Mental and emotional recovery after retirement

[TickTock]

^^^^^
You're giving me w*rk flashbacks!!!

I was contracting for [megacorp], doing engineering construction management for building new plants. Large budget, large cost overruns, missed deadlines piling up.

I remember a megacorp honcho flying down from corporate HQ to tell a competent young (late 20s / early 30s) engineer to justify the cost overruns in his area and *prove that he wanted his job!*. The engineer picked up a 3-inch deep stack of drawings. "You see this? This is revision 17. It's dated 9 days ago. Every revision costs, and the later and larger the revision, the more it costs." He kept his j*b.

I'll add that this (married, with at least one kid) salaried engineer was putting in 12-hour days 6 or 7 days a week. He had to prove that he wanted his j*b?!?!

(I was putting in similar hours, but my contract specified that I got either paid 1-for-1 or PTO 1-for-1 hour w*rked. That took a lot of the sting out of it.)

I'm posting this in the hope that getting it down will prevent me from dreaming about it tonight...

Oh, and I did get free megacorp t-shirts. Since I was repping megacorp and needed to project the proper image.

 

[charais]

Transition is definitely an individual thing however don’t overlook if your meds could be the problem. A now retired close friend on fairly low dose blood pressure meds while w*rking found himself anxious and depressed. Turns out retirement agreed so much with him his bp numbers had come down and it was the meds causing the symptoms. A trip to the doc and a few tests showed no meds needed anymore. Symptoms never came back when bp meds were stopped.

 

[hesperus]

I hope this is the right place to talk about mental and emotional health.

I have heard people talk about it often taking around six month to unwind and recover after their job.

My last couple months at work were very stressful, but before that I was also dealing with "normal" workplace stress and burnout.

Is this something that just happens naturally? Are there things you can do to help the process along? Or is it mostly just relaxing and doing fun stuff?

It doesn't really seem like a therapy kind of thing. Stressful things make me stressed. It isn't an issue to work through.

it does happen but slower and messier than people say.

i went through burnout before, thought I’d just take time off and be fine. instead I felt off for months, like my brain was still in “work mode”. I ended up searching for something more structured and after seeing feedback I got involved with Legacy Healing Center, they helped rebuild normal patterns, sleep, routine, mental clarity.

after that it finally felt like I was out of that state, not just waiting around.

 

[Markola]

“Eh, fifty years from now, no one will remember anything about any of us.” - A wise old friend of mine, who was never stressed about work, or anything else

 

[target2019]

One day only the trees will remember this moment.

 

[walktalk]

I thought I’d just relax and be fine, but it took a bit - doing small purposeful stuff each day helped way more than just ‘doing nothing.