Retirement Planning - Coping with the Stress of Retirement - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN

 Retirement Planning - 

Coping with the Stress of Retirement - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN

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Summary.   

Retirement can seem like a dream. Will we ever be able to stop working? Will we want to? Will we be able to afford it? For those of us who have built our lives around work, the transition to not working can be stressful. Whether your worry about retirement is grounded in financial questions, health concerns, or filling your time in meaningful ways, identifying your sources of stress can help you take proactive steps to prepare for this significant life transition from an emotional and psychological standpoint, helping you reduce and manage your stress and enjoy a more positive retirement. The sources of stress will differ for individuals depending on your personal context and where in the seven phases of retirement you are. Provides definitions and coping mechanisms for six of the seven phases to help you identify them and manage your response during them. Regardless of the specific circumstances of your retirement, preparing for it emotionally and psychologically will help ameliorate the stresses that it can bring so that you can focus on enjoying the life you planned for with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and connection that lasts.

For many of us, retirement is a dream. At the start of our careers, we don’t often give it more thought than enrolling in a savings plan or filling out tax forms. When retirement age grows closer to becoming a reality, we joke about it, daydream about it, and perhaps worry about it. Will we be lucky enough to have the money, good health, and companionship of family and friends to enjoy our golden years?

For those of us who have built our lives around work, the transition to not working can be stressful. In your working life, you move projects forward, crossing off items from an endless to-do list. You feel accomplished, receive praise and recognition, and earn economic rewards. In your retired life, you may be surprised to endure a big and stressful adjustment, as you transition to personal projects and a to-do list of activities that no one but you will know about. You may feel less useful and important when you are no longer speaking to audiences about your work, making that big sale, or getting that promotion you worked so hard for. You may feel gratified to finally make progress on those household, family, and personal tasks that you didn’t have time for when you were working. When it comes to retirement, you likely won’t know how it will feel until you actually get there.

What we do know is that more people are facing retirement than ever before. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every country in the world is experiencing an increase in the size and proportion of the elderly in their population. WHO predicts that by 2030, one in six people globally will be over the age of 60, and this population is expected to double by 2050. This demographic shift, known as “population aging,” means an increase in the number of retirees and a corresponding increase in the length of time that people will be retired. So there are more of us growing older and living longer than ever.

Retirement is more than the absence of work; it can also deeply impact your identity, relationships, and status, which can be stressful, and there is conflicting data about the impact of stress on the mental health of retirees. One meta-analysis of 11 studies found the prevalence of depression among a total of 6,111 retirees to be 28%. One study found a 6% to 9% decline in mental health over an average postretirement period of six years, and it also found evidence that this impact may be stronger for people who retire involuntarily. Another meta-analysis of 60 data sets, totaling 557,111 subjects, found that retirement reduced the risk of depression by almost 20%. Finally, an article from Harvard Medical School reported that doing too little or too much in retirement can have the same symptoms: depression, anxiety, memory impairment, loss of appetite, and insomnia.

While the research is conflicting and confusing, and everyone has their own context, identifying your sources of stress can help you take proactive steps to prepare for this significant life transition from an emotional and psychological standpoint, helping you reduce and manage your stress and enjoy a more positive retirement.

Sources of Stress

Of course, the circumstances of your retirement will impact the way you experience the stress of this major life event. Your retirement-related stress may be tied to the way in which you retire, the change to your daily structure, the impact on your relationships, feelings of isolation, and financial concerns.

How you retire

In an ideal world, we get to pick the circumstances and time we retire. If you have planned for your retirement and things are going accordingly, you may have more excitement than fear or anxiety. But that ideal is not available to all of us. If you have to retire before you wanted to because of an illness, to take care of family members, or because of a layoff, you may experience a lot of stress because you were not expecting it.

The structure of your days

Even if everything is exactly as you planned or dreamed, the shift from a 40- to 60-hour workweek to an equivalent amount of free time can be a challenging adjustment, especially in the first few weeks or months of retirement. The change of pace takes getting used to, even if you have set plans for classes you’ll take, trips you’ve booked, and activities you’ll join.

Changes to relationships

Although the pandemic made working from home a norm for so many, you may feel isolated and disconnected when there is no team to check in with and share happy hours, watercooler conversations about sports and headlines, and corporate events with free bev and bites. Many of your close friendships may be with colleagues; you may feel the loss of the connection that comes with working together.

