In a recent research, it has said that people aged over 40 years perform best when they work only three days a week.
The researchers have found that the cognitive performance of the middle-aged people extending as the wee increased to 25 hours a week. On the other side, the performance decreased when the week extended over 25 hours, because of fatigue and stress.
In this research which was published in the Melbourne Institute Worker Paper series, it included a series of cognitive tests. It was included by 3000 Australian men and 3500 Australian women, and their work habits were analyzed. The research was done to measure the participant’s ability to read words aloud and recite lists of numbers. The reading test measured their “knowing” ability while the other measured the “thinking” ability, all with the executive reasoning, abstracting reasoning and memory.
The research proved that the participants working 25 hours a week performed best while who work 55 hours were even more worse.
According to Professor Colin McKenzie from Keio University, one of the three authors, “Many countries are going to raise their retirement ages by delaying the age at which people are eligible to start receiving pension benefits.” It says that more people continue to work in the old age of their life.
“The degree of intellectual stimulation may depend on working hours. Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time long working hours can cause fatigue and stress, which potentially damage cognitive functions.”
“We point out that differences in working hours are important for maintaining cognitive functioning in middle-aged and elderly adults. This means that, in middle and older age, working part-time could be effective in maintaining cognitive ability.”
The reason for working more than 30 hours a week is injurious to your brain while working fewer hours is good is not clear yet. According to McKenzie work is a double-edged sword. He also says that “While work can stimulate brain activity, long working hours can cause fatigue and stress, which potentially damage cognitive functions. Full-time work (40 hours a week) is still better than no work in terms of maintaining cognitive functioning, but it is not maximizing the positive effects of work.”
It is valuable nothing that the results are likely to differentiate between countries, depending on the days of people take annually. It is very hard to control all the facts which assist to the final results of a study like this (applying choices around the hours worked and the work type), but this sense that working full-time until age of 67 inappropriate.
It is highly detrimental for the brain of people aged over 40 to work full-time. So, it’s better if the government can consider this and review the pension age. In this point, the state pension for a person born in 1989 begins at the age of 68, which is baneful for the employee and nominal for the employer.