We might not realise it, but our working lives play a particularly key role in how resilient and intact our brains will be in later life.
This makes sense given that the average employee spends approximately eight hours a day at work and remains in the workforce for about 40 years. During this time between our mid-twenties and mid-sixties, we know that the brain often undergoes significant changes, many of which can predispose us to cognitive decline and dementia.
“We’ve often underestimated the importance of your profession on your health and your brain health in particular,” says Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London.
But cognitive decline isn’t necessarily inevitable. Researchers like Spiers are increasingly discovering that your job can either support or harm your brain. As we’ll see, this depends on whether your career is actively stimulating your mind and body in various beneficial ways or forcing you to endure stresses which harm you.
Spatial navigation
When Harvard University scientists looked for links between occupations and causes of death across millions of Americans, they discovered that taxi and ambulance drivers, professions which require a detailed knowledge of road networks and how to navigate them swiftly, were the least likely to die from Alzheimer’s disease.
Why? Our ability to navigate is part-controlled by a region called the entorhinal cortex which acts as the brain’s internal GPS system. It’s also thought to be the first brain region to be affected by the development of Alzheimer’s, leading to signs of waning spatial awareness which can emerge some years before other symptoms.
But practicing spatial navigation – for example, learning how to get from A to B without the help of Google Maps – or entering a career which requires you to learn complex navigational routes, appears to help shield this part of the brain.
Professor Matthew Kiernan, chief executive and director of Neuroscience Research Australia, points to research which found that taxi drivers who spent years learning to navigate London, without relying on an app, have a larger hippocampus, the brain’s main memory hub, than the rest of us.
“There was a study where they did MRIs of taxi drivers before and after they had to memorise this network of streets in London, and they showed that there was a physical effect of this process,” says Kiernan. “The hippocampus actually increased in size.”
Novel challenges
The brain thrives on having fresh challenges to tackle, something which leads to the production of a brain chemical called dopamine. In turn, dopamine aids with the formation of new memories and brain processing speed.
As a result, researchers have found that people with jobs which force them to consistently handle new information and problem solve on the spot – such as an engineer or a doctor – experience less decline in recall and attention over the course of 14 years.
On the other hand, if we’re spending part of our day operating more or less on autopilot doing highly repetitive tasks, that will have the opposite effect. With this in mind, Spiers is concerned about the rise of generative AI, and people outsourcing more and more tasks to technologies like ChatGPT and Claude. “Offloading these things may not be so good for our brains in the longer term,” he says.
‘Spending time socialising with other people can lower stress levels’ (Photo: Matthew Kiernan)Socialisation
People who are more socially active from their midlife years onwards have been found to have a 30-50 per cent lower risk of dementia along with better overall cognitive abilities in old age.
There are various reasons why. Spending time socialising with other people can lower stress levels, while Kiernan notes that it can create more pathways in the brain which can be used to transport information from one region to another. Because this makes the brain more resilient to the effects of brain cell-killing toxins in later life, it is known as cognitive reserve.
Because we spend a disproportionate amount of our waking hours at work, careers which require spending time socialising with other people such as public relations, working in hospitality or being a tour guide, can provide some of these benefits.
Kiernan says that people may be able to carve out social time at work, for example by acting as a workplace mentor or buddy to others.
As an example of how this can benefit the brain, he cites Sister Mary, a nun-based in Notre Dame who participated in a famous study of brain ageing. She astounded researchers by scoring almost perfectly on various cognitive tests at the age of 101 despite her brain showing significant signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Sister Mary had always been a mentor and leader in the community,” says Kiernan. “She was the person people would go to. She was an example of how you can mitigate the damage caused by Alzheimer’s by building cognitive reserve through continued social engagement and mentoring.
More movement
Personal trainers and tennis coaches may not seem the most obvious careers for staying mentally sharp, but such jobs involve a lot of vigorous movement on a daily basis. With vascular problems relating to waning blood vessel health, contributing to a significant proportion of cases of cognitive decline, these people are likely to have both healthier hearts and brains.
“Everything I’ve seen suggests that it’s really your fitness levels, keeping up with all the NHS guidance on getting enough steps in and doing enough moderate exercise, that is possibly the most important thing for brain health,” says Spiers. “If you had to choose between either doing Sudoku for an hour a day or going for a walk, then it’s absolutely the walk that I would recommend.”
Physiotherapists or construction workers may also have an advantage as maintaining muscle strength has been linked to better brain health in later life.
‘We’re starting to realise that the link between certain jobs and retaining good brain health for longer isn’t just about how mentally demanding they are’ (Photo: Hugo Spiers)High stress and lack of control
While challenges are good, if a job generates too much chronic stress, that can actively harm the brain. As a result, while some corporate executives might earn a lot of money, the stress of being in such a high-powered role could take its toll over time.
Studies have shown that people with higher levels of work-related stress over many years display slower reaction times, poorer episodic memory – the ability to recall personal experiences and events from the past – upon retirement, and a faster decline in memory and cognitive performance after they retire.
If you have a toxic boss, it may be time to think about switching jobs, as people who have not only stressful careers, but low job control, meaning that they are constantly at the whim of demanding superiors, appear to be the most vulnerable of all to cognitive decline.
Shift work
From NHS nurses to lorry drivers, our societies depend on the efforts of the many millions of people who keep the country ticking over while the rest of us sleep.
But at the same time, scientists have long been concerned about the long-term health impact of such shift working patterns. Three years ago, a major study linked regular shift work with poorer performance in memory and reasoning tasks after eight years, while research carried out in female nurses has found that long-term night shift work is linked to an older brain age.
Part of this is thought to be because sleep is a critical time for enabling the brain to clean itself via a complex drainage network known as the glymphatic system which washes away the waste products and toxins that have accumulated during waking hours.
Purpose
Finally, there may be another explanation for Sister Mary’s remarkable cognitive performance at the age of 101.
Purpose, the belief that you’re doing something important and worthwhile, and having a profession from which you derive significant amounts of satisfaction, may also go a long way to keep your mind healthier for longer.
“We’re starting to realise that the link between certain jobs and retaining good brain health for longer isn’t just about how mentally demanding they are,” says Spiers. “I suspect there’s a sweet spot where it’s about having a career which both challenges you and also gives you meaning and keeps you fulfilled. If it’s not meaningful nor satisfying, then it’s probably detrimental for your brain.”
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