Health & Science blog

By Rebecca Knight

Work invades my sleep. I lie in bed thinking about editors I should email, sources I need to call, and story ideas I ought to follow up on.

To be honest, sleep has never been my strong suit. I suffered terrible insomnia as a kid and into early adulthood. I’ve tried quiet yoga, warm milk, and long, languorous bubble baths before bed. I feel relaxed and cosy as I climb under the sheets, but once my head hits the pillow, it’s all over.

Apparently, the remedy to my restlessness is simple: I should stop working. According to a study by researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, retirement is followed by a sharp decrease in the prevalence of sleep disturbances.

The findings, published in the new issue of the journal Sleep, suggest that this general improvement in sleep is likely to result from the removal of work-related demands and stress rather than from actual health benefits of retirement.

Considering that I’ve been working for about 12 years and I still have a child to put through college, retirement isn’t in my near-term plans, but still, the study’s findings are compelling.

Results show that the odds of having disturbed sleep in the seven years after retirement were 26 per cent lower than in the seven years before retiring. The
post retirement improvement in sleep was more pronounced in men,
management-level workers, employees who reported high psychological job demands, and people who occasionally or consistently worked night shifts.

The study involved employees from the French national gas and electricity company, Electricité de France-Gaz de France, who retired between 1990 and 2006 at a mean age of 55 years.

The participants completed annual surveys concerning health, lifestyle, individual, familial, social and occupational factors from seven years before, to seven years after retirement. The presence of sleep disturbances was indicated by an affirmative response to a single question from a checklist of more than 50 medical conditions experienced during the previous 12 months.

Jussi Vahtera, professor in the department of public health at the university and the study’s lead author, noted that the participants enjoyed employment benefits rarely seen today, including guaranteed job stability, a statutory retirement age between 55 and 60 years, and a company-paid pension that was 80 per cent of their salary.

“We believe these findings are largely applicable in situations where financial incentives not to retire are relatively weak,” says Prof Vahtera. “In countries and positions where there is no proper pension level to guarantee financial security beyond working age, however, retirement may be followed by severe stress disturbing sleep even more than before retirement.”

But even in countries where there isn’t the same level of financial security in retirement – read: the US – there is a lesson here, say the authors. Today, when people are expected to live many years beyond the traditional age of retirement, consideration should be given to the restructuring of working life to enable workers to remain economically active without compromising their future health.

Hear, hear.