How to Prepare for a Happy Retirement

Retirement is more than leaving the workforce. A UHealth geriatrician explains how planning your routines, relationships, and sense of purpose can help you stay healthy, happy, and fulfilled in retirement.

Are you years away from retirement or might you retire sometime fairly soon? If you haven’t yet retired, you still have time to take the main step suggested by experts who work with older people. That step is to plan ahead, not just about your finances but also about how you will use your precious time.

“One big problem I see among my patients is the issue of not having planned ahead.  While they are still at their jobs, they are so caught up in daily pressures that they don’t think deeply about their retirement, beyond just not working,” says Fiorella Myrella Perez, M.D., a board-certified geriatrician with the University of Miami Health System.

Use preretirement to reflect on yourself.

Retirement represents a major life transition. During preretirement, think about your identity, beyond your identity at work. What aspects of yourself are enduring ones? Perhaps you are a nature-lover, storyteller, cards player, or reader? These passions can occupy more of your time in retirement.

Maybe you value religion. “I often see patients who are focused on their faith, doing more that way, serving or doing music,” says Dr. Perez.

What makes you happy to get out of bed each day?

Think too about your purpose in life, the things that make you eager to get up every morning. You may have several. How can these motivators direct your choices during retirement?

Assess your relationships. Which people sustain you and bring joy into your life? Do you have a robust social network outside of a spouse and work colleagues? If not, seek out ways to connect with like-minded people. Then you will have places to go and people to see besides the doctor and dentist after work has ended.  

Most people thrive on structure.

Not working is an insufficient framework to sustain a happy life for most people, Dr. Perez has observed. “People who don’t plan can feel overwhelmed by retirement, thinking they have to figure out what to do with themselves for the rest of their lives,” she says.

Deciding how to fill the hours in a day can feel daunting. “With retirement, you get out of the work structure. You have to create your own routines and structure,” she says.

For the first six months, she suggests setting small goals. “They can be vacation goals, marriage goals or personal ones,” she says.

“Without things to look forward to you can find yourself bored and without purpose. This is where I’ve seen depression among patients,” she says.

It’s fine to enjoy the flexibility that retirement allows. If you never want to hear an alarm clock again, you can skip early morning commitments. “You don’t have to be strict or rigid. You have more leeway to navigate but you do want some sense of structure,” Dr. Perez says

With more time available, retirement can offer you a chance to do more of the healthy things you may have struggled to fit in while working. You can devote more time to exercising, cooking your own healthy meals instead of restaurant food, and getting plenty of sleep.

 For many, stage 1 of retirement is the honeymoon.

For many people, studies have shown that retirement unfolds in four fairly predictable stages. After the last day at work comes stage one, a honeymoon period.  

“You feel excited to be retired, to be able to sleep late and if you can afford it, maybe travel. But then people say to themselves, ‘I can’t travel constantly, it may not be affordable or realistic,” she says.

In stage 2, reality sets in.

 About a year or 18 months after retiring, stage two, the reality phase, begins. “People describe it as disenchantment, feeling a sense of loss. They come home from a big, post-retirement trip and ask themselves, “What do I do now?” she says.

During this stage, anxiety and depression can kick in, she explains. Without paid work, some people struggle to establish a new identity, a new sense of self. “They may feel a lack of purpose. They may think, ‘I was a teacher’ or ‘I was a nurse and I used to help people,’ and they miss being of service,” she says.

Stage 3? Reorient and reinvent.

In stage three, most retirees start experimenting with new activities, possibly things they planned for during preretirement. “Hopefully, you don’t last long in stage two and can start stage three, where you are reinventing yourself,” says Dr. Perez. 

People may volunteer or go back to work part-time. They may try consulting or freelance writing.

“You can think of this time as an opportunity to chase the dreams you were too busy to pursue before retiring,” says Dr. Perez.  In this way, retirement can offer a time for personal growth and self-expansion.

The older people she observes truly thriving during retirement find ways to serve others.   “Consistently, the ones who do well find ways to interact with others, often by volunteering. This excites the brain and keeps the neurons working,” she says. Socializing often, research has shown, is vital for cognitive health.

Stage 4 often brings stability and happiness.

By their lates 70s and 80s and into the 90s, most people have created new routines and have reinvented themselves. “You know what makes you feel content. You have found ways to serve others, and have settled into your new identity and you’re just happy,” says Dr. Perez. 

Retirement shakes things up for couples.

Retirement forces couples to renegotiate how they interact. If both partners retire around the same time, they are likely to begin spending much more time together at home than they used to. Situations in which one partner retires and the other keeps working can also create pressures to change usual routines and roles. The changes can cause friction for some couples.

For others, their relationships will improve. They may cultivate shared leisure pursuits such as travel or bridge. Others volunteer together. “Couples sometimes rediscover each other during retirement,” Dr. Perez says.

Of course, people’s individual experiences with retirement sometimes may depart from the “usual” pattern. If someone enjoys their work and is forced to retire before they want to, their experience may be quite different from someone who planned their own workplace exit.

Resources for retirees.

The American Association of Retired Persons offers a wealth of valuable resources for older people.

Books can also help you plan for and adapt to retirement, including called What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement.

Written by Milly Dawson. Reviewed by Fiorella Myrella Perez, M.D.

Tags: active aging, Dr. Fiorella Perez, healthy retirement, older adult wellness