November 10, 2020

Does Retiring Cause Memory Loss?

After four or five decades of work, retirement is liberating! It’s gonna be great! Right?

Well, not necessarily. It depends on how you retire.

In this video, Ross Andel, director of the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, warns that a risk to retiring is that it can “speed up the aging of our brain. It could make us slower and more forgetful.”

His research demonstrates how work and retirement influence brain functioning. He tested the memories of people in their early 60s living in Canberra, Australia. Every four years, they were asked to remember as many random and unrelated words in a list as they could.

Naturally, they couldn’t remember as many words at 74 as at 62. “This is quite normal,” he said.

More interesting was what Andel found when he separated the test results for the retirees from the results for the older individuals who were still working. The decline in memory was almost exclusively among the retirees.

“Something seems to happen around the time of retirement to make people more forgetful,” he said.

Andel isn’t recommending that you work until you drop. He does provide a roadmap for limiting memory loss so you can enjoy retirement.

To find out what he has in mind, you’ll have to watch the video. …Learn More