Science keeps discovering the obvious: work is bad.

A recent economic study out of Australia found that people over 40 perform their best when only working three days per week.  Working more than three days per week when you’re over 40 leads to cognitive decline, which means you perform worse on psychological tests of memory. And furthermore, if you work more than 40 hours per week and you’re over 40 there is a steep decline in cognitive performance.

This study made the internet news on The BBC, The Independent, The Telegraph, Quartz and many other outlets. The interesting thing about this study is not the results – which should not surprise anyone – but rather that this result is newsworthy.

Everyone intuitively knows that working more than a couple of hours per day, a couple of days per week, makes you feel terrible. But of course this kind of subjective experience is not taken seriously as evidence that there is something insidious about work. Rather, we need economists to meticulously measure and analyze data from enormous databases to demonstrate with statistical significance what everyone already knows: working long hours ruins your health and your mind.

There is by now a pile of scientific evidence about this fact: from brain imaging studies, to longitudinal observational studies, to psychological studies.  All these studies point to something simple and undeniable: human beings require much more leisure than work in order to realize their full potential. “Work” can be defined in many ways; however the key aspect is in how much control you have over your time and whether you get to decide the nature of your work.

Scientists who study the effect of stress on rat brains have devised a clever paradigm called the “chronic mild stress procedure”. This experimental procedure sounds cruel, however you will notice many similarities between the lab protocol for inducing stress in rats and a modern job.  For example, the scientists make the rat think he is about to get water and then suddenly take it away (constant uncertainty about your job), they introduce a large dominant alpha-rat into the cage (your boss), they toss the rat into water (rats hate water – like your annual performance review). After a few weeks of subjecting rats to the chronic mild stress procedure you get, unsurprisingly, depressed rats who are lethargic or unable to solve simple mazes. Throw a depressed rat into water after the chronic mild stress protocol and he will very quickly just give up trying get out of the water – that’s right rats can become suicidal.

The rat brain shrinks after the chronic mild stress procedure, and there is less blood flowing to important brain regions. We must be careful extrapolating too much from rat brain to human brain – however if you take the increasing indirect evidence from humans that work reduces your cognitive ability and shrinks your brain, together with the very tightly controlled lab-rat evidence that chronic stress shrinks the rat brain – we are very well-justified in believing that modern work is unhealthy and dangerous.

Nowadays it is popular to engage in myriad wellness activities like yoga, meditation, spa treatments, and vitamin infusions etc., as countermeasures to our overstressed and overworked lives. The more you work – the more you are meant to meditate. In fact meditation is seen as only a means to be able to work more.  The more uncertain your economic future becomes the more “in the moment” you should be.  We try to reduce this economic uncertainty by working longer hours in hopes that we can secure food in our old age. The harsh reality is that this effort is futile. Just like the rats believing they will get water and then don’t – the chronic stress from overwork and uncertainty is literally shrinking your brain. No amount of meditation or bikram hot yoga is enough to reverse the damage to your brain from overwork.

The Australian study shows that impaired mental capacity may get worse over 40 with long working hours. Human brain volumes typically peak at about age 25, and after that it’s a slow decline. But what if working more than 25 hours per week in your mid-life hastens this decline? But working too much in your 40’s you not only sacrifice the present, but you may very well be sacrificing your cognitive future. And for what?  The slight chance that you will have saved enough to afford to eat cat food in retirement?

Why do our policy makers and business “leaders” ignore science? They benefit from us believing that economic salvation can only come through stress and work. We need to become conscious of the fact that the economy is falling apart for most people, and that work is bad for your brain right now and in the future. We cannot work our way out of uncertainty, and the more we work the more damage we do to the only thing we can truly call our own: our minds.

ENDS