WHY YOU MIGHT DREAD END OF LOCKDOWN
Isolation is stressful, but cocooning can be a comfort
Are you secretly dreading the end of stay-at-home orders and a return to normalcy — whatever that may look like following the coronavirus pandemic? Your feelings probably aren’t misanthropic, or even all that unusual.
For those of us who haven’t been sick and who haven’t lost loved ones or jobs as a result of the pandemic, life has simply got strange — and really, really small. And while stay-at-home orders come with their own set of stressors, there’s also a certain comfort in being cocooned, of our routines being limited to a few permissible daily activities, and in just having to take care of the people and things in our immediate bubble.
I live on top of a hill in rural Umbria, Italy, and at no point in my 11 years here have I been more grateful to be smack in the middle of nowhere. In the nearly two months I’ve been in lockdown with my family, I’ve gone from feeling anxious and frustrated to feeling safe. Not just safe from contracting coronavirus, but really safe — like this-is-where-i’m-supposed-tostay-forever safe.
For my husband, our eight-yearold daughter and myself, daily life is filled with more of the good and less of the bad. Good: extra cuddles on lazy mornings, a simple, long-delayed home repair finally completed, my recent mastery of bread baking. Bad: morning squabbles over brushing hair, arguing over whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher or whose work schedule takes precedence.
As I started quietly admitting that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to life and routines going back to the way they were before early March, I found I wasn’t the only one reluctant to let go of the warm and fuzzies.
“It’s not just the fear of breaking out of the cocoon and facing what’s out there,” says Barbara Fredrickson, director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The slowing down of being at home allows us to feel different kinds of positive emotions that we typically race past, like the cosiness of connections, the deepin-your-bones gratitude at being healthy, of being able to access decent food.”
We may have been healthy, loved, and well fed before lockdown but man, do we appreciate it a lot more now.
“Lockdown has had some unexpected benefits,” says social psychologist Carol Tavris, “assuming you’re one of the lucky ones whose survival is not on the line. We feel safer in a world that had been, and still is, getting crazier and less predictable by the day, and calmer without the stress of normal life (traffic, competition, noise, pollution).”
Stay-at-home orders, she says, “provide the chance to do nothing at all without guilt, and the time to dawdle and dream.”
“The simple life of isolation can be quite liberating,” says Beth Healey, an emergency medicine doctor who spent a year at the European Space Agency’s Concordia base in Antarctica studying the effects of long-term isolation on her handful of colleagues.
“Some people really flourished in isolation,” she says. “They learned a language, they made art.
For many, it was a rich period of personal growth.”
It’s one thing to take some guilty or not-so-guilty pleasure in the new-found “freedoms” of lockdown, but what about actually dreading a return to old routines?
Healey says several of her colleagues were not keen to go back to civilization, even after their long, dark months in Antarctica. Some enjoyed the daily structure, their role in the crew and the organized nature of life in a research station.
When the first plane landed, heralding the end of the Antarctic winter and the reopening of the base to the outside world, “there was some resentment,” she says. “They didn’t want the experience to end.” A few, upon returning home, quickly applied to overwinter again.
“These weren’t people who were without support networks,” she says. “But they were overwhelmed by the return to normal life.”
While Healey and her crew were isolated for up to a year, many of us will start to emerge from our lockdown cocoons after just a couple of months. Still, that’s long enough for new habits to have formed. Fredrickson explains that whatever we’ve been doing for the last couple months — whether that’s sleeping in, baking bread, or talking to the dog — has become our new state of normal.
“If things fall out of our experience,” she says, “we become wary of them. The things we no longer do lose their appeal.”
Because we’re connected to our recent history of enjoyment, she says, “We have to learn to like once-routine activities all over again.” In the abstract, we know what we would like — to return to work, school and social engagements.
“But the creature self,” she says, “that which gives us emotion, is wary of changing the routine we’ve learned to like in the last month.”
Even if we’ve not been rendered sick or jobless during the pandemic, Fredrickson points out, we’ve all been traumatized.
When the stoppage of routine life leads to positive outcomes, the effect is even more beguiling. “It’s easy to forget that it’s still a trauma. Having virtually every aspect of our lives changed is traumatic.”
We’re uncertain about what the post-coronavirus world is going to look like, but it’s safe to assume it will take some getting used to. Healey recommends baby steps.
“Be easy on yourself. Don’t run into the centre of a busy city if you’ve been isolating in the countryside,” she says. “Start your social engagements with familiar people, rather than trying to see all your friends at once as soon as we’re let back out.”
Fredrickson, whose research focuses on the effects of positive emotions on mental health, hopes we’ll be able to carry forward some of the good stuff of lockdown into the new reality that awaits us.
“Because of the existential threat (of coronavirus), people are thinking a lot more about what makes life worthwhile,” she says, “and of what makes up a good day.”
We’ll be easing back into pre-pandemic routines slowly, so the transition presents an opportunity to reflect on the parts of lockdown we liked, whether it was more time for cooking, family, or hobbies, and incorporate them into our post-pandemic lives.
Start your social engagements with familiar people, rather than trying to see all your friends at once as soon as we’re let back out.