What to Do When You Feel Stuck or Anxious in Retirement
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Retirement is supposed to be something to look forward to, and it can be a time for starting a new chapter in your life story. It’s also a time of change—a massive life transition, actually—that can leave you feeling unsettled and anxious, even if things are going well for you.
That’s because the uncertainty of entering a new phase of life can trigger the primitive fear centers in our brain, and challenge even the strongest, most confident person.
Here are a few ideas for entering and navigating retirement that will help you stay stable while also helping you to reclaim and enhance your innate confidence, strength . . . and happiness.
Anchor yourself in familiar things
Retirement can mean the loss of a longstanding part of our identity, and can shake our self-esteem. Life changes as significant as retirement can also freak out the reptilian parts of our brain, which thrive on security and comfort.
The path forward doesn’t even need to feel scary in order for us to start feeling anxious—just having question marks on the horizon is often enough.
Of course, retirement is a big change no matter how you cut it. However, you can work to give your brain a better sense of familiarity and security in other ways.
This is the time to connect (or reconnect) with friends and family with whom you have a long history of shared experience, or revisit places where you’ve felt safe, at peace, or connected with others.
Reallocating some time to hobbies or volunteer work you enjoy can give you a familiar touchstone while also providing meaningful engagement in an activity—so it would serve a dual purpose.
Look (within) before you leap
Sometimes when people are facing the uncertainty of what to make of their retirement, they’re tempted to make other major life changes.
Of course, this could be a longtime plan coming to fruition. It could also be serving as a distraction from difficult feelings (even unconsciously).
Either way, use caution if you decide to pick now to move across the country or a similarly large move, because it could overwhelm your primitive brain’s already taxed tolerance for change.
Also, if it is, in fact, a means of distraction from turbulent or difficult times, that has its own cost. When are too quick to do that, it can rob us of valuable insight into ourselves.
What can you learn about yourself from your experience of the transition into retirement? I’m not talking about practical lessons learned.
I’m talking about reflecting on your feelings, thoughts, decisions, and behaviors during this phase, and looking beneath the surface, to consider what those things say about what’s important to you.
Major life transitions like retirement can be incredibly valuable (and relatively rare) chances to boost your self-awareness—and self-awareness helps you chart a more gratifying path forward for yourself.
Also, they can highlight areas where self-care (or care from a professional) would have deeper and more lasting benefit for you now than a mere change of scenery would.
Navigating retirement mindfully
The instability of major life changes can cause us to be knee-jerk reactive, have tunnel vision, neglect activities that are fulfilling, engage in short-term gratification that we end up regretting . . . the list goes on!
In the process, we can easily end up making things worse for ourselves.
I usually encourage my clients to begin a mindfulness meditation practice as soon as possible, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a natural way to reduce the stress of major life transitions.
For another, it helps us to regulate the strong emotions that come up during difficult times, so that we can respond to them more wisely, rather than reacting to them instinctively.
That can come in very handy when you’re trying to plot a course forward, which may include new activities, relationships, and even priorities.
Clarity and wisdom help you take steps now that you’ll be satisfied with in the long run, and mindfulness helps you develop those qualities.
Not to mention, mindfulness meditation has been shown to boost physical and mental health overall, the more it’s practiced.
I know that it can sound challenging to meditate during difficult phases of life. Well, not just sound—it can definitely be challenging!
However, it’s normal during stressful times for your mind to be busy. Even if you can try meditating for five minutes at times like that, it’s much better than nothing.
(If you have 15 minutes to give it a try, you can try a mindfulness meditation right here on this site.)
Remember to look up
As I mentioned, fixating on difficulty during major life changes like retirement is quite natural—it’s our reptilian brain’s way of trying to keep us safe.
Of course, the process of entering and settling into your retirement in a healthy way does need your attention, so this tendency isn’t entirely misplaced. However, what your brain doesn’t realize, but we do, is that it goes overboard sometimes!
The tips above complement a more general one: that you also need to “look up” often to counteract this tunnel vision. That is, making the effort to expand your perspective, and place your current life in the proper context of all that has come before, and all which lies ahead of you.
With an open mind, and awareness, curiosity, and acceptance of this phase of your life, you can emerge stronger, more confident, and happier than when you entered it.
