Health is not a retirement project.

The data is unambiguous: longevity is increasing, but healthspan is not keeping pace.

Research continues to reinforce the need for positive lifestyle choices during working life to optimise long-term health outcomes, not retroactively fix them. With one in six people projected to be over 60 by 2030, ageing is no longer a niche concern, it is a systemic public health challenge. The global population curve makes this even starker: from three billion people in 1966, to five billion in 1999, to more than eight billion today.

Against this backdrop, a new South Australian study challenges a persistent assumption that retirement is a natural reset point for health behaviours.

Conducted by Flinders University Associate Professor Dr Ilke Onur, Dr Rong Zhu (Flinders), and Professor Tony Cavoli (Adelaide University), the research found minimal change in diet and exercise patterns after people exit the workforce.

As the researchers state, “We found no evidence that transitioning into retirement significantly affects body weight for either men or women,” with findings suggesting that pre-retirement interventions, such as workplace wellbeing programs, may deliver far stronger long-term returns.

They also call for more community programs to support active retirement and improve both lifespan and health outcomes for older Australians, including those on the aged pension.

This is the strategic inflection point. If behaviour does not materially shift at retirement, then waiting for retirement to “fix” health outcomes is a flawed operating assumption.

The evidence points towards working life, daily routines, and the cumulative impact of small, repeatable decisions made over decades.

This is where GreyMatter stepped away from dependency thinking and considered a different framework: wellness stacking.

Rather than relying on single interventions, silver bullets, or late-stage corrections, wellness stacking is about building health the way organisations build capability—incrementally, deliberately, and over time. Wellness stacking, stripped of the fluff, is about operational efficiency for humans: layering achievable habits during working life so the benefits compound long before retirement enters the picture.

Here are some basic stacks that scale in real life, not on a retreat brochure. We encourage you to think about the things you already do…

Morning baseline stack. Hydration, daylight, movement, cognition. Water on waking, five minutes outside to anchor circadian rhythm, light mobility while listening to something mildly challenging. You’re waking up the body, the brain, and the clock in one pass. This is risk mitigation for the rest of the day.

Commute stack. Learning, posture, mood. Audiobooks or podcasts at 1.1–1.2x speed, shoulders back, jaw unclenched, breathing through the nose. The commute stops being dead time and starts behaving like a mobile classroom with spinal benefits.

Workday micro-reset stack. Vision, circulation, nervous system. Every 60–90 minutes: stand up, look at something far away, slow exhale longer than inhale. This reduces cognitive fatigue, eye strain, and stress hormones without needing a “wellness break” calendar invite.

Exercise stack. Strength, balance, cognition. Resistance training while counting reps backwards, naming countries, or listening to complex music. You’re training muscles, fall-prevention, and neuroplasticity at the same time. Especially strong ROI as we age.

Food stack. Nutrition, social connection, digestion. Eat real food, slowly, with other humans when possible. Phones down. Conversation up. Better digestion, better mood, better compliance. This is wellness hiding in plain sight.

Evening wind-down stack. Sleep, mental health, memory consolidation. Low light, low stimulation, light stretching or a walk, followed by journaling one sentence: “What mattered today.” This closes cognitive loops and improves sleep quality without a full mindfulness production.

Weekend stack. Joy, longevity, identity. Playful movement, creative output, community contact. Gardening, dancing, making something slightly useless but satisfying. This protects against burnout and identity shrinkage, which no supplement can fix.

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Extra information about the research

‘Retirement and weight stability: Panel evidence from Australia’ (2025) by Tony Cavoli, Rong Zhu and Ilke Onur has been published in the journal of Economic Analysis and Policy – DOI: 10. 1016/j.eap.2025.10.038.