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Quitting Work Early May Carry a Hidden Cognitive Cost
In A Nutshell
- Women who retired early or spent long stretches outside the workforce in their fifties and sixties had nearly double the odds of being classified with mild cognitive impairment or dementia years later.
- People who stayed employed long-term despite repeatedly feeling a high perceived chance of losing their jobs showed no such elevated pattern.
- Among men, only inconsistent, on-and-off employment stood out, linked to roughly twice the odds of cognitive impairment and lower scores across most thinking tests.
- Researchers say staying attached to work, not staying free of worry about it, tracked with sharper memory and thinking scores years later.
Women who retired early or spent long stretches outside the workforce in their fifties and sixties had nearly double the odds of being classified with mild cognitive impairment or dementia years later, according to new research. People who stayed employed despite repeatedly reporting a high perceived chance of losing their jobs showed no such pattern.
That result runs counter to what most people would predict. Researchers reconstructed employment histories from data collected between 1998 and 2014, then compared those patterns with cognitive testing from 2016. Feeling insecure about a job wasn’t the dangerous part. Losing steady footing in the workforce, whether through early retirement, long stretches outside the job market, or bouncing between jobs, was linked to weaker memory, slower thinking, and a higher chance of being flagged for cognitive impairment.
Published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the study followed 2,418 people from the Health and Retirement Study, a long-running survey of older Americans. Researchers compared long-term employment patterns against brain function tests given in 2016. The results told less about how people felt about their jobs and more about whether they stayed attached to work at all.
Six Employment Patterns Emerged for Men and Women
Scientists pulled data from an add-on project called the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol, which gives a subset of participants age 65 and up an in-depth set of memory and thinking tests. That group of 2,418 people (1,470 women and 948 men) answered questions about their jobs periodically between 1998 and 2014, each contributing at least four rounds of data.
At each check-in, participants landed in one of several categories: securely employed, insecurely employed, unemployed, retired, self-employed, or not in the labor force. Working participants also rated, from zero to 100, how likely they thought they were to lose their job within the next year; anyone in the riskiest quarter was labeled job insecure.
Researchers grouped people by the overall shape of their work history, sorting out six patterns each for women and men. A predominantly job-secure pattern, meaning steady employment, served as the comparison point, though it wasn’t the biggest group in either sex. Other patterns included a shift from secure work into retirement, persistent job insecurity while employed, self-employment, and early retirement. Women alone had a group marked by long stretches outside the labor force beyond retirement or unemployment. Men alone had a group marked by frequent shifts among working, unemployed, and retired states. By 2016, everyone had completed testing measuring memory, executive function (planning and decision-making skills), language, and orientation (awareness of time and place), flagging people who met the criteria for mild cognitive impairment or dementia.
Employment Disruption Was Linked to the Largest Cognitive Differences
Among women, every employment pattern other than the predominantly job-insecure group was linked to lower memory and executive function scores than the secure employment group. Women who retired early scored modestly but measurably lower on memory tests, and women outside the labor force for long periods scored similarly low. Self-employed women scored lower across memory, executive function, language, and overall thinking skills as well.
Among men, only inconsistent employment stood out consistently, with roughly twice the odds of cognitive impairment versus securely employed men and lower scores across most types of thinking tested. Early retirement was also linked to lower overall cognitive scores among men, though the effect was narrower than among women.
One finding stood apart. People who stayed employed long-term despite repeatedly reporting a high perceived chance of job loss did not show the same pattern of lower scores as those who actually left work. Among women, that group even showed lower odds of cognitive impairment than the securely employed group, a result researchers called unexpected and treated cautiously given its small size.
Employment Continuity, Not Job Worry, Tracks With Cognitive Scores
Researchers offered a few possible explanations. Steady work may keep people mentally engaged through problem-solving and social interaction, building a kind of mental reserve that could cushion against decline later on. Leaving the workforce or bouncing between jobs removes that stimulation, and often financial stability too, both separately tied to lower thinking scores in older adults.
Adjusting for number of children did not change the results, though researchers noted women’s employment gaps often trace back to caregiving the data could not fully capture. The study cannot rule out the reverse either: subtle health or cognitive changes already underway could push someone out of the workforce, a possibility researchers checked for but could not fully eliminate.
This isn’t a study about whether a stressful job harms someone’s peace of mind; other research already answers that. It’s about which kind of work disruption shows up years later in tests of memory and thinking. Leaving steady work early or moving through unstable employment carried the strongest associations, not staying employed while perceiving a high chance of job loss. That second group’s apparently better odds are worth noting but not leaning on too hard, since researchers flagged the result as small and fragile. Staying attached to work, not staying free of worry about it, tracked with sharper memory and thinking scores years later.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a peer-reviewed observational study and is intended for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical, financial, or career advice. Anyone with concerns about their own memory, cognitive health, or retirement planning should speak with a qualified healthcare provider or financial professional.
Paper Notes
Limitations
Employment status and job insecurity were self-reported, which can introduce measurement error. Researchers could not separate part-time from full-time work, since part-time work was too rare among men to model separately, which may have mattered most for women’s trajectories tied to caregiving. The data also lacked information on other workplace stressors, such as job strain or discrimination, that could plausibly affect both employment paths and cognitive outcomes. Because health decline can sometimes precede a job exit, early health or cognitive changes may have influenced employment exits rather than the other way around, though researchers used statistical adjustments and additional checks to test for this. Restricting the analysis to the sub-study with detailed cognitive testing also reduced sample size, leaving some groups with few individuals who met impairment criteria and wider uncertainty around those estimates. Finally, the cognitive impairment classification was generated algorithmically and is not a clinical diagnosis, though researchers noted that similar algorithms have produced impairment estimates comparable to other national aging studies.
Funding and Disclosures
Funding came from the National Institute on Aging (Grant #: RF1AG088005). The authors reported no conflicts of interest, and additional author disclosures are available in the paper’s supporting information.
Publication Details
Titled “Trajectories of late-life job insecurity and labor force participation: Associations with cognitive function and impairment in the Health and Retirement Study’s harmonized cognitive assessment protocol,” the study was authored by Erika T. Beidelman, Xuexin Yu, Constance Beaufils, Rachel Donnelly, Mateo Farina, Amanda Sonnega, Lindsay C. Kobayashi, and Yuan S. Zhang. It was accepted August 25, 2026, and published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Volume 22, Issue 9 (e71863). DOI: 10.1002/alz.71863.
