Mentally stimulating work plays key role in staving off dementia, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Mentally stimulating work plays key role in staving off dementia, study finds

theguardian.com

63 pointsprmph30 comments

Use it or lose it, as they say.

One of my parents has decided that retirement means to live entirely within their comfort zone, avoiding any kind of changes or challenges to their life. Not surprisingly, they have begun to show signs of dementia.

But also young people want old people to retire these days. If I was old I'd stay working and keep my mind agile though. :)

Young people want old people to retire because the economy sucks for a lot of them so they develop a misplaced zero-sum mentality, thinking these old people are somehow taking up their "slot". There's also a sense that those in leadership are generally behind the times (see Biden's momentary slip when he said he's a "20th century president" before he corrected himself), and are doing more harm than good by staying in.

By contrast I've worked with engineers north of 70 who blow me out of the water. Hard to say those guys don't deserve to be there.

For my part, if I ever do fully retire I intend to play a lot of high difficulty strategy games with people, so I should be set :) There's going to be some sick GenX/Millenial LAN parties once we hit retirement age.

"There's going to be some sick GenX/Millenial LAN parties once we hit retirement age." That's right didn't even think of that.

Yeah I think that's what I find concerning --> 'so they develop a misplaced zero-sum mentality, thinking these old people are somehow taking up their "slot"' because its such a me vs them. A lot of older people are pretty talented and have seen a lot more.

You'd probably want to transition the older people to mentor and guide the younger people, but not to do the same exact work. But that's a different job description; some older people may not want to do that kind of work, nor would the company want to pay for both the old and the young.

I've always wondered what the health trade-off is for a less mentally stimulating role if it dramatically reduces your stress levels and offers better work/life balance.

On a similar note, I've often wondered what the optimum amount of exercise is if you don't like exercise, but want to maximise your time not exercising.

Luckily this is a very common situation for people, so there is a good body of research to answer your question! A good answer is about 30 mins of moderate cardio activity a day: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-ac....

What is the time period for this statement? I'm assuming that must be weekly, but everywhere else in the report, the units are daily.

"Adults aged 18–64 years should do at least 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity;"

EDIT: Added quotes for clarity.

Yes it's very confusingly worded.

"->Should do ... ->Or ... Throughout the week."

Not sure why they worded it that way, maybe adults with busy schedules engage less with _ per day than _ per week recommendations.

Don’t the government of various countries recommend 90 mins of cardio per week and 2-3 strength training sessions on top of 30-60 minutes of daily light activity?

I feel like they would be the ones to answer the optimal exercise question over a huge number of people.

If you want to do weight training but don't want to spend a lot of time in the gym, look into "myo-reps". Rather than doing a traditional "Do 3 sets of 12 reps separated by 90-120s", you do a set of 12, then do several sets of 5 after waiting only 15 seconds. It's more intense but just as effective, and a lot faster.

Doesn't really work on leg day if you're lifting heavy, because 15 seconds isn't enough to catch your breath; but has worked pretty well for me for push and pull days, where my whole workout is usually less than half an hour.

Myo reps might have training benefit for strength-endurance athletes, but afaik they don't improve muscle growth or 1rm strength comparably to traditional schemes. If new work has come out showing that please share.

As of about 4 years ago the research I'd seen suggested that taking rest breaks of 3 mins vs 30s or 1m improves gains over time, though to be fair the lower rest breaks resulted in less overall work being done, so that's not entirely surprising.

> they don't improve muscle growth or 1rm strength comparably to traditional schemes

I didn't say they improved muscle growth cf traditional rest times, just that they took less time. The person I responded to didn't sound like they wanted to be as huge as they could be. I don't want to be as huge as I can be either -- I primarily want to maintain muscle mass as I age (nearing 50). Getting in a solid workout in 20-30 minutes rather than 45-60 minutes makes a big difference to that goal. ETA: As they say, "The best workout is the one you actually do".

This guy is a bit vulgar, but has a lot of good information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V71TGRQaLRs

If it's just a matter of time vs results, HIIT and overhead press/deadlift for 3 sets each of 5-10 reps, with ~2-3 minutes between sets (you can do stuff like bicep curls and chest flyes in between big exercise sets). Unpleasant but high reward/time.

