Retirees who get regular pensions and enjoy other retirement benefits tend to sleep better.

Sleep tends to get more disturbed with age, while work schedules and job stress can also disrupt sleep. To investigate how retirement affected sleep, researchers followed 14,714 workers for seven years before they retired and for seven years afterwards. The workers retired at an average age of 55 years. Eighty per cent of the participants were men. All were surveyed annually for several health and social factors, including sleep disturbances. Just 4 percent had retired due to health reasons.

While the percentage of people who reported sleep disturbances crept up gradually as they aged - from 23 percent seven years before retirement to 25 percent the year before a person retired - it dropped sharply when a person did retire. One year after leaving the work force, 18 percent of the study participants reported sleep disturbances. But this percentage became 21 percent seven years after retirement.

Men saw the greatest improvement in sleep, as did managers, people who worked the night-shift, and people with the most demanding jobs. Overall, people were 26 percent less likely to report sleep disturbances after they retired, but the difference was particularly strong for people who had suffered from depression or mental fatigue during their working life; their risk of sleep problems dropped by 45 percent.

The only group of people who actually slept worse after they retired was those who had left the workforce for health reasons; they were about 1.5 times as likely to have sleep problems after retirement as before.

It seems proper pension level to guarantee financial security after working age prevented sleep disturbances and improved overall health of the retirees.