For many people retirement is seen as a key reward for decades of busy working life. It is a time of freedom, a time to relax, to explore and to have fun unburdened by the daily grind. For others, though, retirement is a hard period marked by declining health and increasing limitations and loneliness. In the recent decades, researchers have been trying to understand whether retirement is good, bad or neutral for health and well-being of people. This question has become more relevant in a period when policymakers around the world have agreed upon reforms that increase the statutory retirement age.
Researchers, however, seem unable to agree on whether retirement is good or bad for people who have been long accustomed to regular employment. Indeed, studies report mixed results. For example, using one of the biggest worldwide dataset on old people (U.S. Health and Retirement Study), Moon and her colleagues found that the transition to retirement increases the risk of heart attack or stroke by 40% compared to those who are still working. A 2015 German study, on the other hand, concluded that retirement had a positive effect on health. It seems to increase physical as well as mental health and is associated with a decrease in the number of doctor visits. Eibich- the author of this study - suggests three mechanisms which might explain these results. First, and most obviously, retirement provides relief from work-related stress and strain. Second, retirees increase time to relax as well as their sleep duration, which is crucial for higher well-being. Third, retired people use their additional leisure-time to pursue a more active lifestyle, including physical effort (e.g., house repairs and gardening) and by exercising more frequently.
Because retirement reshapes healthy behaviors, social interaction and psychological stresses, Wernli and his colleagues adopted a life course approach to study these interrelations in a large Swiss household sample. Their study highlighted the importance of the details of a working career for shaping individuals’ well-being after retirement. They found that retirement tended to have a detrimental effect on wellbeing for individuals with ‘positive’ work conditions, whereas individuals in precarious forms of employment were more likely to report positive feelings after retirement. What matters then is attachment to work, which may go some way to explain why women (in the sample) generally enjoyed a smoother transition to retirement than men, even though they seem to suffer more than men from the reorganization of interpersonal ties that retirement brings. The salient point, however, is that women whose professional trajectories are similar to those of men suffer more (than other women) during the transition to retirement. The smoothness or relative ease with which individuals make the transition to retirement depended on the level of their attachment to work, the degree of identification with a professional role. The stronger the attachment, the harder it is to adjust to retirement.
Although these analyses draw different conclusions with regard to the main question, they do help to shed light on the ways in which the transition to retirement comes with a boatload of other changes. Individuals may adjust to these changes more or less successfully, and since adjustment takes time, it might be useful to think of retirement as a process even though the transition from work with pay to leisure with a pension may be very sudden. In the meantime, policy makers should perhaps consider the potential benefits of a more gradual transition to retirement (e.g., through part-time work or partial retirement programs). It gives them time to plan and adjust.
Finally, we should try to keep in mind the benefits (health as well as enjoyment) of activity, creativity and openness to new experiences and new kinds of social activities. This is true for all stages of life and, especially true perhaps of that stage of life we call retirement.
About the Author:
Dr Sara Zella is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Sara joined the Institute in 2016 to work with Professor Sarah Harper on the research project “The impact of different work/care life courses on women’s wellbeing and quality of life in early retirement and the welfare regimes which help shape this”.
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Comments Welcome: We welcome your comments on this or any of the Institute's blog posts. Please feel free to email comments to be posted on your behalf to administrator@ageing.ox.ac.uk or use the Disqus facility linked below.
