March 12, 2025
Finding purpose in retirement
Retirement is more than just the end of a career—it’s the beginning of a new chapter filled with possibilities. Hosts Gina Galaviz Eisenberg and Dr. Rajay Seudath sit down with Dr. Alisa Holland from WellMed at Bayside in Tampa, FL to explore how older adults can find purpose, stay engaged, and maintain their well-being after retirement.
Docs in a Pod focuses on health issues affecting adults. Clinicians and partners discuss stories, topics and tips to help you live healthier.
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Show transcript
Podcast transcript
INTRO
Welcome to Docs in a Pod, presented by WellMed. Over the next half-hour, Docs in a Pod will educate you about the health and wellness of adults everywhere. Co-hosts Dr. Rajay Seudath and former television broadcaster Gina Galaviz will share information to improve your health and well-being. And now here are Gina Galaviz and Dr. Rajay Seudath.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Welcome to the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by Well Med. I'm your host, Gina Galaviz Eisenberg. Ron Aaron is on special assignment today. I'm so pleased to have you with us. Our program is available on podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're also on the radio in several Texas cities and in Florida as well. Each week, we talk about a variety of health and wellness issues that impact Medicare-eligible seniors and others. We welcome our Docs in a Pod co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath. Welcome Dr. Seudath. You are a board certified family medicine physician. You're a Tampa native and a currently physician for Optum. For those of you in Florida, he's at the university location in Tampa. He received his medical degree from the University of South Florida, and he has a passion for primary care and guiding his patients to meet their health care goals. Before his career in medicine, he's worked many jobs. He's a fascinating individual, but working as an English teacher was the inspiration that led him to a field in family medicine. Welcome, Dr. Seudath.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Glad to be here.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
How was that for an introduction?
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Wonderful. Man, you did it all in one breath.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
I know because I got some good sleep, but thatÕs another story. It's great to see you again. We see each other from time to time. You're in Florida. I'm in Texas.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yes, yes. It's been wonderful being a co-host on this and spreading information and medical awareness. I love it.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Today we're going to talk about something that's also near and dear to everybody's heart. Financial experts will tell us it's never too early to think about and plan for retirement. On today's Docs in a Pod, Dr. Alisa Holland is going to focus on retirement and purpose. Finding meaning and staying engaged, which, Dr. Seudath, is important for your patients. But before we start talking, I'd like to talk about Dr. Holland. She's an internal medicine physician at WellMed at Bayside, where she's dedicated to delivering compassionate, patient-centered care. She earned her medical degree from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and completed her residency at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Dr. Holland combines her extensive training and commitment to evidence-based medicine, ensuring that her patients receive personalized care tailored to their individual health needs. When she's not doctoring, she enjoys reading when she has time, cooking and snow skiing. Love that. Welcome, Dr. Holland.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Dr. Holland, tell us, when is it too early to retire? I have a lot of my friends that say, I'm going to be 50. I'm going to retire. I always say, just keep going. Be sharp. Keep working. Do something productive. What do you tell your patients?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
That's a great start. Retirement is tricky because it is usually a celebrated event in someone's life. People look at it like something that they should be proud of and excited for. And that can be true, but in reality, it is a huge change. It's one of the top ten most difficult life changes that have been recorded. I actually see the outcome of what happens after those changes a lot. People tend to struggle with this one a little bit. It is something to look forward to, but it's good to know what's on the other side of such a change like that.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Do your patients come in and say, hey, I'm thinking about retiring, or do they do it and then talk to you about it afterwards?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
I hear a little bit of both. Because it's such a highly anticipated event, people will come in and talk about it. I'm retiring in 12 months. I'm retiring in 18 months. They'll start looking at it way in advance. But it's the discussion about how someone feels after that can be a little harder to pick up. That's a nuanced conversation. So, keeping open ears for how someone is feeling after they retire is the hard part. They tell me the easy part. I have to work to find the hard part sometimes.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
How long does it take before they start realizing there is a hard part to this?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
That is a great question. Initially, everybody is very excited. They've got a list of things they want to do. They're crossing things off their list. It tends to be maybe 6 to 12 months later. They've gotten the house projects complete. They've done the travel that had been on their mind, and then they start to feel a little lost, a little sad. That's when I tend to hear and start to put the pieces together of when did you retire? Let's talk about that again. And we start to put together that puzzle.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
I'm going to ask both of you in just a moment. What should we do once we get to that point? But if you just joined us, you're listening to the award winning Docs in a Pod with our co-host, Dr. Rajay Seudath. I'm Gina Galaviz Eisenberg. Our podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Our expert today is Dr. Alisa Holland, and we're talking about retirement and purpose. Finding meaning and staying engaged. So, you've been retired for about 6 to 12 months and all of a sudden you're thinking, uh oh, did I do the right thing? Dr. Seudath, do you hear this a lot in your practice?
