Hi, I'm interested to know if stopping work made a big difference to anyone's well-being. I know everyone's different and it's subjective, according to age/finance/job satisfaction etc.
It's difficult to completely measure the effect of work on my symptoms until I stop working for a living but my inkling is that a few months a year in Cornwall/France coupled with voluntary work and a targeted fitness regimen might help!
YES! Retirement made a world of difference. I retired 3 years ago at 57, a few years earlier than I planned, but it was definitely the right decision for dealing with PD. My symptoms improved a great deal, but I keep moving though, I don't sit around. It sounds like you will too.
Yes! I went from working fulltime at Xmas to 2 days.Now I've retired at 56.When working fulltime I was constantly I'll with infections and felt very rundown.Now I go to the gym several times a week.I feel much more human now
This is a very interesting question! My experience has been that having given up work on the day I was diagnosed, did nothing to slow down the progression of my symptoms. Only two years later did my symptoms start to get better.
However! The immediate reduction in stress levels made my life a lot easier. It is patently obvious that harmful stress is bad for us all, but having Pd makes it doubly so.
So why didn't it appear to help me? I don't know the answer to that question.
What else did I do on the day I was diagnosed? When I say I gave up my work on that fateful day, I handed in my resignation as Chairman (President) of a large company, which my late wife and I had founded many years previously. For the next three months I handed over all the work I had been doing to my successor and made sure that the company would still carry on without me. My late wife continued to work in that company for many years afterwards.
I increased my daily gym classes from 60 minutes a day to 90 minutes a day, six days a week. I thought that seeing that Pd is a movement disorder, the more I moved the better it would be. That did not turn out to be correct. Because, the first thing I noticed was that all the settings on the machines and all the piles of weights proceeded to get smaller much quicker than they had prior to diagnosis. So the extra exercise was not doing anything to help me, it was doing the reverse. After two years of doing 90 minutes a day in the gym, I decided to give it up. After all, who wants to get up at 5-30 in the morning to go to the gym, when my performance wasn't getting any better, it was getting worse?
Three months later, my late wife persuaded me to join an organisation called RUN/WALK for LIFE, which started me off doing fast walking for only twenty minutes every second day for the first two weeks and increasing that time by an additional five minutes every second week. When I started I managed to walk one kilometre in just over ten and a half minutes. After only four months, when I had reached one hour per walk, my time had come down to less than nine minutes per kilometre. That was in only four months!
That was the first time my physical performance had improved for more years than I can remember. Somewhere in the 1970s I was walking much faster than that on the treadmill and I had watched it slowly getting worse over the years, thinking that it was age related. But here I was, at the age of 60, starting to walk faster again. After two more years of walking my times had come down to less than six and three quarters of a minute per kilometre. I was over the moon. I was not the fastest person at RUN/WALK for LIFE, there were at least two ladies walking faster than I was, and they were not spring chickens.
So, what had happened? 90 minutes of gym every day was not doing me any good, while one hour every second day was doing wonders for my performance. I must say that the people running WALK for LIFE would not allow us to walk more than once every second day. Why? because they said that muscles need a day to recover from energetic exercise, otherwise they eat themselves up trying to find the energy they need to carry out my demands on them.
Whether other forms of exercise do what fast walking has done for me, I don't know. All I do know is that after eight years of doing fast walking I had no need to take any further Pd medication and nobody would ever have known that I still have Pd, other than a good neurologist.
I too feel early retirement has slowed the progression of PD symptoms. In my case I was diagnosed at age 52 retired at 55 and I'm now 59. Those three years of work amounted to a lot of stress which resulted in an increase in PD symptoms. I now enjoy life, work out and smell the roses!
Absolutely! I was diagnosed at 68, stuck it out for another year. I enjoyed my work, but it was sedentary and I sat staring at two screens with headphones all day, with almost two hours of stressful commute at either end. I was typing with my nonaffected dominant right hand while my left hand became weaker. I was desperately trying to save money for my predicted inability to care for myself as PD progressed. Not good!
Now at 70 I enjoy life, exercise daily, rest when needed, practice good posture, cook healthy meals and practice gratitude. We have enough, I live with an angel, life is good.
I like what I do, no need to stop.
I've been wrestling with this myself for several months. I was diagnosed at 63. At age 67, I only recently went to part time, three days a week. It is stressful, because the reality is that I am still doing five days work, only in three days. Still, I enjoy having a four day weekend every week. Would I remain as active if I stopped working? Would I miss the social interaction? I have a very supportive work environment. Finances aside, it's a hard decision to make.
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