Why You Might Still Languish After COVID

The past two years have been hard. The good news is that as COVID cases continue to fall and restrictions are lifted, a lot of things are going to get easier.

Here’s the not-so-good news: Our belief that things should be easier can make us feel worse if they’re not. As difficult as the pandemic has been, there has been one saving grace: We can at least understand why life is hard right now. When we feel sad, disappointed, anxious, lonely, or languishing, we know what to blame. Life isn’t supposed to be easy in a pandemic.

But what happens when we no longer have the pandemic to blame for how we’re feeling? What if things improve, but we still feel like we’re languishing?

If we’re not careful, this incongruity can send us into a negative feedback loop: If we don’t feel better as the pandemic improves but we think we’re supposed to, that can make us feel bad about feeling bad. We start thinking that something must be wrong with us. And that sense of failure and shame piles on to our languishing, which makes us feel even worse, and down goes the spiral.

How can we avoid this negative feedback loop as we emerge from the pandemic?

Since this kind of negative feedback loop is driven by a sense of failure to meet expectations, it’s essential that we pay attention to the expectations we are forming now about how we will feel in the future. We don’t need to set the bar for the future as low as possible just to avoid shame and disappointment, but we want to be careful that we are not setting unreasonable expectations of how we will feel in the future.

Here are two unreasonable expectations we can let go of as we emerge from the pandemic:

Expectation #1. We know how we will feel.

The first expectation we can let go of is the assumption that we even know how we will feel as the pandemic improves.

Researchers have found that we’re not always very good at predicting our future feelings, even in normal circumstances. We tend to overestimate the impact that events will have on how we feel, a phenomenon known as impact bias. We often anticipate that we will be more upset about future negative events and happier about future positive events than we actually end up feeling.

We might feel happy when we get a promotion or win an award, for instance, but our happiness probably won’t last as long as we imagined it would. Instead, we will probably move on to thinking about the next ladder to climb or goal to chase, and that happy feeling will fade.

Part of the problem with forecasting our future feelings is that we focus too much on the things we think will change and not enough on all the things that will stay the same. Sure, there might be some positive changes when you get a promotion, but the daily grind can crowd out those changes in ways you might fail to predict.

Trying to anticipate exactly how we will feel as we emerge out of the pandemic will be even more challenging than trying to predict how we will feel under normal circumstances. The pandemic has affected so many aspects of our lives—our health, our habits, our jobs, our kids’ education, the economy, etc.—and things are still changing constantly. It’s hard enough to decipher how we got to where we are now, let alone accurately predict where we’ll be months or years from now.

So, we can start by dropping the expectation that we know exactly how things will go and how we will feel as we emerge out of the pandemic. That doesn’t mean we can’t have any expectations about the future; it just means we should hold our expectations loosely and humbly and admit there is a high degree of uncertainty about them.

The benefit of holding onto our expectations loosely is that it makes it easier to let go of the ones that end up being unrealistic instead of feeling ashamed and disappointed when we fail to meet them.

Expectation #2: Our feelings will match our circumstances.

Another expectation we can let go of is the expectation that our feelings will always match our external circumstances.

Even if we wouldn’t consciously endorse this assumption, we can see how it affects us if we look at how we respond when our feelings don’t match our circumstances. When things seem to be going OK in our lives, but we still feel restless or dissatisfied, we get confused. Why? Because we implicitly expect our feelings to match our circumstances. We think that if things are going well, we should feel happy.

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But this isn’t how feelings work. Our feelings do not perfectly track our objective circumstances. Sometimes we feel unhappy even when things are going well, and sometimes we feel joyful and peaceful even when things are falling apart around us. Our circumstances are only one part of the happiness equation. There are a number of other factors that affect our happiness—like our genes, our actions, and even aging.

If we can let go of the expectation that our feelings will always directly follow our circumstances, we can feel less bad—and less bad about ourselves—if we continue to languish as the pandemic improves. By dropping the expectation that we should feel better as soon as our circumstances improve, we can help prevent a negative feedback loop from taking hold.

And if we can collectively drop the expectation that we will automatically feel better as we emerge from the pandemic, we can help reduce the stigma and shame of negative emotions. When people feel social pressure to be happy, it can make them feel even more sad, lonely, and socially isolated when they do feel bad, making it harder to get help. So, in our desire to move forward and feel better, let’s beware of the pressure and expectations we put on ourselves and others and remember that it’s OK to not feel OK sometimes.