You Might Be Retired, but Your Brain is Still on the Job.

Retirement has a way of exposing our need to be productive when we no longer need to be.

Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash

A few months into retirement, I had coffee with a former communications and marketing director I’d worked earlier in my career. After the usual catch-up, I asked her how she spent her days. With an embarrassed laugh, she told me she catches herself almost every day checking her email three or four times before 9 a.m.

“You’d think the last thing I would be doing was getting on my phone to see what needed managing,” she explained, “but I guess old habits die hard.”

After our goodbyes, I walked back to my apartment thinking about what she’d said. And it occurred to me that perhaps the issue wasn’t so much that she forgot she was retired, it was that her brain was still on the job.

For nearly thirty years, her mornings had begun the same way. Waiting for the coffee pot to fill, she opened her laptop and scanned for crises, responded to urgent requests, mentally rewrote press releases and anticipated client feedback she needed to prepare for. Her brain had been trained to stay one step ahead.

Now, with no promotional campaigns to launch or executive meetings to prepare for, her finely-honed anticipation, problem-solving and planning skills had nowhere to go.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore,” she had told me as we were paying our tab. “It’s like my nervous system didn’t get the retirement memo.”

Her comment underscored another surprising thing about retirement: we underestimate how much of our working lives became automatic. And now, without much thought, we continue to rely on behaviours built over decades that once helped us succeed — being alert to problems, showing up and stepping up to challenges — behaviours far less in demand once our working lives are over.

In a word, retirement has a way of exposing the habits we no longer notice because they’ve become part of who we think we are.

In my case, I am increasingly aware the extent to which I am still driven to use my time productively and feel uneasy when I’m not completing something off my to-do list. I’ve also noticed a mild guilt cropping up when I grab a novel after lunch and am still reading two hours later.

Perhaps this is one of the least recognized challenges of retirement: becoming aware of the parts of ourselves we thought were essential components of our personalities and instead, discovering they are habits shaped by the demands of work.

This doesn’t mean we toss out those habits, attributes and behaviours that still serve us, like the ability to solve problems, our capacity to remain calm in a crisis — or the skill to think about all the unintended consequences of a particular action. The thing we might want to let go of, however, is the compulsion to prove our worth every day through productivity, and the belief that our value depends on being busy.

Retirement, as I am discovering, is far more than letting go of a job. It’s also about untangling ourselves from the automatic ways of thinking and behaving that our careers required, so we can choose — perhaps for the first time in decades — how we actually want to live.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like a resource to reflect on the emotional side of transition to retirement, download this free tool.

And if you’re curious about my work as a retirement coach, visit me here.