Psychological wellbeing
Why post-retirement is always considered a healthy, wealthy phase of life?
Why pre-retirement is all about stressors and hard work?
It’s complicated to explain how and why retirement is a great change, and how is this change going to affect us? It’s too subtle and serpentine for everyone. All equally worked hard for many years but still their huge difference, where the corollary it’s good for some or bad for others. When transposing from work to non-work or from the fixed schedule to 24 hour leisure time, life turned into a slow phase. Everything about retirement is labyrinthine, which may be a great relief or life’s most stressful phase. The relationship between our lifestyle and health goes hand in hand, mostly aging can simply affect the older population’s health. In fact, retirement affects health in extremely different ways because of aging, losing the daily structure, and the non-productive days. Thus that might be unpredictable how retirement affects most people and what might seem to be a consequence of retirement.
For decades, there has been a dramatic increase in life expectancy and, correspondingly, longer periods spent in retirement. Historically, researcher and Forbes contributor Wade Pfau, estimates that life expectancy has risen by about 1 year per decade since the 1950s. Though Crowley (1985) finds that retirement does not appear adversely affect wellbeing, and other scholars such as Pallmore, Fillenbaum, and George (1984) find inconclusive results. There is remarkable no one factor responsible for increased life expectancy or decreased life expectancy in the leading causes of disease and death. The prevalence of dementia sharply rises with age, with an estimated 25–30% of people ages 85 years or older, according to the World Health Organization. The major health consequence of a longer lifespan including the change in types of illness or disease from communicable diseases to chronic, short- term to long-term care, non-communicable diseases and disability. The improvements in life expectancy over by retirement refers to psychological to physical wellbeing.
In the words of Laslett (1991), the retirement event signals entry into the third age of life. Psychological wellbeing refers to positive personal growth and development, an individual experiences life in a way full of purpose and meaning, attained a state of balance. Although few researchers have measured pre and post-retirement psychological adjustment, they found people more interested in psychological factors (Shultz and Wang, 2011). However, there is no current literature on how individuals experience and cope with the retirement transition (Shultz and Wang, 2011; Wang et al., 2011). Psychological well-being functions well in post-retirement, most retirees experience little or no change or have life satisfaction or no satisfaction. It is an extended reward to retirement, surrogate challenges as adjustment.
One study reported that higher levels of self-esteem are significantly associated with better health in post-retirement and as well as provide greater satisfaction. Hofäcker et al., 2016 concluded that there are changes in retirement patterns and changing macro-conditions. Talk about stress with higher self-esteem, three-quarters reported being less stressed and only 7% were more stressed after they retired. Exposure to stress impacts the likelihood and in turn, contributes to poor health and health disparities. Retirement may look very different from each individual, but psychological wellbeing greatly dependent on all the resources that individuals bring to the retirement transition. Lower levels of psychological wellbeing are likely to result from poor health, unexpected demands of retirement, and restricted opportunities to take up new roles in retirement. Shultz and Wang, 2011; Beehr and Bennett, 2015, defined different retirement statuses among older workers to retire, “un-retire,” and “re-retire”. It is therefore important to distinguish external factors and transitions how their influence on various psychological outcomes.
Inadequate finances can affect are retirement but lack of challenges and purpose, retirement can be a daunting prospect. Additionally, the loss of financial resources leads to loss of self-esteem and if one’s sense of self is tied to their work identity limiting the access to a healthy retirement. The most commonly reported predictors included physical health, finances, psychological health, and personality-related attributes, leisure, voluntary retirement, and social integration. In all these cases, the majority of studies found unplanned retirees and earlier retirees are more likely to experience decreased psychological wellbeing. Actively, there is no set the variable in question on retirement adjustment, but more of inconsistent planning and one’s own choice affects everyone in different manners. The consequences of poor psychological wellbeing can be associated with the missing challenges and missing structured planned further implements into maladaptive behaviors.
