Retirement is usually presented as a change in what you do. You stop working and gain more control over your time, so you can start deciding what you want the next stage of your life to look like. But low self-esteem in retirement can also raise a more personal challenge: whether you want to continue living by the same rules that governed the previous stage of your life.
This can be particularly significant if low self-esteem has been part of your life for many years.
Perhaps you became used to putting other people first and taking on responsibilities without asking whether they should really be yours. Perhaps you avoided conflict and found it difficult to say no. You may even have built a successful career and a happy family life while doing all of this. The fact that those rules helped, or at least were part of how you got this far, doesn't mean they need to govern your retirement.
How can low self-esteem follow you into retirement?
Low self-esteem doesn't necessarily look like a lack of confidence. Someone can run a business, manage a team, raise a family, deal with crises and make important decisions while still having a poor relationship with themselves.
The evidence may be found elsewhere. You might find it much easier to identify what somebody else needs than what you need. Saying no may produce guilt. Other people's disappointment can feel like evidence that you have done something wrong. Being needed can become an important source of self-worth, while asking for something yourself feels uncomfortable or selfish.
Over many years, these responses can become rules:
- Other people's needs come before mine.
- I should keep everyone happy.
- If I can help, I should.
- I shouldn't let people down.
- What I want isn't as important.
Such rules can and often do influence careers, friendships, marriages and family relationships, and because they have been around for so long, they may no longer feel like rules at all and simply feel like who you are. Such rules can and often do influence careers, friendships, marriages and family relationships, and because they have been around for so long, they may no longer feel like rules at all and simply feel like who you are. Then you retire, and low self-esteem in retirement can mean continuing to live by rules that were established many years earlier.
Why can retirement make low self-esteem more visible?
Work can provide status, competence, responsibility, recognition and evidence that other people value what you contribute. Retirement can remove or reduce some of these sources of self-esteem, while also giving you more freedom to decide how you spend your time.
On the surface, that sounds entirely positive, but making decisions for yourself can be surprisingly difficult when much of your previous life has been organised around the obligations, expectations and needs of others while downplaying your own.
A strange contradiction can emerge: you have more freedom than you have had for decades but don't necessarily feel entitled to use it. Common examples include:
- Adult children assuming that because you are retired, you are available.
- Your partner having ideas about what you two will do with your newfound time.
- You becoming the obvious person to help elderly parents, grandchildren or other family members.
Before long, retirement has acquired another set of responsibilities. This doesn't necessarily mean anyone is deliberately taking advantage of you. They may simply be responding to the version of you they have always known. And you may be doing exactly the same.
Why does putting yourself first in retirement feel selfish?
If you have spent decades putting yourself behind others, changing the order can feel wrong. You may recognise intellectually that wanting more time for yourself is reasonable, while feeling guilty or afraid of disappointing someone. There may also be a nagging sense that you should be doing something more useful.
This is where, as a Retirement Coach, I would make an important correction to the phrase ‘putting yourself first.’ The aim isn't to put yourself ahead of everybody else, but it is to stop automatically putting yourself behind them. There is a considerable difference between selfishness and equality. If your needs, preferences, ambitions and time have consistently received less consideration than those of the people around you, even if you have unwittingly contributed to this state of affairs, retirement offers an opportunity to establish a more equal arrangement.
That might mean saying no to something you would previously have accepted, or deciding that retirement doesn't make you permanently available. At first, these choices may feel uncomfortable, and probably will, but that discomfort doesn't automatically mean the choice is wrong. It may simply mean that you are no longer inhabiting an old self or following an old rule.
What happens when other people prefer the old you?
Changing your relationship with yourself inevitably affects some of your relationships with other people. Imagine that you have always been the person who helps whenever asked and accommodates everybody else's plans. Then you begin saying:
- I can't do Tuesday.
- I'd rather do something else.
- I don't want to take that on.
- I need some time to myself.
You may see these as small, reasonable changes, whereas someone else may experience them very differently. From their perspective, an arrangement that has existed for years is changing. They may be disappointed or resistant. You might even hear some version of, ‘You've changed.’ And they could be right. The challenge is to help people understand what is changing without treating their discomfort as proof that you should return to the old arrangement.
Explaining what you are doing can help. You might say that retirement has made you realise how automatically you have taken responsibility for other people or that you have postponed things for years and now want to pursue them. Someone who benefited from the previous arrangement may still prefer it, and their reaction deserves consideration, but it doesn't automatically require compliance.
