Retirement Reshapes Sleep and Sitting, But Income Decides Who Benefits

Retirement is often imagined as either a hard-earned reward or a dangerous slide into inertia, and for decades scientists have argued about which picture is closer to the truth. A new longitudinal study from Flanders, Belgium, published in the Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, offers one of the most technically sophisticated answers yet. By tracking 96 workers with wrist-worn accelerometers from before they retired until a full year afterward, researchers led by Nina Vansweevelt of KU Leuven captured how the entire 24-hour day reorganizes itself when paid work disappears. Their central finding is striking: on average, retirement nudged people toward healthier patterns, with sleep increasing by roughly 18 minutes per day and sedentary time falling by about 15 minutes, while physical activity held steady. But that average conceals a sharp divide. Retirees with higher post-retirement incomes moved decisively toward more active, less sedentary lives, while those with lower incomes drifted in the opposite direction, revealing how the transition to retirement may quietly widen health inequalities.

The methodological ambition of the study is what sets it apart from earlier work. Most previous research on retirement and movement relied on questionnaires, which are notoriously vulnerable to recall bias and tend to miss the small, incidental movements that make up much of daily life. Device-based studies, by contrast, have almost all been conducted in Finland and Sweden, raising questions about whether their findings generalize to other cultures and environments. The Belgian team addressed both problems at once. Participants wore triaxial ActiGraph wGT3X-BT accelerometers on their non-dominant wrist for seven consecutive 24-hour cycles at four time points: one to six months before retirement, and again at three, six, and twelve months after. Wrist placement was a deliberate choice, since it yields the highest wear-time compliance and, crucially, allows sleep to be measured alongside waking behaviors, giving researchers a complete picture of the full day rather than fragments of it.

Raw acceleration data were processed with the open-source R package GGIR, which estimates time spent sleeping, sitting still, and moving at different intensities. Sedentary behavior was defined as acceleration below 44.8 milligravities, light physical activity between 44.8 and 100.6 milligravities, and moderate-to-vigorous activity above 100.6 milligravities. But the researchers went a step further, adding two cut-point-free metrics developed by Rowlands and colleagues: the intensity gradient, which describes how activity intensity is distributed across the day, and average acceleration, which captures total activity volume independent of any thresholds. Together, these measures allowed the team to detect shifts not just in how long people moved, but in how intensely they moved, a distinction that matters enormously for health outcomes in older adults.

The deepest technical innovation, however, lies in how the team handled a stubborn statistical problem. Sleep, sedentary behavior, and physical activity are not independent variables; every minute of the day belongs to exactly one of them. When sleep lengthens, something else must shrink. This perfect interdependence, known as multicollinearity, breaks traditional multivariate models. The solution was compositional data analysis, or CoDA, a framework borrowed from geology that treats the 24-hour day as a composition whose parts carry meaning only in relation to one another. The researchers converted their time-use data into isometric log-ratio coordinates using a sequential binary partition: the first coordinate separated active behaviors from passive ones, the second contrasted light activity with moderate-to-vigorous activity, and the third opposed sedentary time to sleep. These coordinates could then be fed into linear mixed models without violating any statistical assumptions.

Across the whole sample, the results painted a broadly optimistic picture. Before retirement, participants averaged 74 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity, 157 minutes of light activity, about 13 hours of sedentary time, and just over 7 hours of sleep per day. Twelve months after leaving work, moderate-to-vigorous activity had barely changed, sedentary time had fallen by roughly 16 minutes, and sleep had grown by about 15 minutes. The statistical models confirmed a significant shift in the balance between sedentary time and sleep, with moderate effect sizes, while the balance between active and passive behaviors remained stable. Notably, the timing of these changes was concentrated in the first three months after retirement; after that, the new patterns settled in and remained remarkably stable through the one-year mark. The intensity gradient and average acceleration showed no significant change, confirming that the reallocation happened on the inactive side of the day rather than in the structure of physical activity itself.

The sleep findings align neatly with earlier device-based studies from the Nordic countries, which also documented longer sleep after retirement. Evidence from both quantitative and qualitative work suggests the mechanism is simple: retirees postpone both their bedtime and, especially, their wake-up time, and the later awakening is what extends total sleep. In this study, average sleep rose from 7 hours and 13 minutes to 7 hours and 28 minutes, still comfortably within the 7-to-9-hour range recommended by major sleep societies. The sedentary result is more surprising. Previous device-based studies generally found only small reductions in sitting time, and one Finnish analysis even reported an increase of 24 minutes per day. The Belgian team suggests their sample, which included proportionally more men in non-manual occupations, may explain the difference, since office workers lose large blocks of occupational sitting when they retire.

The most consequential findings, though, emerged when the researchers stratified the data by socio-economic position, measured through three separate indicators: education, occupation, and income. Education and occupation showed only descriptive, non-significant trends toward more favorable changes among higher-status groups. Income told a different story. Retirees in the higher income bracket increased both moderate-to-vigorous activity by 7 minutes and light activity by 6 minutes per day while cutting sedentary time by 28 minutes in the first three months after retirement. The lower income group did the opposite, losing 7 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity and 10 minutes of light activity while their sedentary time stayed flat. By six months, the higher income group had shifted toward more intense activity while the lower income group had shifted toward less. By twelve months, the higher income group had cut sitting time by 31 minutes and added 20 minutes of sleep, while the lower income group managed only a 1-minute reduction in sitting and a 6-minute gain in sleep.

Why would income, rather than education or occupation, be the decisive factor? The researchers point out that income is recognized in the gerontological literature as the socio-economic indicator most strongly associated with late-life health, because it reflects accumulated resources across the entire life course. Retirement typically reduces financial resources, and rising awareness of the cost of activities has been documented as a barrier to physical activity in qualitative studies of new retirees. There is also the well-known physical activity paradox to consider: occupational activity, which lower socio-economic workers perform in abundance, carries different and often less favorable health implications than recreational activity. What happens to health when a physically demanding job is replaced by discretionary movement is, remarkably, a question that has not yet been directly investigated, and this study adds urgency to it.

The authors are candid about their limitations. The sample of 96 participants is small, limiting statistical power and generalizability, and manual workers were underrepresented, likely reflecting recruitment through channels that attract health-conscious volunteers. Wrist-worn accelerometers estimate inactivity rather than true sedentary behavior, which by definition requires a sitting or reclining posture that the device cannot verify, and the applied intensity cut-points were validated in younger adults. Still, the study’s strengths, multiple socio-economic indicators, objective 24-hour measurement, four time points, and compositional statistics, make its message hard to ignore. Retirement is a natural window of opportunity when daily routines dissolve and new habits can take root, and for wealthier retirees that window opens onto healthier lives. For lower-income retirees, it may instead mark the beginning of a downward drift. The authors argue that targeted lifestyle interventions during the retirement transition are needed precisely for these groups, who already face elevated risks of chronic disease. As populations across Europe and beyond age, ensuring that the health dividend of retirement is shared equally may become one of the defining public health challenges of the coming decades.

Subject of Research: Socio-economic differences in changes in device-measured physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep during the retirement transition

Article Title: Socio-economic position and changes in 24-h movement behaviors during the retirement transition

Article References: Vansweevelt, N., van Uffelen, J., Boen, F., Suorsa, K., & Seghers, J. (2025). Socio-economic position and changes in 24-h movement behaviors during the retirement transition. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, 4(1), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-025-00087-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-025-00087-7

Keywords: retirement, physical activity, sedentary behavior, sleep, socio-economic position, accelerometry, compositional data analysis, 24-h movement behaviors, aging, health inequalities, longitudinal study, Belgium