Despite some concerns, retirement anxieties even, we invited some friends round last Wednesday night (it being the first Wednesday of the month (actually it was the second) we gathered together, as tradition dictates) and with the support of lateral Flow tests all round we decided Covid be damned.
After the meal we fell to talking, as you do, about the pandemic situation and the male half of the duo said he thought his wife was one of those people whose mental health had been negatively affected by the pandemic and all its restrictions.
This didn’t entirely surprise me as she has a bit of a reputation as something of a worrier. Beating even me into second place. But the thing was / is Mrs Summerhouse and I could honestly say we hadn’t particularly worried through the pandemic. True all my usual worries have been up and running but we haven’t added any as a result of the virus.
True again, we’ve started doing Lateral Flow Tests in the last couple of weeks but other than preparing for and reflecting on our recent trip to that London, we haven’t made a habit of it. Having done a couple it can be habit-forming now but what we’ve done has been more for the protection of people we were planning on meeting up with rather than our own good health.
And we have done quite a bit of socialising in the last few days, at least by our own modest standards. London, the above friends, daughter and son-in-law on Sunday in a Derbyshire pub, even our next door but one neighbours here in Derbyshire. We were pretty confident this latter couple would cancel as she had spent the afternoon having a scan and previously 15 (we think she said) polyps removed from her oesophagus. But no, any chance of social distancing through cancellation, was dashed. It was ever thus (perverse that is). A hint of concern there maybe but, as I say, not heeded.
Anyway back to our friends of Wednesday night, she of the high anxiety quotient. It was a rare evening in that she actually asked my advice as a psychologist. An ex-psychologist as I pointed out but a first nonetheless. Her worry quotient has been exceeded along the lines of what a rotten place the world is and so on. Which, as I say, led to her husband’s opinion as above.
Basically she was worried about all the negative thoughts that crowded in, mainly although not exclusively, when she was trying to get to sleep. I feel I’m somewhat qualified to express an opinion on this subject not just from a professional perspective but a personal one as well.
In fact I believe several years ago I wrote a retirement anxieties blog about this very topic, I think I called it sleeplessness or some such topic. I haven’t re-read it so I’ve no idea if it’s any good but I did it and I felt I could recommend the basics of it to her.
The basics of it are, don’t try and stop these negative thoughts but rather replace them with positive alternatives. There is a technique called thought-stopping but I never found this worked for me so hence a focus on the positive replacement.
The trick here is to know what your alternatives are, so I recommended to her she start to collect positive scenarios to use at times of stress. I even mentioned the hero of an author by the name of Tony Hillerman whose central character was a Navajo policeman called Jim Chee. He, in one book, described how he collected in his mind those beautiful New Mexico vistas that he saw on his police business driving around, mostly, New Mexico and then ‘pulled them up’ / brought them to mind, at times of stress. They soothed him.
So this was my recommendation to her. I wasn’t prepared to give my own examples as a) they might be embarrassing being mainly about trains and stations but b) mostly because they wouldn’t have worked for her, too personal.
To my surprise not only did this seem to make sense to her but also to her husband who could be described as generally cynical of life as a whole and psychology specifically. So I was flattered, pleased, whatever, however pathetic this might seem. You don’t get many compliments as a retired person beyond the, you’re still alive then, type.
And talking of retirement this brings me back to what was supposed to be the main topic of this blog about retirement anxiety – worry or, a step up the psychological ladder, anxiety and its associated bed fellows, sleeplessness, negative and disturbing thoughts, etc. And do we have more of these as we get older or are retired?
I rather get the impression from what I’ve read in the papers that throughout this pandemic it is young people who worry most but I have no clear evidence of this. And you could hardly call my friend (a sample size of one) as a reasonable representative of our group, but still it made me think, have I got more of a worrier as I’ve gotten older and become a retired person?
I honestly don’t know what a broad view of our age group might be in this area. Are older people generally thought of as being bigger worriers, more prone to becoming anxious or having negative thoughts as we grow (true in the case of my mother, sample size one) generally more distant from the world does this have the advantage of removing some of the rough edges of life’s experiences vis a vis our worries and concerns. Or is this just a code for senility? I hope not because while I like the idea of mellowing out I don’t care for the mental drooling version.
Retirement anxieties summary
So there we have it, a skim across the surface of the topic of retirement anxieties. Do we become more or less anxious as we grow older, what might be the reasons either way and should we do anything about it?