therefore require more social support in later life. Based on surveys of their members, Men’s Sheds claim their groups reduce loneliness and create new friendships.
Yes, this means you finally now have a valid excuse to retreat to the shed – so long as your friends are invited too.
About our experts
Dr Laura Brown is a senior lecturer of psychology and mental health at The University of Manchester. She has been published in Ageing and Society, Aging and Mental Health and Autism in Adulthood, to name a few journals.
Dr Amanda Sonnega is an associate research scientist and ageing specialist at the University of Michigan. Her work has been published in journals such as Fear and Anxiety, International Journal of Epidemiology and Work, Aging and Retirement.
Dr Georg Henning is a retirement expert at the German Centre of Gerontology. His work has been published in various journals including Aging & Mental Health, Psychology and Aging and Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Prof Alan Gow is a professor in the school of social sciences and studies cognitive ageing at Heriot-Watt University, in Scotland. He has been published in journals including European Journal of Ageing, Ageing Research Reviews and Public Health Reviews.
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