Back to the Grind: Start retraining for social interactions

An Axios-Ipsos poll released this month found that “the number of Americans engaging in social interactions outside the home is increasing.” And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new recommendations that individuals who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus can start to gather in small groups, without masks, offering a measure of hope in particular to those who have missed the intimacy of double dates and dinner parties. 

But after a year spent internalising public health precautions for social distancing and mask-wearing, the prospect of readjusting to in-person social engagements may be a daunting one. For many, it provokes a sense of profound discomfort, apprehension or ambivalence. 

“It’s a new version of anxiety,” said Dr. Lucy McBride, an internist in Washington who writes a newsletter about managing the coronavirus crisis. You may discover that your continuing concerns about the virus are colliding with a new set of worries about seeing others more regularly: What am I comfortable with? How do I act? What do I say? “There’s two feelings that are continuing to exist for me,” said Allison Harris-Turk, 46, an events and communications consultant and mother of three in San Diego. Harris-Turk created the Facebook group Learning in the Time of Corona, where many among the roughly 16,700 members are discussing the pros and cons of re-entry. 

“There’s the excitement and the optimism and the hope, and then there’s also the grief and the trauma and ‘oh, my goodness, how are we going to recover from this?’” Here’s how some individuals and experts are starting to think about closing the social distance. Although you may be chafing at the confines of the lockdown, remember that it’s still not entirely safe to resume social activities as before. Across most of the country, the risk of coronavirus transmission remains high. If you’re wary of re-entry, begin with a lower-stakes outing. “It’s like little baby steps getting back into it,” said Dr. David Hilden, a Minneapolis-based internist who hosts a weekly radio show during which he answers listeners’ pandemic questions. He’s observed this firsthand: Earlier this month, he met up with a friend to share a beer for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. “Now that we’ve dipped our toe in the water, a lot of Zoom meetings end with, ‘Hey, I think we can get together now,’” he said. After receiving her first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, Aditi Juneja, a New York-based lawyer, expected to feel the same flood of relief that some of her peers had described after getting theirs. While on the phone with a friend, she started to consider future late nights and travel to far-off destinations. “I was like, ‘Man, I want to dance on bars,’” Juneja, 30, said. “There was a euphoria about imagining the possibilities.” 

But after 10 minutes, she found even the fantasy versions of these scenarios exhausting. The reality can be, too; she described the sensory overload and disorientation she felt while dining outdoors with a friend for the first time in months. “I think our ability to take inputs has really lowered,” Juneja said. This is especially true for individuals suffering from social anxiety, for whom the lockdowns have offered some relief, and for whom reopening presents new stressors. But even extroverts may experience an adjustment period as our brains adapt to planning and monitoring responses to unfamiliar situations. At the beginning of the pandemic, people had to change their behaviours to comply with social distancing, mask-wearing and sheltering in place. But learning those new behaviours — and now, relearning old ones — can take a cognitive toll.