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yes. I typically hear this more along the lines of, I'm just driving my wife crazy. We are just fighting all the time. What am I going to do? So, sometimes we have to figure out, well, what are the things you want to do with your time? Sometimes they havenÕt even thought about that. They didn't expect to have all of this time on their hands. Before, when you're doing busy work, the busy work is what takes up your time. So, finding out what's important to them. What are some of the goals that you have? We do that with health care. What are the goals you have? Well, I want to see my granddaughter grow up. I want to see this. I want to do that. And sometimes those can overlap. I want to be a little healthier. I want to lose some weight. Well, let's look into your daily activities, and how can we work those things into that? Sometimes, volunteering can be helpful. It's almost like a job, but you don't necessarily have to be there every day. It's a little more flexible. That can be helpful. Church volunteering. Volunteering at hospitals. There's one here in Tampa. I think it's called seniors and service. That's another one. So, those are some of the things that we can do to kind of rope them in. But really and truly, we want to make sure that they're able to do that. And that could be, are their diseases well managed? Are we giving them the opportunity to do things like that?
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Dr. Holland, when we're working, we're so stressed. If I wasn't working, I wouldn't be stressed. I would think that once you realize, oh, what am I doing? The stress is still there even more so. How do you help your patients with that?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
It turns out there's a lot of research that's been done on retirement and purpose. One of the things that's been identified in so many studies is that there seems to be a little bit of an inverse relationship, meaning one gets better when the other gets worse. There seems to be an inverse relationship between job satisfaction and happiness after retirement, which kind of seems like a no brainer. If you're dissatisfied with your job, you tend to be satisfied and find that purpose and find that happiness in retirement. One of the things that we found has been that for people who, like Dr. Seudath was saying, maintain a routine, volunteer, remembering that it's a marathon and not a sprint, setting up good habits early. Yes, get that six-month to-do list taken care of, but be ready to get in there. We're creatures of habit. We're creatures of structure. We've known structure since preschool days. Now it's time for this. Now it's time for this. Now it's time for this. And then all of a sudden, it just goes away. It's looked at as this pleasant thing, but that loss of structure can really leave us feeling lost, feeling like we're wandering. So, adding that structure back in can really help lead to some balance, some happiness, actually reduced illness and improved mental health in retirement. Some of those tips can really help somebody who may be struggling get out of that struggle or can help somebody go into it with a plan of action and be more successful.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
What are the studies showing about people who are retiring later and later as weÕre healthier and living longer? It used to be 60 or 65. It's now 70 or 75. What are the studies showing?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
It actually favors it a little bit because work does a lot for us. It fills the void. It fills the bank. It pays the checks, but it also contributes to our identity. It provides social interaction. It gives you that structure. It often gives people a sense of meaning. So, continuing on a little bit, whether you delay your retirement or even some of the studies that I went over identified that working part time, calling it a partial retirement gives you a little bit. Then if you were dissatisfied in your job, you're switching over to maybe a field that always made you happy and the goals and what makes you happy, what gives you purpose, redirecting yourself, but continuing that structure and continuing a little bit of work. People tended to do better from an illness burden standpoint and a mental health standpoint, building on what that also because.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Building on what Dr. Holland said about part time, working a less schedule. In some industries, in some professions when people are retiring, having that participation and training the next generation, that could be very fulfilling for people who have retired because, like you said, so much of what our identity is your job, right? So, it's like, oh, I don't do that anymore. Now I'm somebody else. It's very hard to come to grips with that idea of I'm losing who I am because I'm not doing what I am. Sometimes, as people are getting to that retirement stage where they've talked to me, yeah, it's coming up in six months. I often ask them, well, what are you doing for the next generation? For the new blood that's coming in? For people who've gone for 12 months, or they've gone to six months, and now they're really struggling and they're having a lot of problems with what am I going to do with my life? I can't do this anymore. I need to have something. Sometimes going back into a part time or even as an advisory role, can help them with that transition. And it can give them that satisfaction that I'm still contributing to the industry. I'm contributing to who I am. And it's kind of bringing those two halves together in a sense.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
We're going to continue this discussion in just a few moments. We're going to take a small break. I'm Gina Galaviz Eisenberg, along with Dr. Rajay Seudath. We'll be right back.
