Every Friday, Casey Weade highlights four hand-picked articles on trending retirement topics and delivers them straight to your email inbox. Catch a preview of this week’s Weekend Reading for Retirees with one of Casey’s featured articles here.

Retirement is much more than just a chapter of your life, it’s a complete shift in your life, and how you adapt to that change can determine whether or not you make that transition successful.

Pyramids and squares: The author of this article poses a good point, stating, “Everyone experiences change, not everyone transitions through it.” Growing older brings along challenges and many mixed emotions. In fact, as a society, we’re on the brink of a major shift, as we move from traditional age pyramids (many young at the bottom, few elders at the top), to a square, with similar numbers of individuals both young and older. Eventually, with low birth rates, we could find ourselves back to a pyramid, this time inverted, with many more individuals age 65 plus, and less youth.

Change is coming: This massive demographic shift contains one of the biggest generations, the Boomers, and might leave many retirees feeling lost and unsure of how to handle the emotional overflow that comes along with growing older and closing out a career. The author of this article recommends a few rules to ease the transition, and renew your viewpoint on aging:

• Name the thing – Normalize this transition, focus on your emotions and call this phase of growing older what it is; The author suggests, 'Maturity'
• Integrate head and heart – Come to terms with yourself, find your place in the world, and make your retirement shift more than just about money
• Create a transition team – Find, or build your tribe of people you can depend on
• Rebrand the Third Age – This isn’t an ending, it’s a beginning

Full disclosure: This one took me a while to digest, but intentionality is at its core, and I’m a huge fan of living intentionally. Make life your own and define it for yourself.