How do you help someone who is 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 neglect, evolving into psychological problems.

This phenomenon is very common in people over 65, 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 who is bored in retirement, with various tips.

• Related article: "The 4 psychological changes in old age (memory, attention, intelligence, creativity)"

How to help a retired person who is bored?

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, 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 we are magically happy. Unlike what the name suggests, 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 and most troublesome emotion for recent retirees is boredom.

Retirement is a situation in which, suddenly, our days lose structure because what kept us busy, work, is gone. Each job is different, of course, but as a general rule people, who can perfectly carry in the same job for decades, they find themselves in the situation that from Monday to Friday they have more than 8 hours a day empty. 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 your 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 not a few retirees who, after leaving their job, begin to become depressed, feeling that their useful life has reached its end. The first year of retirement is critical because so much free time poorly managed, far from being a release, becomes a death sentence in life.

It should be said that adapting to the new situation, in which there are no longer fixed hours or work obligations, is a matter of attitude, but also 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 already manage and take advantage of the idle hours. We run the risk of condemning him to the sickest boredom. We must help our loved one who suffers from boredom.

Reactivating at this stage of life

To help someone suffering from boredom in retirement, the first thing to do is discover what their dreams and hobbies are. You may even be a bit ashamed to tell us, but no one in this life does not have unfulfilled dreams. Whether taking a trip, writing a novel, writing your memoirs, painting, learning a language... there are many "I want but I can't now" who, because of 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 can we take a trip in her name, but we can accompany him on the way. If we also have time, we sure do, we can join the same hobby to make pineapple and learn together. It is not just a matter of pushing 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 he 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 lives that, perfectly, they may have started when they were 18 years old, they run the risk of leaving absolutely everything in life. It happens that they renounce all kinds of social and personal responsibility, leaving behind friends, co-workers or even family members. If we are any of those loved ones, we must do everything possible so that contact is not lost and insist on staying, inviting you to all kinds of plans such as dinners, excursions or, simply, meeting for be seen.

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. Encourage her to go for walks, exercise, dance, swim... In addition to giving her books, motivating her to do sudoku puzzles, crossword puzzles or to try to learn something new is essential to delay the onset of age-related diseases. Boredom not only causes depression, but also dementias and through physical and mental exercise can be avoided.

But we must not neglect the emotional aspect of our recently retired loved one. They all have little battles to tell that, although they may have said them in the past, it is worth remembering them. Listening to him is essential for him to feel loved and entertain himself by recounting his life. Their experiences may not appear in textbooks, but they are part of family history. Whether it's because we love him or out of respect, listening to him tell his stories is something everyone in the family should do.

• You may be interested in: "Empty Nest Syndrome: when loneliness takes over the home"

How to avoid it?

The ideal is to prevent rather than cure. Whether we are the ones who 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 that we would like to do or that we have tried in the past but could not because of the work is very recommended, but we must also be aware that many of the things we put on paper will end discarding.

The reason for this is that, as difficult as it is for us to recognize it, at 65 there are things that can no longer be done in a sustained way. 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 setting priorities will cause us to make little progress and become very frustratedThat is why there is the saying "who covers a lot little squeezes" and at these ages it is not convenient to waste time.

Bibliographic references:

• Aleixandre, M. (1993). Preparation for retirement: analysis of the variables that make satisfaction possible and their application to an intervention program. Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia.
• Aranda, C., Pando, M. and Aldrete, M. G. (2002). Retirement, psychological disorders and social support networks in the retired elderly. Journal of Psychiatry of the Faculty of Medicine, 29, 169-174.
• Belsky, J. (2001). Psychology of aging. Madrid: Auditorium.