Are you Anxious about Retirement? Here’s How Therapy Can Help
Making the adjustment from working adult to retired person is not easy. Retirement brings some significant changes to your day-to-day and long-term way of life, and it’s very common to feel some anxiety or depression as a result of these changes. If you’re about to retire or are having difficulty adjusting to retirement, it can be helpful to talk to a therapist and explore some ways to make the transition easier.
Retirement is a Major Life Change
Not everyone retires by choice—sometimes, illness or unexpected job loss forces people to retire earlier than they’d planned. When this happens, illness or financial insecurity can make retirement very different from how you’d imagined it.
Even if you are able to plan for your retirement, and you’re able to support yourself financially, it’s a significant change in your life. Retirement can stir up all kinds of feelings, not all of which are positive. The working week provides structure and purpose that ends once retirement comes around, and the change is not an easy one to cope with. Many people are surprised to find that, while they’d expected to enjoy having so much free time, they feel bored and even useless when they no longer have a job to go to each day.
How Therapy can Help You Ease into Retirement
When someone is anxious about retirement, there’s usually one or more of these reasons involved.
- The loss of identity as a working person.
- The loss of working relationships.
- Boredom as a result of having more free time.
- Some people find it hard to adjust to spending so much time with their spouse, even if they’ve been happy up until this point.
- Feeling that life has less value, or that they aren’t making a contribution to the world.
Seeing a psychologist can make a big difference in the way you feel about retirement by helping you come to terms with the changes it brings. Therapy for retirement anxiety can help you explore your new identity as a retired person, and think about ways in which you can create a new life full of value and meaning.