ZURICH — Early retirement can kill you. Or, at least, it can feel like a part of you has died.
A new study from the University of Zurich looking at workers in Austria found that each year of early retirement causes an increase in the risk of premature death of 2.4 percentage points (a relative increase of about 13.4 percent).
But before you go and decide to work for another 10 years to save your life, there is some hope in the study "Fatal Attraction? Access to Early Retirement and Mortality," by Andreas Kuhn, Jean-Philippe Wüllrich and Josef Zweimüller.
First off, it only applies to men. Secondly, they were blue collar workers — people who likely did physical work. Thirdly the worst effects seem only to happen with men who were forced into early retirement.
These men would go home take up more drinking and smoking and basically do nothing but die sooner.
Sharon Gilchrest O'Neill remembers when she worked for Exxon in the Human Resources department. It was the 1980s and the company was pioneering one of the nation's first big downsizings. O'Neill and her fellow young employees thought how nice it had to be for many of the executives to retire early with millions of dollars.
It wasn't.
"A lot of these guys were getting clinically depressed," she said.
People may look forward to retirement, but few are really prepared to change their lives so drastically. Having finances in place is only part of the picture. Being emotionally ready and changing the way they live now will make a big difference when that day comes around — whether it is planned or unexpected.
O'Neill is now a marriage and family therapist in Mount Kisco, N.Y. and author of "A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage." In her practice she has notice more and more baby boomers coming in with retirement problems.
One of O'Neill's clients is in semi-retirement. He doesn't golf. He doesn't like sports. He has no hobbies. "And so his self-image without the job becomes really empty," she said.
Another of O'Neill's clients said recently, "I don't know what I am anymore."
Working to retire
Ernie J. Zelinski, author of "The Joy of Not Working" and "How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free" agrees that, for many, retirement takes away a source of their identity. Everything was tied up in work — and suddenly it is gone.
Zelinski said there were three important needs met by working:
1. Purpose
2. Community
3. Structure
If all these things are tied up in work, retirement is a wrenching experience — a painfully ironic situation. You work to retire and then retire and wish you were at work.
The study, which looked at workers in Austria, found that women are more immune to these problems. Kuhn, Wüllrich and Zweimüller say early retirement may not affect women's health. "Women may be more capable of coping with major life events such as retirement," they said; "they may be more health-conscious and adopt less unhealthy behaviors (such as smoking, drinking and unhealthy diet); they may be more active after permanently exiting the labor market due to their higher involvement in household activities; and they may suffer less from a loss of social status and identity because work is less central in life for additional income earners as compared to the main breadwinner."
O'Neill said women have more to grab onto when they retire from the workplace. They did more of the parenting, for example and that doesn't go away. They still plan the family get togethers.
Men don't have that as often.
Rebuilding purpose
This is why Zelinski said people — and men especially — should do more than just look forward to a retirement life of passive activities. They need to rebuild the purpose, community and structure into their lives.
Purpose can come from creative expression, he said or making contributions to the community or neighborhood through volunteering and so forth.
Community can come from working with others or going to a coffee shop or church group.
Structure can be taking a daily bike ride or taking a class to learn something new.
But suddenly jumping into changing everything at the moment a person retires might be very hard.
The people who have the most difficulty in retirement, Zelinski said, are workaholics, whose whole lives wrapped around their jobs. "They had no outside interests," he said.
Having a good work life balance is important while people are working so that when retirement or early retirement comes along they will have something to do. "You shouldn't be just a workaholic, but should have a lot of leisure activities you are really interested in," Zelinski said. "Then the transition is a lot easier to make. Then you don't have to spend so much time looking for your purpose in life."
Changing expectations
O'Neill sees the problems regularly in her practice. People have high expectations. "They don't understand that retirement is such a transitionary time," she said. "So much is going on and so much is emotional. People really need to think about why it isn't happy."
And so her clients come to her confused and sad. "All these years they haven't had that much time together, so what makes you think you are going to really want to spend that much more time together when you retire?" she said.
They find they do not have a lot of shared interests they can do together. They find one spouse wants to live in Florida for half the year while the other one wants to stay near the kids and grandkids. They have different expectations about intimacy.
And in the midst of all these things they should be talking about, they feel like they have nothing to talk about.
The problem is people get lazy and withdraw into their own little world, O'Neill said. They don't keep up on the news, politics or religion. They don't keep on old friends. "And if they don't keep up, they won't have anything to talk about," she said.
And sometimes illness shatters the retirement dream even more. Illness that could have been pushed off. Death that comes too early, as the study from Austria shows, because of bad retirement planning and expectations.
But Zelinski, who has made his living talking and writing about not working, thinks retirement planning needs to go beyond the financial and into the challenging areas of activities and goals that stretch people.
"If you do the easy and comfortable in life, life turns out to be difficult and uncomfortable. But if you do the difficult and uncomfortable in life, life turns out to be easy and comfortable," he said.
And, if anything can be learned from the Austrian study, life could be longer as well.
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