Adjusting to Retirement & Planning for Life After Work
Retirement can offer freedom, time and new possibilities. But what happens when you stop working - psychologically as well as financially? Whether you're thinking about retirement, reducing your work, or finding life after work different from what you expected, there can be more to the transition than we realise.
Why am I not happy in retirement?
So you’ve finally got what I wanted, but you’re wondering why you don’t you feel happier?
I know something personally about the appeal of not having to work. At one point in my own life, I structured things so that I was able to step away from work for a while. I thought having all that freedom would be wonderful.
And some of it was. I exercised, saw friends, had coffees and enjoyed not having my time dictated by work.
What surprised me was what I missed. There was something disconcerting about reaching 11am on a Tuesday and having nowhere I needed to be. I began to realise that work had been giving me things I hadn't really counted as benefits of working: structure, challenge, purpose and a sense of forward movement.
That experience stayed with me. It made me interested in the gap that can sometimes exist between the retirement we imagine and the retirement we actually experience.
Free time feels different when almost all your time is free
Think about going on holiday after an exhausting few months at work. Part of the pleasure can be the contrast. You can finally stop. There’s no alarm, no emails, no meetings and nowhere you have to be.
Now imagine taking exactly the same holiday after six months in which you've had very few demands on your time. It might still be lovely. But it may not feel quite the same.
Retirement can contain a similar paradox. We can spend years longing for more free time, only to discover that free time feels different when almost all our time is free.
The same can happen with the smaller pleasures of life. When you're working, seeing a friend for coffee or having a free afternoon can feel precious. When whole days are available, those things can still be enjoyable - but they may no longer be enough to give your week its shape.
That doesn't mean the answer is to fill every available hour.
What makes your time feel worthwhile to you?
What did work give you besides money?
It's easy to think about what we're retiring from: the commute, the pressure, the difficult boss, the endless meetings or the Sunday-night dread.
But work can also provide things we may not fully notice until they're gone: structure and routine, social contact, intellectual stimulation, challenge, achievement, responsibility, belonging, status and a sense of being useful or needed.
It can also become an important part of our identity. Even one of the first questions we often ask when meeting someone - "What do you do?" - tells us something about how closely work and identity can become connected.
Who are you when what you do is no longer such a large part of who you are?
That doesn't mean replacing your working identity with an equally impressive retirement identity. But it can be useful to understand what work was giving you before deciding which parts you want to recreate, replace - or happily leave behind.
Friendships and social connection after retirement
Leaving work can also change your social world. People you thought of as friends may gradually disappear from your life. That doesn't necessarily mean those friendships weren't genuine. Sometimes work was simply the structure that kept you connected. You saw each other regularly without anybody having to organise it. Once work disappears, maintaining those relationships takes intention.
But the answer isn't necessarily to accumulate as many new friends as possible either. As we get older, some of us become more selective about who we spend our time with. A smaller number of relationships with people we genuinely connect with may feel far more valuable than a packed social calendar full of people we don't particularly enjoy.
The difficulty can be finding those people. Perhaps your work brought you into contact with people who shared your interests, ideas, humour or ambitions. If you've moved from a city or a large organisation to somewhere smaller, finding the same kind of intellectual or social stimulation may not happen automatically.
And knowing that connection would be good for you doesn't necessarily make it easy to walk into a room full of strangers.
Retirement may not create difficulties around confidence, social anxiety or feeling that you don't quite fit. But losing the ready-made social world of work can bring them into sharper focus.
Sometimes finding your people takes experimentation. Sometimes, if the thing you're looking for doesn't exist, you can create it.
I set up a local social group for counsellors partly because I couldn't find quite the professional community I wanted. My mum and her partner did something similar in retirement, helping to create an active retirement group that has since brought together more than a hundred people. What began as finding something they wanted in their own lives ended up creating connection for many other people too.
Relationships after retirement
Retirement doesn't happen in isolation. It can change the dynamics of a relationship too.
If one partner retires while the other continues working, assumptions can appear surprisingly quickly. Who does more around the house now? Is the retired partner expected to cook dinner every night? Is the working partner envious that the other no longer has to work? Does the retired person feel their newfound freedom has simply been replaced by a different set of obligations?
When both partners retire, another adjustment can begin. Couples who previously spent much of the week apart may suddenly be together a great deal more. That can be wonderful. It can also be quite a lot of togetherness.
