Post COVID opening up and anxiety

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When the pandemic narrowed the world, Jonathan Hirshon stopped traveling, eating out, going to cocktail parties and commuting to the office.

What a relief.

Mr. Hirshon suffers from severe social anxiety. In the past, casual get-togethers and meetings came with a rapid heartbeat and clenched fists. He preferred to interact virtually, and welcomed the Zoom meetings that others merely tolerated. Even as he grieved the pandemic’s toll, he found lockdown life to be a respite.

“There is cognitive dissonance to feeling good in the middle of the pandemic,” he said.

Now with normalcy about to return, Mr. Hirshon, a public relations consultant, finds himself with decidedly mixed feelings — “anticipation, dread and hope.”

Mr. Hirshon, 54, belongs to a subset of the population that finds the everyday grind not only wearing, but also emotionally unsettling. These include people with clinical diagnoses of anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, but also run-of-the-mill introverts, who are socially uncomfortable.

A new survey from the American Psychological Association found that while 47 percent of people have seen their stress rise over the pandemic, about 43 percent saw no change in stress and 7 percent felt less stress.

Mental health experts said this fraction of the population found the quarantine protective, a permission slip to glide into more predictable spaces, schedules, routines and relationships. And the experts warn that while quarantine has blessed the “avoidance” of social situations, the circumstances are poised to change.

“I am very worried about many of my socially anxious patients,” said Andrea Maikovich-Fong, a psychologist in Denver. That anxiety “is going to come back with a vengeance when the world opens up.”

She doesn’t for a moment diminish the larger picture of the pandemic’s toll.

But for people with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, these sharp restrictions in some ways reinforced their intense impulse to withdraw.

Early on in the pandemic, “these patients were feeling very vindicated,” said Ms. Maikovich-Fong.

There are a lot of people walking around with a false sense of security, who are a lot more comfortable than they were a year ago,” she said. “That’s not sustainable.”

This counterintuitive dynamic is playing out for teenagers and children, too.

A study published in February in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry looked at the mental health impact on 1,000 young people in Canada during the pandemic, and found that 70 percent of study subjects aged 6 to 18 reported some negative impact. But 19.5 percent in that age group saw some improvement, leading the authors to conclude of the impact: “Mostly worse; occasionally better.”

Researchers found that some children with social anxiety and learning disorders saw improvements in anxiety and depression.

Ryan Fenstermacher, a high school senior in Connecticut (who asked that his city of residence not be published), said school can increase his social anxiety. “Like group projects, they’re always terrible for me — my anxiety comes from not being able to predict what they’re going to do, what they’re going to say,” he said. “There’s no escape route.”

Mary Alvord, a psychologist who runs a large group practice in Maryland serving adolescents, said that many adolescents have suffered during the pandemic. “We don’t want to diminish that,” she said. But “there is a subset of kids who are doing better.”

Some adolescents, Dr. Alvord said, have found a respite from bullying and social anxiety, and students struggling in school now get more help from their parents and worry less about their in-classroom performance.

the anxiety-ridden people who experienced relief during the pandemic probably are in higher income brackets, said Ms. Maikovich-Fong, the therapist from Denver. They are more likely to have jobs they can do remotely, allowing them to remain employed but with less stress than before.

In the end, that relief may not only prove temporary but also actually intensify anxiety as people try to re-engage.

“The more you avoid something that makes you anxious, the harder it is to do,” said Martin Antony, a psychology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and an expert in phobia and anxiety. He added of people with more extreme cases: “They may find when the pandemic ends, it’s much more difficult.”