Who would have thought we would find ourselves living through a global pandemic. Maybe Bill Gates. But for the rest of us, COVID 19 arrived the way most life altering events do, without an invitation and without any real warning. One month we were going about our lives complaining about traffic and deadlines, and the next we were watching streets empty out, schools shut their gates and entire economies hold their breath.

Governments responded with lockdowns and restrictions designed to slow the spread of a virus we barely understood at the time. Those measures were necessary. But they also opened the door to a second crisis that received far less attention in the early months, because you could not see it on a chest scan or track it on a case count graph. This was the psychological cost of the pandemic, and in many ways we are still counting it.

The most obvious loss was human life, and there is no framing that softens that. People lost parents, partners, children, colleagues and friends, often without being able to say goodbye in the way they would have chosen. But grief during this period was rarely confined to death alone. It showed up in places we don’t usually associate with mourning. A final year student who never got to walk across a stage. A couple who postponed a wedding so many times they stopped setting new dates. A small business that quietly closed its doors after twenty years. A person who lost a job that had become tangled up with their sense of who they were.

We tend to reserve the word grief for bereavement, but psychologically, loss doesn’t check whether it qualifies before it affects us. The pandemic handed millions of people reasons to grieve things they struggled to even name, and that ambiguity made it harder to process. When you cannot point to what exactly you lost, it becomes much easier to dismiss what you are feeling, or to assume you have no right to feel it at all.

It is also worth separating out what we were actually experiencing, because fear, stress and anxiety are not interchangeable, even though the pandemic made them feel that way. Fear is a response to a threat we can identify. Stress is what the body produces when demands are placed on it. Anxiety tends to live in anticipation, in the mind running ahead to work out what might happen next. During those first waves of COVID, it became almost impossible to separate the three, because the questions kept multiplying faster than the answers. Would I get sick. Would my parents get sick. Would there still be a job to return to. Could I afford the next grocery run. When would I see the people I loved again.

The mind does not cope well with an open loop. We are built to look for patterns and explanations, some sense that we understand what is coming next, and when that sense of control disappears, the nervous system tends to stay switched on far longer than it should. This is part of why the psychological toll of the pandemic cannot be separated from its economic and social one. Financial insecurity and unemployment stretched across entire communities for months. Some households absorbed the shock with savings and remote work. Others were left weighing rent against groceries, or trying to navigate healthcare and childcare with responsibilities that had multiplied overnight. The pandemic did not distribute its impact evenly, and pretending otherwise flattens a story that deserves more nuance than that.

For one family, lockdown might have looked like working from a spare room with a garden to step into when things felt overwhelming. For another, it meant losing an income with no real cushion underneath them. And for some, home itself was not a safe place to begin with. When movement is restricted and people are confined indoors for extended stretches, existing tensions can intensify rather than ease. For those living with domestic or intimate partner violence, isolation also cut off access to the very support systems that might otherwise have offered a way out. The World Health Organization identified family violence, social isolation, unemployment and fear of illness among the key contributors to psychological distress during this period, and that list reads as a fairly accurate map of what so many households were quietly enduring.

Then there were the people who were already struggling before any of this began. Existing mental health conditions were disrupted as access to treatment and support became harder to maintain. Others experienced anxiety, low mood, sleep disturbance or changes in substance use for the first time in their lives, without necessarily having the language to describe what was happening to them. Healthcare workers carried a particular kind of weight, showing up daily to the exact threat the rest of the world was trying to avoid. Parents watched the boundaries between work, schooling and home life dissolve into something unrecognisable. Children tried to make sense of a world that had changed its rules without much explanation. Older adults navigated increased health risks while being cut off from the people who usually kept them company.

There was never one pandemic experience. There were millions of overlapping ones, shaped by circumstance, resources and history, and that is perhaps one of the more important psychological lessons to take from the period. We are often quick to measure someone else’s struggle against our own coping, wondering why they are finding something so difficult when we appear to be managing just fine. But coping was never a competition, and functioning well under pressure does not make someone stronger than the person who is barely holding on. It usually just means they are working with a different set of circumstances.

Technology became one of the strange double edged tools of this era. Video calls kept families visible to one another across closed borders. Online spaces offered a kind of company when physical contact was off the table. But the same screens that connected us could just as easily overwhelm us. Every time you opened your phone, there was another statistic waiting, another headline, another theory, another argument to wade through, and our minds were being asked to metabolise an extraordinary volume of information while already running on uncertainty.

