People in routine and repetitive jobs found to have 31% greater risk of disease in later life, and 66% higher risk of mild cognitive problems
If work is a constant flurry of mind-straining challenges, bursts of creativity and delicate negotiations to keep the troops happy, consider yourself lucky.
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.
You’re comparing playing video games, an explicitly recreational activity, to mind numbingly boring jobs?
Filling up the same form hundreds of times is rather different than fighting virtual monsters. I did a shift covering workers at a printing house. My job for the day consisted of sitting on a chair and waiting for a machine to spit out a stack of magazines. When it did, I’d place a small piece of paper on top of the stack before it got wrapped in plastic, due to the regulations of the country the stacks were went to.
The machines were stuck all the time, so in practice, I sat in a chair and slapped a small piece of paper on a stack like 3-12 times an hour. There were no smart phones back then, and you wouldn’t have been allowed to use one anyway. Even music was strictly forbidden, because you need to be alert because the machines are dangerous.
And that was a stress free boring job. Most jobs are super stressful and bosses demand more than you can do.