The Psychology of Retirement: Coping with the Transition from Work

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Reframing Retirement

Active coping is central to retiring successfully, but it does not operate in isolation, being embedded within ways of thinking and feeling that significantly shape our ability to adapt. In the first chapter I noted how stressors trigger appraisals: these are ways of perceiving events, influencing whether we view the stressor as threatening or welcome, manageable, or overwhelming. As these initial appraisals lead to judgments about how to cope with the situation, they influence what follows. Like our general coping efforts, perceptions are not fixed ways of responding, but can develop into a key part of our approach to stress. For example, in sport psychology there is an emphasis on being “positively preoccupied,” of reframing everything that happens in as positive a way as possible. An example would be a cricketer, who when asked how he felt about playing on the bone-dry pitches of India might reply: “My favorite surface: nowhere better to play spin bowling.” A few weeks later he was in England, being asked about the perfect conditions there for seam-bowling: “My favourite surface: I just love the way that the weather affects the game.” At this point he was challenged: “But you said Indian conditions were your favourite!” His reply was that he made himself love wherever he had to play. This person is coping by taking as positive an attitude as possible to unavoidable stress, an approach that is likely to be helpful. As Art Linkletter put it: “Things turn ...