You might be – or have already been – thinking about how you’ll spend your retirement. But have you really thought about the psychological ramifications and the many other effects it will impose on you?
Loss of ID
Many retirees, when asked, will say that retirement brought enormous changes to their lives. And one of the main changes was the feeling that they’d lost their identity. So many people equate who they are with what they do. In the case of retirees, it often comes down to who they were and what they was. We know, that’s bad grammar, but it’s a fact. It’s common to say “I was a… blah blah blah.”
Whether they were a financial advisor, a teacher, a graphic designer, a nurse, a doctor, a manager of a store, after retirement it usually doesn’t matter. They find out soon enough that they no longer are the person that was. Jobs and work were their defining descriptors. If they went to a club or to a party the inevitable question was often, if not always when introduced to new people, “So, what do you do for a living?”
It’s hard to drop the moniker associated with one’s past life and simply reply “I’m retired”. It almost sounds as though you’re already living in the past tense when in fact you are alive and well in the present tense and striding forward. Just not in that work world kind of way.
Loss of Ready Cash Flow
Often, money issues can start to rear their ugly head once you enter retirement. That reliable monthly salary is no longer deposited on a regular basis into your bank account or a paycheque isn’t slipped to you in an envelope every two weeks. A guaranteed, reliable source of income is a thing of the past.
Emotional Impact
Although retirement can be experienced as a “wow, I’m free at last” sensation, once the novelty wears off, many newly retired find themselves at their wits end. They may find themselves succumbing to anxiety and depression caused by the mere fact they were not really prepared for the reality retirement brings.
If you’re one of those people that are feeling a negative emotional impact, you may want to try engaging in talk therapy, yoga or some other relaxation technique to help you come to terms with such a mighty change in your life. If the level of stress you’re feeling is very high, perhaps you might want to seek medical intervention – talk to your doctor and see if they can guide you towards the resources you may require to cope with this lifestyle change.
What You Can Do
- Create a new kind of schedule for your days. Remember when you were working? You set the alarm for the morning and you got up and prepared yourself for the day. Well, just because you no longer have to ‘get to work’ doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get up, get dressed and be well groomed in all its iterations, to meet your day.
- Make a proper breakfast. Take the same time you used to take to have your morning coffee (or stretch it out a bit now you’re retired) or continue going to the gym early every day if that was your ‘work-a-day’ routine.
- Discover new goals for yourself if that was part of how you functioned while working. They’ll just be different from those from the past. If you were a rewards-oriented person then set new tasks for yourself to fulfill now that you’re not going to work. Goals could be anything from learning a new skill to putting in X amount of volunteer hours somewhere. Give yourself a reward for achieving them.
- Set out to make ten (or five or twenty) new, non-work related, friends. Challenge yourself to meet and discover other people and widen your social circle by leaving your age-old comfort zone.
- If money’s an issue, create a budget that you can live with, and if it turns out you don’t have enough resources saved, then think about what you can do to generate income using the skills you learned when you had a full time job. Then get going and either create the job or apply for it. Retirees are often in demand in many employment situations, as consultants or on a part time basis.
It’s a Brave (Brand) New World
Above all, allow yourself ample time to figure out what this brand new world of retirement means to you. Experiment with ideas, look for unusual opportunities and try to network with others – you’ll discover who the new you truly is.