The message is getting through – working longer is not just about keeping the wolves from the door. It is as much to do with our emotional and social needs as anything. That at least is the gist of another interesting piece by Lucy Kellaway in this week’s Financial Times. Lucy is singing our song! We have been pointing out these things for some considerable time.

For example, one point long since emphasised in yellowing TAEN presentations is that the cliff edge retirement concept is at odds with our biological needs. With accumulating evidence that “good work is good for you,” perhaps I should explain.

Well I will offer a theory at least. This is that however irksome it becomes at this time of the year, the routine of getting up and going out in the morning is as important as a good night’s sleep to one’s circadian rhythms. It is doing what comes naturally, to use the lyrics of a song in the musical Annie Get Your Gun (now resurgent at the Young Vic, incidentally.)

Our priorities may be changing a bit - there are plenty of reasons to think that financial drivers have become more important recently. However, in a 2007 survey of older workers in the G7 countries10 by the AARP, 82 per cent of British respondents said in general they worked for the money but only 45 per cent listed money as the main factor for continuing to work beyond retirement age.

So like sleep, work and the routine it brings are important to us. Disturbance of either is disorienting and stressful. Retirement before one planned to do so, is not nice!

One problem is that our human excesses can destroy the predictable, desirable routine we are programmed to need. Favourable to good health and well being work may be, but routine can be upset at every throw. We live unwisely, eat too much, take too little exercise, work long hours, drive ourselves and hence become unable to work. It all sounds beautifully simple - all you need is willpower - but of course, organisations and society ingrain these excesses into our existence too.

Consider the issue of diet. According to Professor Christopher Hawkey, President of the British Society of Gastroenterology: “Obesity is the biggest health problem we face this century.” So bad is the problem becoming that demographers are beginning to grapple with the idea for the first time that we may actually start living shorter lives than before.

Or take work pressure and stress. The Health and Safety Executive’s report, Psychosocial Working Conditions in Britain in 2009, shows that, despite some  brief improvement in 2007, the stressful working problem continues unabated.

Make no mistake about it, it is bad! In 2009 16.7 per cent of respondents to the HSE’s balanced survey said that they found their jobs “very” or “extremely” stressful. The proportion of employers taking visible measures to reduce stress at the workplace was not changing either.

So stress-related ill health has become a by-product of our approaches to work and organisation. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that for lots of people, stress is the trigger to an early exit from the workforce. Show me a teacher of 60+ and I will show you 20 who have retired before that age!

Now an illuminating report prepared for TAEN looks at the specific impact of stress on older workers. Incredibly, it seems to be the first attempt to study the effects of stress on this particular age group.

The report Ageing, Work Related Stress and Health, by Nottingham University’s Professor of Occupational Health Psychology, Amanda Griffiths, surveys existing evidence and literature exhaustively. You can see it here .

Among other things, it points to evidence that our stress levels at work peak when we reach about 50 to 55 years of age. There are reasons for this of course – in part it may be down to the ‘healthy survivor effect’. Those remaining after a certain age include a proportion who have given up work or left stressful posts for less demanding jobs.

On a lighter note, I am thinking of submitting it as evidence to support the idea that in the evolution of mankind, running away from work must have been dysfunctional whilst sticking with the job was a positive asset. And Adam, if he existed, would have been a worker – no doubt about it!