With the arrival of retirement you have much more free time to dedicate to your hobbies, family and friends: all this means that well-being and satisfaction increase – but not in the same way for everyone. A study published in SSM Mental Health found marked differences based on income, the type of work performed and the sex of the worker, identifying women and unmarried people with a salary of less than 1,500 euros as the categories most penalized by retirement.
The study is among the first to analyze workers’ mental health during the three phases of retirement – before, during and after leaving work. Based on data on 1,583 Dutch people aged 66-67 collected between 2007 and 2023, the researchers examined their mental health five and a half years before, during, and five and a half years after retirement.
Tell me how much you earn and I’ll tell you if retirement is good for you. The analyzes showed that, after an initial period of post-retirement well-being, the mental health of those with a low income (defined in the study as less than 1,500 euros per month) worsened after about two and a half years – in particular for women and unmarried workers; things were better for those with an average income (between 1,500 and 3,000 euros per month), whose well-being increased significantly before retirement and then stabilized in the following years – with the exception of those who had done physically demanding work, who tended to have worse mental health throughout the retirement period; in those who had a high salary (above 3,000 euros per month) mental health remained substantially unchanged, with a peak in well-being in the year of retirement (less marked in those who retired very late).
“All income groups showed overall improvement in mental health during the transition to retirement, but we observed several developmental stages where mental health may decline. In these moments of vulnerability, people could benefit from targeted support,” concludes Aja Louise Murray, one of the authors.
