The Perplexing Psychology of Returning to ‘Normal’

Last night, on the anniversary of what was more or less the start of the worst year of our collective lives, President Joe Biden shocked the nation with a vibe most of us had long forgotten: optimism. All American adults would be eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine by May 1, he declared. And if we behave ourselves by wearing our masks and social distancing, Biden continued, “by July the 4th, there’s a good chance you, your families, and friends will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue, and celebrate Independence Day.” (Within reason, of course—large gatherings are still a no-no.)

“After this long, hard year,” Biden added, “that will make this Independence Day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, but we begin to mark our independence from this virus.”

But independence does not mean a return to normalcy. For a year now, we’ve been living in constant fear for our own health and that of our loved ones. We’ve feared losing our jobs and America’s scant safety net not catching us if we fall. Structural inequality has ensured, as always, that the poor and people of color suffer the most in a catastrophe. For essential workers, showing up to work has been a matter of life and death, a stress typically reserved for soldiers. It’s been, in a word, surreal.

When you get that vaccine shot in your arm, it’s not like some switch will flip and your stress will melt away. Neurobiologically, it doesn’t work like that. “The experience of heightened arousal, difficulty sleeping, irritability, wanting to drink and smoke to cope—all of those manifestations of stress may take a while to subside, because our nervous system has been chronically dialed up for a year now,” says Adrienne Heinz, a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “Just because a war is over, doesn't mean that what happened during the war doesn't still activate you, doesn't still haunt you in some ways. There's a healing that will need to take place.”

The psychological archvillain here is uncertainty. Certainty for our distant ancestors was a social structure that helped them find food—and avoid becoming food. Certainty was the invention of agriculture and irrigation, which allowed our more recent ancestors to build up food and water surpluses. Certainty today is rigid routine: spouse, kids, mortgage, commute, work, and so on.

The Covid-19 pandemic is uncertainty incarnate. None of us had previously lived through a pandemic like this, so we had no prior knowledge of how to cope. In the beginning, we didn’t know who was at most risk, nor what situations we should avoid, nor even how the virus was most likely to spread. We didn’t know if we should wear masks right away, or if we could safely send our kids to school. And don’t forget the dizzying number of candidate treatments for Covid-19, from convalescent plasma to hydroxychloroquine, which were hyped on the internet as quick fixes but didn’t stand up to clinical testing. Even when scientists better characterized the virus, the damn thing remained invisible, so the average person didn’t know where it lurked.

Then the vaccines landed, and we had to wait for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to tell us what’s safe for vaccinated people to do. (As of March 8, the CDC now says they can gather indoors with one another unmasked but still need to wear masks in public. And no big gatherings, under any circumstances.) Most of us still don’t know when we’ll get our own shot, and on a population level, it’s not clear when we’ll reach herd immunity, thus finally bringing the pandemic under control.

The human brain tries to resolve uncertainty with routine—so maybe to deal with all of this you picked up a new hobby, or set an exercise schedule, or arranged a weekly call with friends or family. But the multitudinous traumas kept coming. Psychologists will tell you that if the pandemic has done one thing consistently, it’s exacerbated preexisting troubles. The lonely have grown even more isolated, the depressed have grown more depressed, rocky marriages have become rockier. Money, eating disorder, and substance abuse problems have become more problematic, and for the latter, it has often been hard to seek treatment due to pandemic precautions. Those who’ve yet to get the vaccine are still very much in survival mode, literally and figuratively: We’re hunkered down to avoid the virus, and emotionally hunkered down to cope with the stress. And even after vaccination, that stress will persist neurochemically in our brains.

“If you think about the mental health consequences of this whole thing, I think it's going to be ugly for a long time, and for different reasons,” says University of North Carolina at Charlotte social psychologist Amy Canevello. “Because it's exacerbating any cracks that existed.”

But at some point, we’ll be able to look back and take stock. Maybe that’ll be when enough people have been vaccinated that the kids are back at school, or when we can take a trip abroad again. “Once folks get out of survival mode and their basic needs are met, there's going to be a reshuffling and a reprioritization of how we live and who we live with, and who we love and how we love,” says Heinz. “There will be a reckoning. Once you can financially take care of what you need to, and your children have school to attend, and you actually have the cognitive bandwidth to process what happened, certain insights will come to light about what's best for you moving forward.”

Heinz and other psychologists think the reckoning among couples who have gone through this stressful period together may be particularly acute—although the clues to that are not so much in the data, but in how it’s interpreted. For instance, according to a December 2020 report in The New England Journal of Medicine, calls to domestic violence hotlines actually plummeted in the past year—not because domestic violence is decreasing, but because people don’t think they can safely connect during lockdown, the authors reckoned.

