A former colleague of mine (now retired) used to tell me that vacations at my advanced age were best viewed as “practice for retirement.” Recalling his advice during a recent week away from the office, I had to conclude that I may need a good deal more practice.
If the hours I spent by myself — sprucing up the garden, doing odd jobs around the house, reading on the porch — were predictive of my eventual retirement routine, I’d probably be perfectly content, but a couple of new studies suggest that making a habit of such solitude may not be doing my retired brain any favors. To protect my cognitive abilities, I may need to cultivate a more fertile social network before I give much thought to life after work.
This is a challenge, because I’m not a particularly sociable guy. Oh, I’ll gladly accept a friend’s invitation to catch up over coffee, but I never reach out. And, lacking the regular interactions with my office colleagues, I could see myself gradually losing touch with much of the world beyond my front door.
As Daniela Weber, PhD, notes in a study released earlier this month, it’s a challenge that affects men differently than women during their retirement. “A strong social network appears to buffer the cognitive disadvantage of not working, but the pattern is clearly gendered,” she explains. “For women, having a diverse social network appears to compensate for the loss of engagement opportunities often provided by work. For men, close personal ties, often with a spouse or partner, may play a particularly important role.”
Weber, along with her colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2020 for the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to determine the effects of social connections on cognitive function among more than 82,000 middle-aged and older respondents. Those effects, they found, varied based on gender and employment status.
Regardless of gender, retirement was generally associated with poorer episodic memory and verbal fluency, but researchers noted that women tended to strengthen their social ties during retirement, which mitigated its effects on their memory. “For men, the findings are more mixed,” the authors write in the journal Research on Aging. “A weak social network appears to exacerbate the adverse effects of unemployment and retirement on episodic memory.”
In other words, guys like me are less likely to use our newly acquired free time to cultivate the social connections necessary to offset the cognitive damage wrought by our withdrawal from the workforce. We instead lean on our spouses or a very few close friends for our needed social interactions.
I could certainly envision that sort of scenario on my retirement horizon, so I was heartened by a University of California, Davis, study published last week that seems to suggest that a little postemployment solitude may not be so hard on my aging brain.
The key, explains lead study author Tomiko Yoneda, PhD, is understanding the difference between loneliness and social isolation. “Loneliness is a perception,” she notes. “You could be surrounded by a crowd of people and still feel lonely, whereas isolation is just being alone. Some people might be not lonely at all and be completely content in their solitude.”
And it’s loneliness, rather than social isolation, that can lead to cognitive dysfunction and a shorter lifespan, she argues.
Yoneda and her team analyzed 11 longitudinal data sets tracking social contact, feelings of loneliness, and cognitive status among 175,000 study participants 50 years old and older. They found that feelings of loneliness — even when participants weren’t socially isolated — were associated with both a higher risk of cognitive impairment and a shorter lifespan. Social isolation absent a sense of loneliness was not shown to be a risk factor for cognitive dysfunction, and its association with a truncated lifespan was also found to be weak.
“The findings are consistent and clear: Loneliness, rather than social isolation, is the more robust risk factor for cognitive impairment and mortality,” Yoneda writes in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
This is good news for retirees who happily embrace their social isolation without the accompanying sense of being left out or alone. At some point, that might include me, though my retirement practice remains a work in progress — a point I made the other day when I happened to run into my old colleague.
We exchanged pleasantries before he asked me whether I was considering retiring in the near future. “Probably before I turn 85,” I replied. “That gives me 10 years to figure it out.”
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