How To Help Someone Suffering From Boredom In Retirement?
Getting bored is normal. It is a totally healthy emotion, no matter how much they insist on saying that we should be entertained and busy. Boredom is what allows us to reflect, calm down and become intimate with ourselves, without any distraction.
However, when boredom becomes our main companion every day, this emotion can lead to apathy, reluctance and laziness, evolving into psychological problems.
This phenomenon is very common in people over 65 years of age, who have just retired and do not know what to do with their free time. Today we are going to find out How to Help Someone Suffering from Retirement Boredomwith several tips.
The word “retirement” comes from the Latin “iubilatio” which literally means joy. From this we can extract that when the retirement age is reached, a period of joy, personal enjoyment and freedom begins. The time has come to dedicate ourselves to ourselves, and not to dedicate our time and energy to a job that, although we may have liked it, has also tired us. Our well-deserved rest has arrived.
But retirement does not inject joy into our veins and magically we are happy. Unlike what its name indicates, in retirement, as in any other period of our lives, we can feel a wide range of emotions. We are still human: we can be happy, sad or angry, among many other emotions. However, the most common emotion and the one that causes the most problems in recently retired people is boredom.
Retirement is a situation in which, suddenly, our days lose structure because what kept us busy, the job, is no longer there. Each job is different, of course, but as a general rule people, who may well have been in the same job for decades, find themselves in the situation where from Monday to Friday they have more than 8 empty hours a day. What to do with so much time? Having so much free time brings new opportunities, but also risks.
Boredom is normal and healthy, but being chronically bored seriously damages mental health. In a society in which being busy and stressed is perceived as a sign of triumph and unemployment as failure and uselessness, there are many retirees who, after leaving their job, begin to become depressed, feeling that their useful life has come to an end. The first year of retirement is critical because so much poorly managed free time, far from being a liberation, becomes a life sentence.
It should be said that adapting to the new situation, in which there are no longer fixed schedules or work obligations, is a question of attitude, but also It depends on the support you receive from your closest environment. If we have a father, grandfather, uncle or any loved one who has just retired, we should not believe that he or she will manage and take advantage of the downtime. We run the risk of condemning it to the sickest tedium. We must help our loved one who suffers from boredom.
Reactivating at this stage of life
To help someone who suffers from boredom in retirement, the first thing to do is discover what their dreams and hobbies are. You may even be a little embarrassed to tell us, but no one in this life does not have unfulfilled dreams. Whether it’s taking a trip, writing a novel, writing your memoirs, painting, learning a language… There are many “I want to but I can’t now” who, due to work and other obligations, have not been able to do.
Many of these hobbies could be considered an individual thing. For example, we cannot learn a language for him or her, nor take a trip in his or her name, but we can accompany him or her along the way. If we also have time, which we surely do, we can join the same hobby to join forces and learn together. It is not only a matter of putting pressure on him a little to fulfill his dreams and kill boredom, it is also spending time with that person. He may still be healthy and agile, but let’s not forget that it is in the last period of his life.
It happens to many people that they retire from their work and their life.. As they leave behind a very long period of their life that, perfectly, they could have started at the age of 18, they run the risk of leaving absolutely everything in life behind. It happens that they renounce all types of social and personal responsibility, leaving behind friends, co-workers or even family. If we are one of those loved ones, we must do everything possible so that contact is not lost and insist on meeting, inviting them to all kinds of plans such as dinners, excursions or simply meeting up to see each other.
Not only is it okay to learn how to help someone who is bored in retirement, but prevent you from having any physical and mental health problems. Encouraging her to take walks, exercise, dance, swim… in addition to giving her books, motivating her to do Sudoku, crossword puzzles or try to learn something new is essential to delay the onset of age-related diseases. Not only boredom causes depression, but also dementia and through physical and mental exercise they can be avoided.
But we must not leave aside the emotional aspect of our recently retired loved one. Everyone has little battles to tell that, although they may have said them in the past, it doesn’t hurt to remember them. Listening to him is essential for him to feel loved and have fun telling his life story. Their experiences may not appear in textbooks, but they are part of family history. Whether because we love him or out of respect, listening to him tell his stories is something that everyone in the family should do.
The ideal is to prevent rather than cure. Whether we ourselves are on the brink of retirement or a loved one is, what we need to do is plan for it before it arrives. Making a list of everything we would like to do or that we have tried in the past but couldn’t because of work is highly recommended, but we must also be aware that many of the things we put on paper will end up being discarded.
The reason for this is that, as difficult as it may be for us to recognize it, at 65 years old there are things that can no longer be done in a sustained manner. Each person is different, but cognitive and physical agility are not the same as when we were 25 years old, so we must focus on those activities that we can do. Not establishing priorities will make us make little progress and get very frustrated.that is why there is the saying “he who covers a lot, takes little” and at these ages it is not advisable to waste time.