One challenge of building better self-esteem is learning that another person's disappointment and your wrongdoing are not the same thing. Ideally, others will be comfortable with the changes you are reasonably asking for, but their agreement isn't required. Why? Because you are allowing yourself the same freedom to make reasonable choices that you would want for them, too.
Do relationships need to be renegotiated after retirement?
Retirement can expose agreements within relationships that were never actually discussed.
I describe these as implicit contracts. A couple may have spent 30 years with one person working longer hours while the other takes greater responsibility for particular areas of family life. One person manages the finances. The other organises the social calendar. Assumptions develop around housework, grandchildren, holidays, friendships and how much time you spend together. Nobody necessarily sat down and agreed these terms - they developed, implicitly, over time.
Retirement changes the circumstances under which those arrangements were created. If one or both of you are now at home more, why should the old division of responsibilities automatically continue? If you previously fitted your interests around work, should you now fit them around your partner? Equally, if your partner developed a life that worked perfectly well while you were working, should they have to surrender parts of it because you have retired?
There can be a deeper challenge here for someone with low self-esteem. Re-contracting a relationship requires you to believe that what you want deserves a place in the conversation. That doesn't mean demanding that everything changes in your favour, but it does mean making the implicit explicit: This is how we have lived until now. Our circumstances have changed. What do we both want from the next version of our relationship?
Could better self-esteem change what you do in retirement?
The consequences aren't confined to personal relationships. Low self-esteem can also limit what you allow yourself to attempt professionally. Perhaps you never applied for a job because you assumed you wouldn't get it, or dismissed a promising business idea. Perhaps a creative ambition never seemed sufficiently sensible, or a course you wanted to study never felt justified.
Retirement can change the practical calculation, as your next professional decision may not need to provide a full salary or status. A part-time job, consultancy role, small business, voluntary position or creative project can be judged on different terms. That can open possibilities that weren't realistic earlier in life. But there is little benefit in gaining practical freedom if low self-esteem still makes the decisions, for if an opportunity appears, the old responses will too:
- I'm too old.
- Nobody will be interested.
- I've never done anything like that.
- It's a bit late for me.
Some opportunities genuinely won't be right for you, but what matters is whether you are making that decision based on the reality in front of you or an old belief about yourself.
Retirement doesn't have to inherit all the old rules
Retirement planning tends to concentrate on what needs to be added: hobbies, travel, exercise, social activities, volunteering or perhaps some form of paid work, but sometimes a useful starting point is to consider what you no longer want to carry forward:
- The obligation to keep everybody happy.
- The assumption that your needs come last.
- The belief that saying no makes you difficult.
- The requirement to earn your value by constantly being useful.
- The opportunities you rule out because you don't believe you are capable of them.
Retirement doesn't automatically improve self-esteem, and leaving work doesn't erase beliefs and behaviours that may have developed over decades, but it can provide a natural point to examine them. You may have built a successful life around rules created when you thought less of yourself than you deserved, and as I said above, some may have served you well or still be useful. However, others may now be restricting the retirement you are trying to create, and it's important to identify them.
You don't have to reject the person you were to support the person you are now. You do, however, get to decide which of the old rules still apply.
FAQs about low self-esteem in retirement
Can retirement cause low self-esteem?
It can contribute when work has provided an important source of identity, competence, status, or recognition. Retirement can also make existing self-esteem difficulties easier to recognise once some of the structures surrounding working life have disappeared.
Why do I feel guilty putting myself first in retirement?
Guilt can arise when doing something for yourself conflicts with long-established beliefs about responsibility, usefulness and other people's needs. Feeling guilty doesn't necessarily mean that what you are doing is selfish or unreasonable.
Can retirement change a marriage or long-term relationship?
Yes. Retirement changes time, routines, responsibilities and how much time partners spend together. Arrangements developed during working life may therefore need to be discussed again rather than automatically carried into retirement.
Can I become more confident after retirement?
Retirement can provide opportunities to behave differently, reconsider old beliefs and try things that were previously impractical. Age or retirement doesn't require you to keep making decisions based on the beliefs you held about yourself during your working life.
How can retirement coaching help with low self-esteem?
Retirement coaching can provide a structured place to examine how beliefs about yourself influence your decisions, relationships and use of time. This can help you identify which long-established patterns remain useful and which are getting in the way of the retirement you want.