You may discover that you want different things from retirement. One of you wants to travel; the other wants to stay close to home. One wants a packed social life; the other has been dreaming of slowing down. One wants to do everything together; the other needs more independence.
Difficulties in the relationship that were less obvious when work occupied much of your lives may also become harder to ignore.
Money can feel different too. Moving from watching savings accumulate to watching the pot gradually reduce can be psychologically difficult even when you've planned carefully and know rationally that you can afford it.
And it may not be only your own future you're thinking about. You might have adult children struggling to buy a home, establish themselves financially or cope with the cost of bringing up a family. You may worry about what the future will look like for your grandchildren. If you're in a position to help, that can bring another set of questions: How much do I give them? When? How much do I need to keep for myself?
Questions about helping adult children or protecting your own security can also bring different beliefs about responsibility, fairness and what you are entitled to enjoy after a lifetime of working and saving.
Retirement can create new conversations about independence, togetherness, money, priorities, values and what each of you wants this stage of life to look like.
If retirement is bringing relationship difficulties into sharper focus, read: When Your Relationship Isn't Working - or Has Ended
When freedom gets filled with other people's plans
One of the great attractions of retirement is freedom. But work used to provide a very convenient boundary: "I can't - I'm working." Once you're retired, other people may start seeing all that apparent free time too.
Perhaps you're expected to look after the grandchildren more often; an elderly parent needs increasing support; a voluntary organisation discovers you're reliable and gradually asks you to take on more; friends or family assume you're available because, after all, you're retired.
For someone who already finds it difficult to say no, retirement can become unexpectedly overwhelming. You can escape the demands of employment only to find you've created a new life full of obligations you never consciously chose.
And retirement may not have created the underlying difficulty. Perhaps you've always found boundaries difficult. Perhaps you've spent much of your life looking after other people. Perhaps being useful is important to your sense of self. Perhaps disappointing someone feels deeply uncomfortable. A major life transition can bring patterns like these into sharper focus.
Finding purpose doesn't have to mean making yourself useful to everybody else. Retirement can be an opportunity to ask: What do I actually want? What am I choosing because it matters to me - and what am I doing because I feel I should?
Perhaps retirement is partly about learning to 'be'
There is another possibility too. Perhaps part of retirement is learning to be, rather than always needing to do. And that can be harder than it sounds.
If much of your identity has been built around achievement, productivity, responsibility, solving problems or being needed, a day in which you haven't achieved anything can initially feel uncomfortable. You may need some structure and purpose. But that doesn't necessarily mean recreating a full-time job out of golf, volunteering, committees, childcare and DIY.
A satisfying retirement might contain both doing and being: challenge and rest, connection and solitude, purpose and play, structure and spontaneity. There isn't one correct balance.
Could semi-retirement suit you better?
Retirement doesn't have to be binary. You don't necessarily have to choose between working full-time and never working again.
For some people, semi-retirement can offer an attractive middle ground: keeping some of the structure, challenge, connection or intellectual stimulation that work provides while creating considerably more space for everything else. Personally, that comes pretty close to my idea of the dream, but that's my balance.
Someone else's dream might involve shutting the laptop for the final time and never looking back. Another person might consult occasionally, mentor, work one or two days a week, study, volunteer, start a small business or move between periods of working and not working.
What might work for you?
You don't have to get retirement right first time
Retirement can be an opportunity to experiment. Perhaps you volunteer and discover you don't enjoy it or you join a group and don't click with the people. Maybe you take up the hobby you've been promising yourself for 20 years and discover it's surprisingly boring. That doesn't mean you've failed at retirement. You've learned something.
Rather than asking only "What should I do?", it can help to think about what matters underneath the activity.
If connection matters, how might you create more of it? If learning matters, what would you like to learn? If contribution matters, where would you choose to contribute? If adventure matters, what does adventure actually mean to you?
The activity is only one possible expression of what matters. You can try something, notice what happens, learn from it and change direction.
What does a good ordinary Tuesday look like?
I've had my own version of a "good week" spreadsheet for more than ten years. It's surprisingly simple. It contains things I know tend to matter to me and gives me a way of noticing whether they're actually present in my life. I don't slavishly follow it. Sometimes I don't look at it for months. But if something feels a little off, I'll occasionally return to it and notice, for example, that I haven't spent enough time in nature or haven't had enough contact with other people.
