The Busier the Better: Greater Busyness Is Associated with Better Cognition

Well only 5 nights this week of social activities, last week was 6 nights. Do I need to get to 7 nights a week for better cognition?  A great question for your doctor. How is your doctor prescribing social activities while in the hospital? Or prescribing sex?
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnagi.2016.00098/full

Sara B. Festini^1*, Ian M. McDonough^1,2 and Denise C. Park^1*

• ¹Center for Vital Longevity, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA
• ²Department of Psychology, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

Sustained engagement in mentally challenging activities has been shown to improve memory in older adults. We hypothesized that a busy schedule would be a proxy for an engaged lifestyle and would facilitate cognition. Here, we examined the relationship between busyness and cognition in adults aged 50–89. Participants (N = 330) from the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (DLBS) completed a cognitive battery and the Martin and Park Environmental Demands Questionnaire (MPED), an assessment of busyness. Results revealed that greater busyness was associated with better processing speed, working memory, episodic memory, reasoning, and crystallized knowledge. Hierarchical regressions also showed that, after controlling for age and education, busyness accounted for significant additional variance in all cognitive constructs—especially episodic memory. Finally, an interaction between age and busyness was not present while predicting cognitive performance, suggesting that busyness was similarly beneficial in adults aged 50–89. Although correlational, these data demonstrate that living a busy lifestyle is associated with better cognition.

Introduction

Everyday conversation frequently touches upon the busyness of daily schedules. People discuss their packed to-do lists and make inferences about the impact of their busy lifestyle on their health and mental function. Often busyness carries a negative connotation, as people tend to complain about their hectic schedules, yet, little scientific work has been done to empirically investigate the construct of busyness and its associations. To fill this gap, the present study: (1) assesses whether busier people tend to have better or worse cognitive performance; and (2) tests whether this relationship with cognition varies with age.

Busyness has been defined as the subjective evaluation of one’s ongoing activity patterns, including reflections about the quantity of one’s unscheduled time and comparisons to what is expected or standard (see Gershuny, 2005; Levine, 2005). Martin and Park (2003) developed a self-report assessment of day-to-day busyness in the Martin and Park Environmental Demands Questionnaire (MPED). This questionnaire yields two scale scores (i.e., Busyness and Routines), and the Busyness scale asks individuals to reflect upon, for example, how frequently they have too many tasks to complete or too little time in the day. The Busyness measure had high internal consistency and external validity, as it was related to medication adherence, employment status, and household size. We utilize this measure of busyness in the present study and examine its relationship to cognition.

Given the pervasive discussion of busyness in everyday life, it is surprising that few studies have assessed busyness. We note that, unlike engagement, which typically bears a positive connotation, busyness carries a more negative undertone, and, at present, the cognitive associations of a busy lifestyle are empirically unknown. Related literature suggests that busyness either could be beneficial or harmful to cognition. Busyness could be related to increased levels of stress, which can have negative consequences on the brain and cognitive function (i.e., allostatic load, see McEwen, 1998). For instance, stress hormones have been shown to have negative neural impacts, with different brain regions showing more vulnerabilities at different points in the lifespan (for a review see Lupien et al., 2009). Moreover, stress has been shown to narrow attention, impair working memory (i.e., potentially by disrupting encoding and maintenance processes), interfere with knowledge acquisition, and degrade perceptual-motor performance (see Staal, 2004). High stress even increased the risk of death, although this was only true in people who viewed stress as harmful (Keller et al., 2012). Thus, it is possible that individuals who are very busy could have inferior cognitive function relative to their less busy counterparts.

Alternatively, more positively, busyness could be related to increased effortful engagement at work, home, and in leisure activities, which can have advantageous consequences on neural health and cognition. Recently, several studies experimentally manipulated lifestyle engagement levels and found benefits for intense, sustained engagement. In the Synapse Project, productive engagement groups that learned digital photography or quilting showed improvements in episodic memory relative to receptive control groups that did little new learning (Park et al., 2014), and this sustained new learning also resulted in more efficient neural processing (McDonough et al., 2015). An iPad training project similarly found that prolonged engagement in learning to use an iPad resulted in improvements in episodic memory and processing speed (Chan et al., 2014). Moreover, participants in the Experience Corps program improved their memory and executive functioning after prolonged mentoring of elementary school students (Carlson et al., 2008), and participants engaging in the Senior Odyssey curriculum improved their processing speed, inductive reasoning, and divergent thinking after sustained mental engagement (Stine-Morrow et al., 2008). Finally, theater training has also been shown to improve memory and problem solving in older adults (Noice et al., 2004).

In addition to these experimental manipulations of engagement, many correlational studies report benefits of high levels of cognitive, social, and physical activities. Benefits include improved cognition, delayed cognitive decline, increased longevity, and reduced risk of various diseases, including dementias (e.g., see Christensen and Mackinnon, 1993; Glass et al., 1999; Singh-Manoux et al., 2003; Valenzuela and Sachdev, 2007; Wilson et al., 2007; Seeman et al., 2011; Small et al., 2012). Furthermore, greater work complexity (i.e., greater opportunity to perform higher cognitive operations; more independent work) has been associated with better cognition and longevity (see Correa Ribeiro et al., 2013; Then et al., 2013; Andel et al., 2015; Massimo et al., 2015). For instance, higher mental demand at work was related to better cognition at baseline and a slower rate of cognitive decline over 8 years (Then et al., 2015).

Based on these experimental and correlational findings, if busyness serves as a proxy for intense, sustained lifestyle engagement, then we would predict that greater busyness would be associated with better cognition. Moreover, because busyness has been shown to differ between middle-aged adults and older adults (see Martin and Park, 2003), we aimed to examine if the effects of busyness on cognition were consistent across adults aged 50–89. It may be that the greatest effects of busyness will be observed in older adults, who tend to have more deficiencies in cognition compared to their younger counterparts (i.e., Park et al., 2002), and thus, may be more sensitive to the effects of busyness. In line with this hypothesis, some studies of activity levels and work complexity have found larger effects in older adults than middle-aged adults and young adults (e.g., Hultsch et al., 1993; Schooler et al., 1999). On the other hand, busyness could be detrimental to cognition if it heightens stress substantially, as prolonged stress is harmful to the central nervous system (i.e., Lupien et al., 2009). Overall, the goal of the current study is to examine the relationship between busyness and cognition. We interpret our results in the context of other relevant literature on busyness, engagement, and activity levels and also discuss hypothetical mechanisms.