The Pandemic Didn’t Actually Spike America’s Anxiety, Study Finds

The covid-19 pandemic was a horrific and earth-shattering world event. But it may not have scarred our collective psyche as profoundly as you would think. New research indicates that the pandemic didn’t spike Americans’ overall anxiety.

Scientists at the University of Virginia led the study, which examined a decade’s worth of survey data. They found evidence that our anxiety levels didn’t significantly shift in the first years of the pandemic. People’s mental fortitude during the pandemic was probably tougher than assumed, the researchers say.

“Our results might suggest that the mental health of U.S. adults is more resilient than public perception suggests, given the many news headlines about the U.S. currently experiencing a ‘mental health crisis,’” said lead study author Noah French, a clinical psychology researcher at the UVA, in a statement from the university.

French and his team analyzed yearly data from the Project Implicit website, a Harvard-run project aiming to better understand people’s perceptions and biases lingering just beneath our conscious thoughts. As part of the project, volunteers are explicitly asked about their anxiety level and also undergo tests that measure their implicit associations related to themselves and anxiety.

They studied the responses of nearly 100,000 volunteers who took the test between 2011 and 2022. To their surprise, they found the average level of people’s anxiety did not spike in severity at the start of the pandemic, nor did the strength of people’s implicit/explicit self-as-anxious associations. The yearly rate of change in people’s anxiety also didn’t abruptly jump in the first years of the pandemic as they had expected.

“Instead, anxiety mostly remained stable,” the authors wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

The news isn’t entirely good. Younger people under 25 continued to have higher anxiety levels on average than older individuals, for instance—a trend that didn’t change during the pandemic years.

Of course, even if most people didn’t experience a major jump in anxiety during the pandemic, that doesn’t mean there weren’t many who did suffer as a result. Rates of certain conditions linked to our mental health, such as binge alcohol drinking, did appear to spike in the first years of the pandemic, for example. And many people lost family members and friends to covid-19, including hundreds of thousands of young children who lost a caregiver.

The authors also caution there are important limitations to their data. Project Implicit volunteers tend to be more educated than the general public and had to intentionally sign up for these tests, meaning they might not be entirely representative of the average American.

Indeed, the researchers say more studies like this are needed to truly understand the ups and downs of our collective mental state. They also argue that people should be dubious about scary-sounding soundbites based on limited data.

“One of my biggest personal takeaways from this project is that there is surprisingly little high-quality research tracking the mental health of entire populations over time,” French said. “We need a lot more research in this space, and I will forever be skeptical of headlines that make strong claims about a certain mental health condition being ‘on the rise.’”

Speaking personally, I can say that my mental health stayed stable during covid-19, even if there were occasional dips early on as many of my friends and family became sick and even sometimes hospitalized. But I did develop an unhealthy obsession with cat videos that sadly continues to this day.