If you want to optimize for exercise pleasantness, start consuming all your tv on a treadmill or elliptical at a slow-moderate (2.5-3m/h) pace.

Great question. The approach I've always taken (now that I'm past my prime) is to just show up. If I train 15 minutes and call it a day, at least I was active and sustained the habit of being active. If I train for a couple hours, that's great too. What I try very, very hard to avoid is doing nothing.

I suspect I get the majority of the gains from the first 20 minutes or so. And since I'm no longer training to compete at a high level, I don't need to eek out as much from my training as possible...but I have no data to back that up.

For me it seems to be a ~30 minute speedwalk almost every day. My bodymind notices when I miss it, especially 3 days in a row.

I think the sweet spot is lots of mental stimulation and no stress. This is probably why university positions were so coveted in the past, before academia became completely dysfunctional.

Same here. I worked repetitive manual labor jobs for a long time before I switched to tech. I was bored out of my mind at work, but after work loved playing games and working on programming/tech/electronics projects.

Now that I'm in tech I have 0 desire to do anything screen based or deep thinking/problem solving after work. There are days I look out the office window and kind of wish I was the guy mowing the lawn and trimming trees. But I know I'd be bored.

The grass is always greener I guess.

We have two batteries: physical and mental. It's only when both batteries are fully drained that we feel happily tired.

Occupational burnout > Treatment and prevention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout

Work-life balance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work%E2%80%93life_balance

Maybe you could start a 20% hobby project at work on their tab. "Why companies lose their best innovators (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887903

Hypothesis; it's probably normal and healthy to pursue different biomechanical activities when not working (possibly regardless of tech career or not)

It's not really explained in TFA, but it has been considered at least:

> Prof Gill Livingston [said] “It is not just that more educated people do more cognitively stimulating jobs – they do – but cognitive stimulation in work through problem solving and new situations has an effect by itself.

Knowing more languages also helps and could be the same effect:

The more interconnections you have, the more you can compensate.

A bike can be reached through different types of bikes, different names of bikes, different experiences with bikes.

anecdotally, i find this statement quite dubious. i speak two languages natively but only think in one. two other languages i know proficiently, and they never come to mind naturally except when intentionally called into service. anything you can reference to help me read or interpret the signs? thanks.

https://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org/news/speaking-second-la....

Its not the point about you thinking in multiply languages, its about your brain being able to find a connection to something.

still dubious. anyone who speaks multiple languages still thinks in one. and object recognition in the real world doesn’t require language. abstract concept recognition requires language, but it’s always in the language the concept was encountered.

I often enough formulate sentences in the language i'm writing.

And plenty of times i remembered a word only in english but not in german.

Like a few month back i was looking at an escalator and though mmmhh escalator whats the german word for it? Took me ages to remember Rolltreppe

Is your mother tonge english? Because i do not think that just having learned a language will help you here a lot. I speak english at my workplace every day while am a german in germany.

Yeah, the old correlation causation strikes again - unfortunately the study itself is paywalled [1].

Realistically how could you possibly prove this isn’t just a case of “people with better brains are less likely to get dementia and also inclined towards more cognitively demanding jobs”?

1. https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000209353

An alternative explanation for the finding is that high IQ people are more likely to have mentally stimulating work and can lose more of their mental capacity without appearing demented.

You can't easily change peoples' jobs, but you could do a randomized trial where the treatment group is encouraged to take up a mentally stimulating hobby, say Scrabble, chess or bridge. It would be great if taking up such a hobby staved off dementia, but I am skeptical that it does.

'Researchers have found that the more people use their brains at work, the better they seem to be protected against thinking and memory problems that come with older age.

In a study of more than 7,000 Norwegians in 305 occupations, those who held the least mentally demanding jobs had a 66% greater risk of mild cognitive impairment, and a 31% greater risk of dementia, after the age of 70 compared with those in the most mentally taxing roles.

“It really shows how important work is,” said Dr Trine Edwin, a geriatrician and postdoctoral fellow at Oslo university hospital. “It’s important to go to work and use your brain, and to use your brain to learn new things.”'

Yeah, agreed, mentally capable people would be less likely to want to do repetitive and non stimulating work.

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