Busy and stressed at work? Great news – it’s good for you (in some ways)
Stressed at work? Fear not – it could be good for you.
A new study has found that day-to-day busyness improves cognitive function.
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The Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience paper tested 330 adults aged between 50 and 89, assessing them on their busyness.
The results found greater busyness was associated with better processing speed, working memory, episodic memory, reasoning and “crystalised knowledge”.
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Sara Festini, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Vital Longevity of the University of Texas and lead author on the paper, said: “We show that people who report greater levels of daily busyness tend to have better cognition, especially with regard to memory for recently learned information.”
She added: “Living a busy lifestyle appears beneficial for mental function, although additional experimental work is needed to determine if manipulations of busyness have the same effect.”