Feelings of isolation

Retirement can definitely engender feelings of FOMO. You may see your still-working colleagues going on business trips together and getting big promotions and wonder if you made the right decision to retire when you did. Also, if you live alone as many seniors do, you may have feelings of loneliness now that you’re not regularly connecting with others for work. According to a study from the Pew Research Center, more U.S. seniors live alone than anywhere else in the world; 27% of U.S. adults over 60 live alone, compared to 16% in the rest of the 130 countries studied. Older women are almost twice as likely as their male counterparts to live alone, partly due to women living longer and marrying men who are older than them. And lots of research shows that social isolation negatively impacts the mental and physical health of seniors.

Financial concerns

Money is a common source of stress for many people at different stages of life. Financial stress can increase in retirement, when people stop working and therefore relinquish their ability to grow their savings. According to a CNBC feature on retirement, 37% of Americans feel unprepared or unsure if they are on track for retirement. One survey found that more than a third of Americans are concerned that they won’t be able to cover health-care costs in the next year. If you still have debt such as a mortgage or student loans (for yourself or your children), you may also have some anxiety about carrying these debts into retirement. Last, as life expectancy increases, many people wonder if their savings will last for the remainder of their lives. And current economic downturns only exacerbate those fears.

Coping with Stress During the Phases of Retirement

According to Robert Atchley’s classic book, The Sociology of Retirement, there are seven stages of retirement, and depending on where you are in the “retirement life cycle,” the sources of stress may differ. We’ll discuss the first six phases to help you plan your retirement. Knowing that the phases exist will help you identify them and manage your response during them. (We won’t address here the last stage — termination — when people are close to the end of life.) People generally go through these phases of retirement in the order in which they are listed, but each person goes through them at their own pace, and some may skip certain stages, such as the disenchantment and reorientation phases, depending on their orientation toward life. Sometimes a change in circumstances can cause a jump backward or forward. For example, inheriting money in later stages may bring people back to the honeymoon stage or forward to the stability stage. Or a more negative experience such as the diagnosis of a chronic illness may cause a shift to the disenchantment or reorientation phases.

Preretirement

This is the first stage; it usually takes place in the five to 10 years before you plan to retire, when most people start to focus on financial planning. This may mean downsizing to a smaller home after your children have left. For others, it may mean planning for a change in where they live geographically. For example, if you live where winters are long and cold, you may decide to move permanently or temporarily (e.g., snowbirds) to where the climate is more favorable. The stress associated with this time of your work life may be rooted in a generalized anxiety about getting or feeling older, wondering if you have enough money saved, and not having a concrete plan for retirement.

How to cope: To address this source of stress, focus on making a clear and concrete plan for your future. Write down your dreams for retirement, meet with a financial planner to see how realistic your goals are, and take steps to make those dreams come true. It may also help to focus on healthier eating and living so that you plan for a healthy and long life in retirement. Consuela Chapman, a licensed therapist and health coach in North Carolina, advises that you take advantage of any counseling offered through your organization’s employee assistance programs to help you prepare for your new normal of retirement.

Retirement Day

The second—and shortest stage—is the actual day of your retirement, which your organization and colleagues may celebrate. It may mean a gift of some kind and maybe a party at the office or a fancy restaurant. Many people look forward to this day as it marks the before and after of their work lives. And though the actual day may be celebratory, there may be stress related to setting the date and telling your boss and family. And if you feel like you’re being pushed out, this day may not be so celebratory.

How to cope: The best way to deal with this day is to reflect on your career achievements, which may be the focus of your retirement speech or the goodbye email you send to colleagues. You can even do this just for yourself to feel a sense of accomplishment. Another way to make this day as positive as possible is to list at least three things for which you are grateful as you say goodbye to work and start a new stage of life.

Honeymoon Phase

In this third phase, you do a lot of the things you always wanted to but did not have the time or freedom: impulse trips to see family or to explore new places, fully indulging your hobbies — whether gardening, painting, or knitting; learning a new language just because; or volunteering for your favorite cause. The honeymoon phase is also when you may relish loss — the loss of waking to an alarm clock, a painful commute, a calendar so packed with meetings that you didn’t have time to eat or grab a coffee. There is no determined length of time for this phase, as it really depends on your emotional and psychological reaction to retirement and all the activities you planned to do.

