The covid social phenomenon nobody's talking about
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Lots of articles are covering how socially awkward we’ve gotten ever since a lot of us have started socially isolating. But I’ve noticed a second, stranger social phenomenon lately that nobody seems to be talking about.
The pandemic has led us to become more critical of how we interact with others.
I hear it all the time these days— folks tell me that they should have done or said things differently in even the most mundane social interactions. A lot of people are having more invasive thoughts, more frequently, regarding how they could have or should have behaved differently. And a lot of folks are making negative assumptions about how they’re perceived by others.
Why is this happening? And why is it happening now?
Here are some psychological phenomena that might help us understand what’s going on:
Being lonely makes us assume the worst of social interactions. It turns out that loneliness affects our brains in pretty predictable ways. One of those ways is that we assume the worst of ambiguous social information.
For instance, if I were feeling lonely and I saw a stranger across the bar look up at me and then look away, I might be likelier to think something like, “Ugh, they probably looked away because they don’t want to talk to me.” But if I were feeling more socially connected, I might look at the exact same stranger looking up at me and then looking away and think to myself, “They looked my way— I wonder if they want to talk to me!”
In the psychology world, they call the biased perception of social interactions when you’re feeling lonely “maladaptive social cognition” and you can learn more about the phenomenon in a 2010 meta-analysis by Masi et al. here.
So, why is this coming up now? Well, a lot of us have been more lonely than usual thanks to years of social isolation, so our brains are ready to make negative assumptions about ambiguous social stimuli. So, for the folks who are dipping their toes back into the waters of socializing, it’s the perfect storm for them to assume that other people are thinking the worst of them. And that leads to thoughts like, “I bet that person who was looking at me didn’t want to talk to me— I bet there’s something wrong about what I’m doing/ how I’m acting/ how I look.”
But there’s good news! Just being aware of this phenomenon and learning to challenge maladaptive social cognitions can help! So the next time you find yourself criticizing yourself, you can challenge those thoughts to be a little less critical of yourself and to get a little more realistic of a perspective.Social anxiety is associated with more self-criticism. A lot of us who weren’t previous socially anxious are socially anxious now. And a lot of us who were socially anxious before the pandemic are even more socially anxious now. Why’s that?
It turns out that if you avoid something (whether a thing or an experience), over time, you can develop anxiety or phobia toward that thing. And a lot of us have now been limiting or avoiding in-person social contact for years! So it makes sense that after avoiding in-person social interaction for years, we’d have developed some anxiety about in-person social interaction.
That alone wouldn’t necessarily have an impact on our level of self-criticism, but social anxiety is highly associated with self-criticism, as demonstrated in this 2004 article by Cox et al.
So there’s a decent chance that by avoiding in-person social interaction for years (even though it was absolutely necessary to keep the most vulnerable among us alive and healthy), a lot of us developed social anxiety or worsened our existing social anxiety, which may have led to more criticism of ourselves. So a lot of us who are returning to social interactions, especially in-person, may be seeing the manifestation of that.PTSD can lead to self-criticism. Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD, but the fact that an international traumatic event has been ongoing for years means that the number of people with PTSD in the world has likely risen. Now that there are more folks around with PTSD than there likely were before the pandemic, we’re likely to see some PTSD symptoms more frequently in the general population. And one of those symptoms is, you guessed it, increased self-criticism. So there’s a chance the self-criticism you’re experiencing now is a symptom of your brain’s response to several years’ worth of ongoing trauma.
You’re likely interacting with other people who are also experiencing self-criticism. Statistically speaking, since we probably have greater numbers of people with PTSD and social anxiety than we did before the pandemic, chances are much likelier that any given person you’re interacting with is also experiencing at least one of the above phenomena.
Although I wasn’t able to find relevant research on this, from my anecdotal experience picking up phones at a suicide hotline and working with folks who have social anxiety in research and clinical settings, I very consistently saw that interactions with a person who is self-critical often leaves the other person feeling more critical of themselves, too.
So if you’re socializing in an environment where most people are feeling self-critical, some of that is likely to rub off on you. And chances are, most of your socializing these days is taking place with some folks who might be more critical of themselves than before the pandemic.
Photo by Ashley Kirsner, at a Skip the Small Talk
You might be reading all this and thinking that the cards are stacked against you and you’re just doomed to feel bad after social interactions. But that’s not the case! Check out some of our tips for how to have self-compassion even when you really don’t feel like it. And if you read all this and thought, “Shoot, maybe I do have social anxiety or PTSD,” don’t worry— both are very treatable, and you can absolutely get to a point where you no longer experience symptoms by working with a mental healthcare professional.
And remember, no matter what you’re experiencing, you’re definitely not alone.