It's been a difficult year. But we're coping better than you might think, says expert

It might come as a surprise, but a B.C. researcher says people are feeling happier than you might think during the pandemic.

"As a happiness researcher, I've honestly just been blown away by the resilience people in Canada and around the world have shown," said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. 

"There was this initial spike in mental health concerns early on in the pandemic, but people have done an incredible job of maintaining their well-being over the past very challenging year."

Dunn and other researchers analyzed data from around the world that looked at the impacts of COVID-19. They wanted to determine how people's mental health and general well-being have fared during the pandemic. 

The study, which was published in February in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, notes that much of the large-scale data available on the topic is focused on Western, democratic nations that are rich and well-educated.

Dunn spoke with The Current's Matt Galloway about the findings and how people are doing one year into the pandemic. Here is part of their conversation.

What does that mean, resilience? I mean, we use that word a lot, but what does that really mean right now?

What it means is that although we have seen a decline in well-being over the course of the pandemic, it's been relatively small. People got hit hard initially, right. So early on, it looked like ... this [was] going to be a mental health disaster around April 2020.

And then this incredible thing happened, which is that people bounced back. People found ways to be happy such that we saw only about a two-per-cent decline in people's day-to-day positive and negative emotions throughout a good chunk of the pandemic.

I could imagine that there are a lot of people listening whose eyebrows have raised in hearing that. And I would say, really? Is that really the case?

Well, of course, this is looking at large samples across the population. 

Everybody has bad days. And there are people — we see these people in our data — who've had a really tough time. Their well-being has declined dramatically. 

But the really fascinating thing is that there are other people whose well-being has actually gone up during the pandemic.

As somebody who is studying happiness, how do we, in this context, define what happiness is?

We can look at people's day-to-day positive emotions. So, are you feeling cheerful and positive on a given day? How much negative emotion are you feeling? Are you feeling sad, down, frustrated? Everyone feels some negative emotions, but we want to see positive emotions kind of predominating over those negative emotions. 

We can also look at life satisfaction — people's sort of broad evaluations of how their life is going. And it looks to me like life satisfaction has taken a little bit more of a hit than those day-to-day positive and negative emotions.

Why, broadly, do you think, despite all the hardships that people have gone through, that people, according to the research, generally are as happy as they were before this kicked off?

Probably the biggest lesson from research on human happiness is that we are much better at adapting to new situations than we ourselves realize. 

I never would have guessed that people would have done as well as they have in terms of maintaining their well-being, even being a happiness researcher. But it's just that we're incredibly good at finding what we need from daily life, even if, you know, our whole lives feel like they've been completely upended.

What does that adaptation look like?

Maybe you don't get to see your friends or some of your other loved ones, but you find other ways to kind of cope and find a sense of connection. So whether that's reaching out to people on Zoom, [or] talking to some neighbours as you pass them at a safe distance outside, people are finding these alternate sources of social connection. And I think that helps to explain why, for the most part across the population, you see people kind of doing OK.

People have called these weak ties — they're not close friends, but they're the ties that we have to the community that we live in. How valuable are those casual relationships that we have in our lives?

In our own research from before the pandemic, what we've seen is that these seemingly trivial, casual social interactions do make a difference for people's day-to-day feelings of connection and happiness. 

We actually conducted a study where we had people carry around these clickers and click every time they interacted with a weak tie. They clicked a different clicker when they interacted with a strong tie. And what we saw was that both types of interactions contributed to people's overall feelings of connection and happiness on a typical day.

What do those weak ties do for us?

When we have these casual social interactions, we're likely to smile, put our best face forward, just be kind of a nice, pleasant version of ourselves. And my research has shown that just kind of putting our best face forward with other people that we don't know very well can leave us in a better mood.

It also just gives us the sense of being connected to our communities. When we're chatting with the people in our neighbourhood or the barista at the coffee shop, it just gives us the sense that we belong.

Are there people who are hit harder by that lack of casual interaction?

It seems to me, from looking at the data and looking at my friends, that when people are deprived of these casual interactions they might have around the water cooler, [or] with casual friends at work, that they turn to their close others who they live with, and particularly if you have a partner who can fulfil that need for connection. It's the people who don't have a partner that they're living with who seem to be suffering the most from the disappearance of some of those interactions with weak ties.

People say that, you know, we're in a tunnel and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. When we get out of this dark tunnel, what will whatever is waiting for us on the other side mean for our happiness?

I predict that there will be a spike in happiness after the pandemic as all of the wonderful experiences and social interactions that we've been deprived of, we're suddenly able to indulge in. 

But, you know, that human capacity for adaptation that has served us so well in the challenges of the pandemic isn't going anywhere. It's still going to be present. And we will pretty quickly adapt to all of the experiences and connections and stuff that we're able to have. 

If there's one thing we know about humans, it's that we're capable of adapting to whatever life throws us, whether for better or for worse. 

Written by Kirsten Fenn. Produced by Ryan Chatterjee. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

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