GuidesGuide
Retiring and Losing Your Work Identity: What the Research Actually Shows
Retirement is often described as freedom, so it can be confusing when the first weeks feel like a loss. The research here is mostly about groups: the teams, colleagues and circles that work came with. In a study of 424 people in England who retired, every group membership lost in the year after retiring was linked to a quality of life about 10% lower six years later. At the same time, retirement is not a decline for most people: in a Finnish study of 3,543 public-sector employees, average life satisfaction improved across the transition and stayed stable afterwards.
On this page
What a study of 424 retirees in England found
In a 2016 study in BMJ Open, Steffens, Cruwys, Haslam, Jetten and Haslam used a nationally representative cohort of older adults in England. They followed 424 people who went through the transition to retirement, alongside a matched group of 424 people with similar demographics and health who did not retire. For every group membership people lost in the year after retiring, their quality of life six years later was approximately 10% lower. Among retirees who had two group memberships before retiring, the risk of death in the first six years was 2% if they kept both groups, 5% if they lost one and 12% if they lost both. These links held when the researchers controlled for age, gender, relationship status and socioeconomic status, and the comparison group suggested the effects were specific to people going through retirement.
Part of what you miss may be the "we"
These findings point at something other than the job itself. Work usually comes with groups: a team, a set of colleagues, a regular place to be. When those go, the loss can be felt before it can be named. A cross-sectional study of 171 retirees (Steffens et al., 2016, Frontiers in Psychology) found that people with multiple social identities after retirement, though not before it, reported more satisfaction with retirement, better health and more satisfaction with life in general. Part of that link ran through giving support to others, rather than receiving it.
Keeping old groups and finding new ones
In a 2023 study in Psychology and Aging, Haslam and colleagues surveyed 170 Australian workers who had retired within the previous 12 months. Having more group memberships before retirement did not affect outcomes directly. It helped indirectly, by making it easier both to keep some existing groups and to join new ones after retiring, and those were linked to better physical health, mental health and life satisfaction.
Retirement is not a decline for most people
In a 2022 study in the European Journal of Ageing, Prakash and colleagues followed 3,543 ageing public-sector employees from the Finnish Retirement and Aging Study, with surveys every year before and after retirement. On average, total life satisfaction improved during the retirement transition and stayed stable afterwards. The improvement was larger for women than for men, for people whose health had been suboptimal before retiring, and for people living without a spouse. The biggest change was in how easy life felt. So a hard first stretch is common enough to have been studied, but it is not the whole story.
What this does not show
The English and Australian studies are observational: they show links between group memberships and later outcomes, not proof that losing a group causes lower quality of life. The 171-retiree study measured everything at one point in time. The Finnish study reports averages; it does not describe every individual, and its sample was public-sector employees in one country. We could not find a study testing journaling, writing or voice recording specifically for people losing their work identity in retirement. We read all four papers through their indexed summaries, not the full texts, so we have left out details we could not see.
What that means if you want to try it
If retirement feels like a loss you cannot quite name, it may help to name the groups instead: which ones you still belong to, which ones went with the job, and where a new one might start. The research above is about the groups themselves, so the useful step is noticing them. Phi's 60-second voice entries are one place to say it out loud. That is a format, not a tested treatment: none of the studies above tested voice journaling.
Sources
Steffens, N. K., Cruwys, T., Haslam, C., Jetten, J., & Haslam, S. A. (2016). Social group memberships in retirement are associated with reduced risk of premature death: Evidence from a longitudinal cohort study. BMJ Open, 6(2), e010164.Prakash, K. C., Virtanen, M., Törmälehto, S., Myllyntausta, S., Pentti, J., Vahtera, J., & Stenholm, S. (2022). Changes in life satisfaction during the transition to retirement: Findings from the FIREA cohort study. European Journal of Ageing, 19(4), 1587–1599.Haslam, C., Lam, B. C. P., Ghafoori, E., Steffens, N. K., Haslam, S. A., Bentley, S. V., Cruwys, T., & La Rue, C. J. (2023). A longitudinal examination of the role of social identity in supporting health and well-being in retirement. Psychology and Aging, 38(7), 615–626.Steffens, N. K., Jetten, J., Haslam, C., Cruwys, T., & Haslam, S. A. (2016). Multiple social identities enhance health post-retirement because they are a basis for giving social support. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1519.Say it out loud instead.
Sixty seconds a day, in your own voice. Phi keeps it and shows you what returns.
Get Φ Phi on the App Store