How to Cope: This is the least stressful period of retirement, so soak it up. You love retirement and the new life you have worked so hard for and may have feelings of joy, satisfaction, excitement, and achievement. To extend this period, it may help to journal your positive feelings so that you can refer to them when you need an emotional boost as you move through less positive phases. While things are good, you may want to prepare for the future by creating an advance directive. Vanessa Souza, a social worker with more than 15 years of experience working with the elderly in the San Francisco Bay Area, says, “My number one piece of advice for retirees is to immediately identify who will be both your financial and your medical power of attorney, should you need someone to make decisions on your behalf, and who is going to help you get what you need if you are physically or cognitively unable to do it yourself.” She finds that most people don’t want to think about this when things are going well, but an advance directive is just one more way to have peace of mind going forward.

Disenchantment

In this fourth phase, you start wondering if “this is it” for the rest of your life. The emotional high of the freedom to do as you please starts to wane and the downside of too much freedom and too little structure starts to kick in. You may start feeling anxiety about only spending money while not earning money. You may face yet another unplanned day with dread instead of adventure. You may ache for a goal or a sense of accomplishment. And as Chapman says, “Individuals who have recently retired and are not adjusting as well to the change may begin to feel anxious and or depressed. It’s not uncommon for retirees to go through the grief cycle as well. Leaving a career and the relationships established is a loss.”

How to Cope: One way to deal with the stress of this phase is to focus on the things you enjoy about retirement and try to solve the parts that you don’t. Go back to that list of career achievements, your gratitude list, and read journal entries from the honeymoon phase to help shift to a more positive mindset. Be proactive in connecting with friends and family to do things you enjoy together. Consider learning a language or developing a new skill. And if you really miss working with a great group of people on a shared goal, sign up for a volunteer opportunity where you collaborate on making a difference in someone’s life; that may mean joining a nonprofit board, delivering Meals on Wheels, mentoring or coaching younger people in your field, or volunteering in a K–12 classroom. Hobbies and volunteering have been found to improve both mental and physical health of retirees. If you’re seeking to get out of your retirement rut, consider joining the Peace Corps or taking a volunteer trip abroad. And if you find that feelings of grief and loss are persistent, find a mental health professional to help you through that process.

Reorientation

For some people, this fifth phase can be the most challenging, as as it involves figuring out a new identity and starting to acclimatize to a new way of life. You want to be able to answer the perennial question about what you do without any anxiety and feel a sense of purpose in this new life you have created for yourself.

How to Cope: To maneuver through this period, create a routine that works for you. Go to bed and wake at the same time every day to regulate your circadian rhythms, and exercise to keep your bones and muscles strong, maintain a healthy weight, and reduce the risk of chronic illnesses. You should also include regular meetups with friends and family to be socially connected and to boost your emotional resilience. To provide a sense of purpose, look for an opportunity to engage in your community in a way that feels meaningful.

Stability

The last and final stage we’ll address here is the stability stage, also known as the reconciliation stage. At this point, you have settled into a life that gives you feelings of purpose and fulfillment. Like everyone else you will have ups and downs emotionally and psychologically, but you also have ways of dealing with these changes without much trouble. Like any other period of life, this stage of retirement won’t always be smooth sailing and you will have psychological and emotional ups and downs. You may have to deal with the death of friends and family, illness of children or partner, or downturns in your economic fortune.

How to Cope: Lean into the coping strategies that work for you that you developed in the earlier stages. Keep these strategies in rotation as needed. At this stage you may want to consider recording the story of your life as a legacy for your children or grandchildren or as a historical record. Writing or recording the story of your life will give you a sense of legacy. And regularly sharing these stories with family and community can keep you connected in very powerful ways. You may even explore the idea of writing and publishing a memoir.

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No matter what stage of retirement you are in, if you are feeling overwhelmed, or find that you are experiencing extended periods of anxiety or depression or other mental health challenges, you should seek out a mental health provider — or a leader in your faith community if this is part of your life — to help you navigate your way through this significant life transition. You have spent decades of your life working, so of course it will be challenging to adjust to a whole new way of life. Regardless of the specific circumstances of your retirement, preparing for it emotionally and psychologically will help ameliorate the stresses that it can bring so that you can focus on enjoying the life you planned for with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and connection that lasts.

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