"You can do anything, but not everything."
- David Allen ~ Inspiring quotes
Researchers have spent decades trying to find a link between retirement and longevity.
Joanne Earl Psychologist
May 27, 2025
Starting to think about retirement but unsure of whether it might lead to your premature demise?
Alternatively, you may be worried that prolonging your work life will come at a cost to your health.
Let’s look at what science tells us about health, retirement and death.
Researchers at Oregon State University in 2016 suggested delaying retirement had a negligible impact on mortality.
This led to promulgation of the idea that working longer might help you live longer because you’re likely to be more engaged with peers and physically active while employed.
Originally reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, and then re-reported in the Harvard Business Review, this piece of research had us all convinced that working for longer was good for our health.
“Early retirement may be a risk factor for mortality and prolonged working life may provide survival benefits among US adults,” the 2016 paper said.
Researchers led by PhD student Chenkai Wu used data from a longitudinal study of Americans aged 50 plus; specifically a sample of 2956 individuals who began participating in the study in 1992 and retired by 2010.
“Among healthy retirees, a one-year older age at retirement was associated with an 11 per cent lower risk of all-cause mortality, independent of a wide range of sociodemographic, lifestyle and health confounders,” the paper said.
In 2016, Harvard Business Review invited Wu to respond to the fact that correlation does not mean causation. “That’s right,” he said. “You’d have a long way to go to prove causation – and I’m not even sure that you could. To prove causation, the gold standard would be to do a randomised control trial, and it’s probably unethical and unrealistic to randomly assign people different retirement ages.”
Subsequent research tells a more complex and nuanced story.
A team based in the Netherlands in 2020 concluded “early retirement was not associated with a higher risk of mortality”. Curiously, they found “on-time retirement was associated with a higher risk of mortality”, but posit this might be because of the healthy worker effect.
The healthy worker effect reflects the fact that people who are employed tend to be healthier than those who are unemployed.
The authors raise an interesting point. Essentially, a lot of studies reporting the effect of retirement on health do not necessarily take into account the health of participants prior to retirement. That can lead to biased findings.
A meta-analysis by economists at the Marche Polytechnic University in Italy examined 308 observations from 85 articles published in peer-reviewed journals in the years 2000 and 2021.
Twenty-eight per cent supported the hypothesis that retirement improves health; 60 per cent provided no statistically significant effects; and, only 12 per cent reported evidence in favour of a worsening health status after retirement.
Another study reported in Nature Scientific Reports last year (2024), using data from 11,540 adults in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, explored factors that contribute to healthy working life expectancy.
The results point to the importance of keeping people pain-free, mentally well and in good health, alongside well-designed jobs in supportive workplaces to prolong working life, but ignoring these factors might also result in premature exit.
Earlier this year, a journal article in Ageing and Society, published by Cambridge University Press, reported a systematic review of 19 longitudinal studies focusing on the effects of retirement on health and concluded that retirement has some negative implications for health, particularly in physical functioning, morbidity and mortality.
Results were less clear-cut when it came to the prevalence of diseases or health problems.
The Europe-based authors concluded that “the relationship between health and retirement is complex, and it is influenced by work-related factors (e.g. job demands) as well as individual factors (e.g. pre-retirement health)”.
This conclusion probably best reflects reality because work-life longevity is not just dependent on the type of work you do, but your predisposition to health issues, how you plan to retire, how much money you have, what type of lifestyle changes you introduce in retirement and how much social support you can access.
As part of decision-making about retirement, you might consider actuarial projections for life expectancy. The longevity calculators will probably alert you to the fact that if you leave work at 60, then you could still have three decades ahead. I looked at one such calculator that predicted I would live to 97 and my husband to 92. But when I added that we’re both already retired, the result is the same. So, not very conclusive.
In my work as a retirement researcher, I have seen people thriving after retirement, but also those who are happily working into their 80s.
Somebody you know will have a story to share about the uncle who retired and supposedly died of boredom two months later, and another will tell you about the couple planning an around-the-world adventure that never eventuated due to ill health.
What is most important is that the decision you make is a considered one. Take into account your own health, what work means to you and what you want to achieve in life.
Leaving work because you have enough money is only half the story. The other half of the story about how you spend your time – the adventures you design will be all your own work.
In other words, create your own fate.
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For as long as humans have existed, we have been looking for ways to extend our time on Earth. The Ancient Greeks celebrated athletic prowess, recognising the importance of physical fitness for a healthy and fulfilling life. The Romans, in turn, favoured plant-based foods and olive oil as a way of promoting overall well-being. And in Ancient China, they understood that, by stimulating specific points in the body, they could optimise the flow of vital energy through the system.