AD
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GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Thanks so much for staying with us on the award winning Docs in a Pod. Our podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Gina Galaviz Eisenberg, and let's continue our discussion on why it's never too early to plan for retirement. I've always felt that if you're keeping busy and you're working, it keeps your brain and your facilities sharp. People will always say to me, wow, you look so young for your age. And I think it's because, well, I'm still working and of course, IÕm raising three young kids. Is there really a correlation between not working and your brain and dementia and all these other diseases that we always talk about?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Absolutely. There's an old adage, we all know it. If you don't use it, you lose it. That holds true in this scenario, too. Keeping yourself busy is a huge key to meaning, to happiness, mental health, longevity, to decreased illness burden. It doesn't have to be your same busy-work hamster on a wheel life for your entire life. That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about missing out on the things that make you happy that you intended to do at one point. I think there is a space to talk about there coming a time where you change and reduce and restructure, and I'm going to spend this amount of time doing these things that make me happy and this amount of time doing work. Or I will introduce an even better idea. Make sure you're doing the things that make you happy, starting right now. Have that happiness now so that you never feel like you're missing out on something. Make sure that you're getting that self-care.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
There was one thing that Dr. Holland had said, and also you as well, Gina, we grow up with structure in our lives. One of our patients, this is a specific scenario, I said, you are so sharp. You're sharp as a tack. What can I do to be like you? And he says, son, when you're retired, Sunday could fall on a Monday, and you never know. Keep that mastery of time. What he said was so profound because if you look at the screening tests we do for memory, three out of the 30 is what day of the week it is. What's today's date? What's the season like? Like you said, having that structure, being able to maintain and manipulate time is one of the things that can keep you fulfilled and keep your brain working. I often kind of try to explain it to patients this way. If you went into a cave and you weren't able to see for a whole year and you came out of that cave, you would be blind. Your brain would stop being able to use photons and see. Your memory and dementia and working with time is kind of like that. If you stop manipulating time, you stop using time. Your brain just kind of forgets how to use it, and it doesn't become important anymore and you kind of lose that part of who you are. So yes, I wanted to just bring that back quickly to that idea of structure and doing the things. Dr. Holland had said, yeah, these are the things I'm going to do, and these are the things I have to do, and these are the things I want to do to stay happy. It's kind of encompassing all of those things is one of the things that can, again, keep the longevity.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
How about diseases, illnesses and retirement? Is it because we're not doing anything, and our brain is not as is alert and protecting us? I mean, I would imagine the brain really can control a lot of things in our body.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Absolutely. It can. It's funny, there is not an association between wandering without purpose and illness getting worse. Speaking of the centenarian that knows the day of the week, and is a healthy, sharp as-a-tack guy. This is this is that example. This is the example of staying engaged, which is, even part of the title, but this is why we do that. So, not only do we live those long lives, but their long, happy and healthy lives. So, part of the things that we should be focusing on in our partial or complete retirement should also be our health because that's the thing that is going to decide whether or not that retirement is going to hold quality.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Are there classes that folks can go to or attend when they're contemplating going into retirement?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Gosh, that's a great question.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yeah, I think we'll have to look into that one. I know there's financial planning and things like that. But for the social aspect, I would say as a person gets into the Medicare age with whatever plan that they decide to get on, there may be a social worker or a Medicare caseworker that might be able to direct them to the local things that might be able to help them with that. But that's what I think we have to research and come back with a better answer for you.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Also, for things like, doc, I want to get back into the working field, but I'm older, and what if I can't get a job? I would imagine that creates some kind of depression. You have all this experience, but then nobody wants you.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Certainly, an understandable fear. But that's when we think outside the box and go back to the question of what makes you happy? What are the many things that make you happy? Just because we are trained as an internal medicine doctor doesn't mean that my after-retirement job is going to be in that field. There might be something else. I might want to be a professional snow skier.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
ThatÕs true.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Just kidding.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