Friends I've shown it to have often wanted to create their own version. Not because everyone needs a spreadsheet - they definitely don't.
What does a good ordinary week actually contain for you? Or perhaps even: What does a good ordinary Tuesday look like? Not the round-the-world trip, the dream holiday or the bucket list. Most of life is made up of ordinary days.
How much contact with other people feels right? How much time alone? Do you need intellectual challenge? Physical activity? Nature? Creativity? Contribution? Learning? Fun? Rest? Something to look forward to? And importantly: what mixture works for you?
Before you retire: plan for more than the finances
If you're still working and thinking about retirement, you have an opportunity to explore some of this before your final day.
Financial planning answers an important question: Can I afford to retire? It doesn't necessarily answer: How do I want to live when I do? It can be worth thinking about what work currently gives you that you value, as well as what you're looking forward to leaving behind.
Which relationships are likely to continue without work holding them together? Where might challenge and stimulation come from? How much structure do you actually like? How much time do you and your partner want together - and how much independence? What have you always wanted more time for? What might you unexpectedly miss?
And do you really want to stop working completely? You don't need to have all the answers before you retire. But thinking about these questions can make retirement planning about considerably more than reaching a number in a pension spreadsheet.
Adjusting to unexpected or involuntary retirement
Of course, not everyone gets to design their retirement. Redundancy in your 50s or 60s can leave you questioning your value or wondering whether you still have something to offer. Ill health can mean losing not only work but activities and independence that previously felt taken for granted. Caring responsibilities can bring love and meaning while also creating exhaustion, resentment, grief or a sense that your own life has been put on hold.
These experiences are very different from choosing your retirement date and happily closing the office door behind you.
If retirement wasn't entirely your choice, part of adjusting may involve making space for what has been lost before deciding what you want to create next.
Retirement can highlight things that were already there
Major transitions have a habit of doing this. Perhaps you've always found it difficult to build new relationships, but work supplied a social network. Or maybe you've always struggled with boundaries, but employment gave you a ready-made reason to say no. Has your sense of worth been connected to achievement, but you've never had to ask who you are without the achievements. Have you spent years responding to what other people needed from you and now find the question "What do I want?" surprisingly difficult to answer. Or perhaps there are relationship difficulties, anxieties about ageing, questions about identity or feelings about loss that retirement has brought closer to the surface.
This is one of the places where counselling can be useful. Not because there is something wrong with retirement, but because understanding what is happening underneath can give you more choice about what happens next.
How counselling and coaching can help with retirement
Understanding doesn't have to be the end point. Once you have a clearer sense of what's happening, you may want to look forward. What could you try? What matters to you now? What would you like more - or less - of? What might you want to change? What kind of relationships, routines, activities or challenges might fit the person you are now? That's where coaching can be useful.
For me, retirement is a particularly good example of why counselling and coaching don't always need to sit in separate boxes. You might want to understand feelings of loss, changes in identity, relationship difficulties or patterns that retirement has brought into sharper focus. At another point, you might want to explore possibilities, make choices, experiment and think about what you want to build next. My training in both counselling and coaching means that we can move between those different ways of working according to what you need.
Retirement isn't just an ending
Retirement invites us to look in both directions. Backwards: Who was I? What did work mean to me? What am I leaving behind? What do I want to keep? And forwards: Who am I now? What matters to me? What do I want the next part of my life to contain? You don't have to answer those questions immediately.
Perhaps retirement is better thought of not as a finished state that you arrive at, but as a transition you gradually learn your way into. You can try things, notice what gives you energy and what drains it, discover which relationships matter, change your mind, set boundaries, slow down, start something, stop something or learn how to do less without feeling you should be doing more.
And sometimes, if what you're looking for doesn't exist, you can create it. Because the aim isn't simply to fill the hours you used to spend working. It's to work out how you want to live them.
Thinking about retirement - or finding life after work different from what you expected?
I'm Nicki Wakefield, an integrative counsellor, psychotherapist and coach based in Eastbourne. I work with adults who are thinking about retirement, adjusting to retirement or exploring what they want the next stage of their life to look like.
I offer counselling and coaching face-to-face in Eastbourne and online across the UK. We can explore both what's happening for you now and what you might want to happen next.
