You Are Not Alone: Personality Changes During COVID
Reference Article Linked Here.
During COVID our collective personalities changed in unique ways. The changes differed from the first year of COVID (2020) to years two and three (2021-2022). And the changes were very different from those that had been observed after local or regional natural disasters. Personality changes are different from changes in mood.
During the pandemic, depression, anxiety, and stress resilience definitely changed – the first two increased, the last one decreased.
The researchers studied a sample of 7,000 people from young adulthood through the very old (wise) who completed internet-based question banks. Even though this was not a controlled study, they were able to compare the results to the same type of study taken before COVID. Keep in mind that the resulting observations can’t be applied to any single person. The observations are an impression of changes that appear to have occurred across the entire population.
So, as you read this, you may or may not see your personal experience reflected in the data. Also, the observations do not hypothesize why the changes occurred. For example did the changes occur because of chronic SEVERE SUPERSTRESS that drained us of our resilience, because of contracting the virus, because of the swirl of misleading or conflicting communication around the experience, because of increasing death or loss, or because of something entirely different.
Personality is know to be fairly stable over the course of a lifetime. Individual stressful or traumatic events can shift an individuals personality, but only slightly over time. In this study personality was measured as the interaction of five characteristics often used in such studies:
Neuroticism: The tendency to experience negative emotions and vulnerability to stress
Agreeability: The tendency to be trusting and straightforward
Openness: The tendency to be creative and unconventional
Conscientiousness: The tendency to be organized, disciplined, and responsible
Extraversion: The tendency to be talkative and outgoing
During the beginning of the pandemic, neuroticism decreased across all ages and the otherfour characteristics remained stable. The authors hypothesize that we, as a people, had an “all in this together” kind of mental framework and we worked to re-establish connection.
In the second and third years of the pandemic, personality began to change but not for everyone. Personality changed for younger people. Those in middle and later adulthood continued to have stable personalities with decreased neuroticism and stable openness, agreeability, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Younger adults suffered from increased neuroticism and decreases in the other four traits. Significantly these changes equal the types of personality changes that are observed over a decade. The pandemic CHANGED THE PERSONALITY OF YOUNGER ADULTS by a decade’s worth. That’s significant.
Such observations make me wonder if our great resignation and out quiet quitting might be based in personality changes induced by the pandemic.
You often hear me speak of Morphing The Mind as a process that can support behavior change toward healthier behaviors. Morphing the mind occurs all of the time. We constantly change how and what we think in response to our experiences and the experiences of the communities that surround us. The trick is to be mindful and aware of our thoughts, to examine the roots of our behaviors so that we can choose the actions we wish to bring to our world.
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