Psychological Well-being and Retirement Anxiety of Selected Filipino Middle-Aged Adults: A Brief Research Report

Abstract

Retirement anxiety may cause significant distress for a person approaching retirement due to the inevitable loss of critical resources. Healthy well-being can counter retirement anxiety allowing the person to carefully plan and make better life choices before and during retirement. This brief research report investigated whether high psychological well-being is associated with lower retirement anxiety among 339 middle-aged soon-to-be-retiring Filipinos. The participants completed the PERMA Profiler and Retirement Anxiety Scale. Results reveal that a significant inverse relationship exists between our research variables, with overall psychological well-being predicting 15% of the variance in retirement anxiety. Psychological well-being, particularly its key constructs of positive emotions (P), relationships (R), meaning (M), and accomplishment (A), should be enhanced to buffer feelings of retirement anxiety among middle-aged Filipinos.