What you bring up is a very good point because not everybody has smooth sailing once they turn 65 and they retire. Some people don't have a lot of fun. Some people have to keep working after they hit the 65-retirement age in order to make ends meet. In those situations, we're often trying to guide them in their diseases, in the management of their pain and that sort of thing so they can continue working in that sense if they can't fully retire or they have to work partially. So, I think that's another instance where if patients are having difficulties, talking with your doctor is important.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Right. There are no dumb questions when it comes to this topic.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Certainty not.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Not at all.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Do you ever bring it up and ask, hey, I noticed, you got another birthday, what are you planning?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Actually, I do bring that up to patients.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
I knew it.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
I do. I tend to bring it up in the in the age that they are 64. I don't mean to make anybody feel bad or think about something that might make them uncomfortable, but it's important to me to know who is broaching that and how they feel about it. Because there are some people that are scared and if they are scared, they might not want to talk about it. But I want to help them no matter what, so I do bring it up.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
At what point do you see that your patients are bringing their kids along? Maybe they're in their 60s. I mean, I wouldn't bring my kids because they're teens. There are no help there. But, I mean, folks who had kids, young and they see their parents as 60, 61, 62 as old. I see it differently, but what do you talk to them about?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
The great thing about primary care is that we have an ability to see multiple family members. So, there are always going to be opportunities and it's lovely when we get that opportunity because there is no game of telephone. Number one, because we all know that the message can sometimes change. But then at the same time, you can really target your discussion to multiple roles in a family. So, we can talk to the person that is approaching retirement about what that person might see. At the same time, if that person is or isn't driving, if that person is struggling in any way, and we can anticipate that they might have a need that the family member can fill, IÕm immediately tasking and engaging that family member to say, let's be aware, let's be ready to help in this scenario. And certainly, contact with me in my office are always suggested.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Sometimes I am encouraging my patients who are going into retirement to bring your family members. Bring your friends. I like it when there's a second brain to go over what's going on. Because sometimes they reinforce the plan. Sometimes they may have some extra information and, the best one is when it's children and parents or husbands and wives, they tell on each other. And that's the best one. Oh, well, he's having ice cream at night. He's a diabetic. Well, she's having salami sandwiches at night, and she's got high blood pressure. You hear all the fun. So yes, I think that's definitely, when it comes to retirement and things like that, we should kind of hope that they're being open with their health and their problems with their family. But some people are very, very private, too in that regard.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Are there studies between dementia and early retirement?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
I didn't specifically read anything about dementia and early retirement. I did read a lot about overall how well somebody is doing versus not doing well from a from a physical standpoint. And I did read a lot about depression, anxiety and mental health. I did not see a lot about dementia in early retirement.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
Well, that's good to know then. Good news out there.
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
Yes.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
So, what top tips as we start winding down would you suggest to someone who's about to approach 65?
DR. ALISA HOLLAND
I think the thing I would say first would be to go in with a plan. The people that I see struggle are the ones who were so happy and ran into it without a plan and then didn't know what to do. So, I think going in with a plan, even if it bakes in some time for that to do list, the bucket list that you finally get to go through with would be the thing I would say is the most important. And if you have any questions or you need any guidance, your primary care doctor is there and your primary care doctor wants to help you.
DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely. For me, I would say, the one thing I would love my patients to do, and I often ask them to do this, is as you're getting to retirement, incorporate some exercise. Incorporate some physical activity, because now you've got all that time. There really is not a reason we shouldn't be able to. That can take up some of that, day-to-day. This is my schedule. It can recreate some of that structure. So, I always tell them, all right, I should be seeing you doing more exercise.
GINA GALAVIZ EISENBERG
That's and that's a great way to end our discussion. Thanks so much for joining us today on the award winning Docs in a Pod. I'm Gina Galaviz Eisenberg, along with Dr. Rajay Seudath. Thank you to our special guest, Dr. Elisa Holland. In the words of the late Charles Osgood, I'll see you on the radio.
OUTRO
Executive producer for Docs in a Pod is Dan Calderon. The producer is Cherese Pendleton. Thank you for listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Be sure and listen. Next week, two Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed.
DISCLAIMER
This transcript is generated using a podcast editing tool; there may be small differences between this transcript and the recorded audio content.
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