Another paper published last month in JAMA Psychiatry found a jump in emergency room visits for drug overdoses, mental health conditions, and suicide attempts starting last March, when lockdown went into effect. Intimate partner violence, on the other hand, remained close to flat. But, as the authors note, all of these figures could represent an undercount, because many patients experiencing trauma don’t visit an emergency room. Additionally, they wrote, “To avoid risk of exposure to Covid-19, many people delayed or avoided seeking medical care, potentially increasing the risk of poor mental health, substance use, and violence outcomes.” In particular, they noted a general drop-off in emergency room visits during last spring’s “Slow the Spread” national stay-at-home order.

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“We know from a lot of research out there that when couples experience a lot of external stress—and most of the work has been on things like financial hardship or job loss—they're more likely to start being hostile to each other, being critical of each other, blaming each other,” says social psychologist Paula Pietromonaco of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “The more stress that people have from the pandemic, I think the more that is likely to happen. And those couples may be in a situation where as things open up, and they're able to start going back to a normal life, it could continue in that direction.”

Still, intimate relationships are complicated. You might assume that the number of divorces will tick up as the pandemic subsides. But that might not actually shake out, for two reasons. Consider 9/11. The attack was a similarly shocking national trauma that, like Covid-19, made us fear for our own safety. Terrorists and a deadly virus both feel invisible yet omnipresent: They could be anywhere, ready to strike. And that fills our brains with dread and uncertainty. Following 9/11, social psychologists watched as divorces declined for a year. Perhaps, Pietromonaco says, that was because spouses sought comfort with each other. The Covid-19 pandemic may well do the same. “There's a threat of your own mortality, right?” says Pietromonaco. “If you get this disease, there's a possibility you could die. And I think those kinds of things tend to bring people closer together.”

The second factor in divorce is money. After the 2008 financial collapse—which also created an era of uncertainty, this time in the form of mass job losses and the mortgage crisis—the divorce rate actually declined. Again, it wasn't necessarily because couples were happier, but perhaps because they couldn’t afford the labyrinthine legal process, according to Pietromonaco. The same may be true as American society recovers from this economic calamity.

For others, the pandemic may have even saved the relationship. If a couple has been lucky enough to make it through the pandemic while working from home, maybe they’re doing quite well together. “In fact, some of those couples may be doing better than well,” says Pietromonaco, “in the sense that the pandemic allows them to spend more time together. They have the opportunity—whether they take it or not, is of course an open question—to really spend more time with their partner in ways that can build the relationship.”

Your social convalescence from the pandemic may depend not only on the state of your closest relationships, but also on your age. Kids and teens are generally more social than adults, and the isolation of the pandemic may have been particularly hard for them. But it may also mean that they are poised for a quicker recovery. “Kids and teenagers, and even young adults, are much better at connecting with others,” says Canevello. “I would guess that kids and young people are going to be better at reconnecting, because they're kind of oriented that way.” By contrast, many parents are exhausted, having spent a year trying to hold themselves and their families together. Socializing may not exactly be a priority for them at this point.

However, social networks may be shifting in interesting ways. Sure, we haven’t been able to see our close friends as often, but we may have gotten to know our neighbors better. Even if you never particularly liked yours, they just happened to be sentient beings you could interact with during the pandemic—and maybe they didn’t turn out to be so bad after all. “Are those shifts going to stick?” Canevello asks. “Am I still going to go for a walk every day and see the lady who grows flowers in my neighborhood?” Perhaps that kind of budding (sorry) friendship persists. Or perhaps these kinds of social networks dissolve once this is all over. Or it could turn out to be something in between.

Elderly people have been the most vulnerable to both Covid-19 itself and the isolation it wrought. “They were struggling before the pandemic, and then the pandemic made them start struggling even more,” says Elena Portacolone, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies cognitive impairment among the elderly. Some of the confusing considerations about how to keep safe during the pandemic have been extra confusing for the cognitively impaired. For instance, they may be more likely to believe “news” sources downplaying the severity of the disease or saying that the vaccines aren’t safe. (They’re very much safe.)

Elderly people may have been more physically isolated during the pandemic than ever, but there’s an opportunity now to get them more digitally connected to family and mental health services. The same goes for society at large: Zoom may have become a curse for the white-collar worker, but the pandemic has given telehealth a significant boost. “Digitally, the landscape is really shifting,” says Heinz. “We're seeing evidence-based mental health services meeting people where they are in their homes, on their phones, in rural areas, and places where they might feel too much stigma to seek help.”

So as psychologically, medically, and economically catastrophic as the pandemic has been, perhaps some good will come from it. Maybe you’ll stay chummy with your neighbors, or keep up your exercise routine, or just appreciate any shred of certainty you can manage to find. “The pandemic has kind of been like this emotional and spiritual car accident,” says Heinz. “We're being pulled out by the Jaws of Life, and we have this new opportunity to live.”