Retirement is meant to bring some of the happiest years of our lives. We don’t need to work every single day anymore, nor do we need to deal with all kinds of stressful demands from our job. We can simply relax and enjoy life.
But according to a recent study, there’s an ongoing trend among seniors who feel deeply unhappy in their retirement. When we start planning for our retirement, what we generally focus on is our finances.
We wonder if we’ll even have enough money to keep us safe and comfortable for the rest of our lives. While it’s definitely important to focus on the material aspect, most people don’t even consider their psychological needs, especially as soon as their golden years begin.
Without proper planning, we might end up disappointed with our own lives. If we want to be happy, we need to be aware of what to expect. This could bring a significant amount of stress at a time when all we want is to enjoy ourselves. Here are a couple of things you should consider as you start this blissful period of your life.
How are we going to spend our time?
You probably have some sort of idea of what you want to do when you retire. Maybe you would like to travel, get involved in a hobby, or even spend more time with your family. All these things are definitely amazing ways to spend your retirement.
But you need to keep in mind that your entire day will be free, and that’s quite a lot of time on your hands. You might also need to factor in some downtime. One thing you could do before retiring is take a test run. For instance, if you think you’d like to travel a lot, take a trip on your next vacation and see what kind of traveler you are.
How are we going to spend our money?
When you retire, your finances will definitely change. One thing’s for sure: You won’t receive the salary you were used to. At the same time, most of your expenses will probably remain the same, and in fact, you might add new ones. You could experience more travel expenses if you plan on traveling; more food and entertainment expenses if you plan on eating out more often; and definitely health and medical expenses.
But if you managed to properly plan your budget ahead of time, you should expect to receive income from different sources, whether it’s Social Security, a 401k retirement plan, or any other type of investment. When you retire, your new finances will come with a series of adjustments.
How can we develop new social networks?
When we retire, we lose our main social network, which is our coworkers. To make it worse, when we’re much older, it’s way more difficult for us to make new contacts. Our social skills become rusty, and the number of people we meet after retirement is much lower. One possible way to go about it is to move into a retirement community.
It’s truly a wonderful way to find other people with similar interests as yours. These communities generally have plenty of activities for seniors. Moreover, studies have repeatedly shown that people who live in retirement communities are more satisfied with their lives. While it’s not for everyone, it shouldn’t be seen as a doomed place, either.
Emotional changes
When we retire, we could experience exhilaration. After all, we’ve probably waited for this moment for a long time. We will finally enjoy not waking up every morning at 5 a.m. and putting in 10 hours of hard work.
But this type of exhilaration generally wears off after a couple of months when reality sets in, much like when we first got married. When the novelty of retirement starts to wear off, we could experience stress or even depression.
This is generally a time when we need to put into action our own psychological plan. With that being said, we need to have planned how we will find happiness and fulfillment in our new life.
Staying productive
One of the biggest challenges retirees need to deal with nowadays is how to stay productive when they’re no longer working. For some of them, this kind of adjustment isn’t that hard, but for others, it could be, especially when their self-identity is so tied to their career.
There are a couple of ways in which you could deal with this bump. You could consider working part-time. Instead of retiring directly, you might want to keep working at least for two hours every day. This approach might downgrade the stress you went through while working but also help you cope with the adjustments.
Changing relationships
As we get older, the nature of our relationships might naturally shift, depending on our changing needs. To be honest, it takes a significant amount of awareness to see any of these changes, and especially to adapt them. If we don’t, then we might create tensions in healthy relationships.
Relationships with our kids
Most of us aren’t used to spending too much time with our partners. Well, along with retirement, we will spend more time with them, so it might be a good idea to consider how it will affect our relationship. When you’re both working, you generally spend little time together.
If you both are quite busy, you probably barely see each other. Depending on your relationship, you might spend some quality time together. If not, then maybe you shouldn’t consider having separate activities and spending the amount of time that you both feel comfortable with.
Health considerations
Along with retirement, there are many things to consider health-wise. As a general rule, we reach a certain age when our health isn’t exactly what it used to be. This is when our lifestyle choices, like overreacting and lack of exercise, could ultimately catch up with us.
But even with such lifestyle choices, our health could slowly start to decline. How healthy you are depends on how you like to spend your retirement. For example, if you’ve lived a healthy lifestyle and you’re in good health, then you can definitely be more active. You are also prone to engaging in activities that you plan on doing.
Declining health
From this perspective, our later years are also the hardest. This is generally a time when our health starts declining faster. We also start to experience immobility, loss of independence, cognitive decline, and could ultimately develop a serious illness.
For those who have been taught to be very independent, this will represent a hard adjustment. To make things even worse, we start losing some family members and friends, which makes us feel even lonelier. There’s truly no easy way to deal with this, but there are definitely things to do to slow this decline.
Our mortality
Our later years could also be a time when we explore more deeply our mortality. Even if we have probably already given it some thought, now is the right time to understand that our mortality takes on a greater urgency. After all, the truth is, we don’t have many years left on this earth. Some of us are more prepared than others. However, it can be a bit difficult to look back and evaluate our lives just yet.
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