Misinformation found fertile ground in that environment. Conspiracy theories travelled quickly, and conflicting claims about the virus and the vaccines created a kind of noise that made it genuinely difficult to know what to trust. There is nothing wrong with questioning information, and in fact critical thinking depends on it. The problem arises when that questioning detaches itself from evidence altogether, and reaches instead for whatever explanation feels most satisfying in the moment. Humans want explanations, particularly when something frightening and unfamiliar is unfolding, but the explanation that feels most comforting is not always the one that is accurate. Media literacy quietly became a mental health skill during this period. Learning when to put the phone down, noticing the point at which scrolling stopped informing you and started frightening you, asking whether the information in front of you was helping you make a sensible decision or simply feeding your anxiety something new to chew on. That distinction mattered more than most people realised at the time.

The pandemic also challenged the idea that looking after your mental health means staying relentlessly positive. I have never subscribed to the belief that we owe the world constant good cheer regardless of what we are carrying. Some days were genuinely fine. Others were not. Plenty of people found themselves grateful and exhausted in the same breath, appreciating what they still had while mourning what they had lost, and both of those things were allowed to be true at once. There is a place for hope in difficult seasons, but hope was never meant to require us to deny what was actually happening.

For me, one of the things that made the harder stretches of lockdown more bearable was structure. When so much of the external world felt unpredictable, building some rhythm into my own day gave me a small sense of influence over something. That didn’t need to be complicated. Waking at a reasonable hour, eating regularly, getting outside, moving my body and staying in contact with people I cared about became small anchors during a period that otherwise felt formless. None of this replaces professional support when someone genuinely needs it, but these habits form a kind of foundation, and it is easy to underestimate how much they carry us.

I found myself gravitating toward things that brought me back into my body rather than keeping me trapped in my own head. Yoga and breathwork gave me pockets of stillness I didn’t know I needed. Being outdoors offered a change of scenery when the walls of home started to feel a little too familiar, and there was something quietly grounding about remembering that a garden was still growing and the sky was still changing, regardless of how contained life had become.

Movement mattered in a similar way, and not because it needed to look like anything impressive. A walk counted. Stretching counted. Dancing badly around your kitchen counted just as much. The point was never punishment, it was reconnection with a body that had spent months being asked to sit still and absorb bad news. The same logic applied to food. Routines shift under stress, and people respond differently. Some eat less, some eat more, some lean into comfort food, and none of that makes anyone good or bad at managing a crisis. Food is tangled up with culture, emotion, access and pleasure, and the more useful question during that period was rarely how perfect someone’s diet looked, but whether their body was getting what it needed to keep functioning.

Sleep deserves the same honest attention, because it was one of the quiet casualties of the pandemic for a lot of people. Working from home, financial worry, disrupted routines and endless screen time made it harder for many of us to switch off at night, and when sleep suffers, everything else tends to get louder. Irritability becomes easier to trigger, concentration becomes harder to hold onto, and emotional regulation starts to slip. None of these habits are lifestyle trends dressed up as wellness advice. They form part of the actual foundation we use to withstand prolonged stress.

But if there was one foundation that mattered more than any other, it was connection. We are relational beings, whether or not that fits neatly into the story we tell about independence. When physical closeness became restricted, we had to get creative about maintaining it in other forms. A phone call. A message that said more than just checking a box. Actually asking someone how they were doing, rather than accepting fine as a full answer, and making yourself available to receive that same honesty in return.

Reconnecting was not automatic once restrictions eased either. Plenty of people found returning to crowded social environments genuinely difficult after long stretches of isolation, and social anxiety did not simply switch off because the rules changed. For someone struggling to re-enter those spaces, a quiet coffee or a walk with one person often felt far more manageable than diving straight back into a crowded room, and that adjustment deserved patience rather than pressure. It probably still does.

The pandemic stripped away a great deal we had taken for granted. It exposed cracks in healthcare systems, economies and communities, but it also exposed something more personal, which is how much we actually depend on routine, connection, certainty and each other. It reminded us that mental health has never existed in isolation from the circumstances surrounding it. Sometimes distress is not a sign that we are failing to cope. Sometimes life is simply, legitimately hard, and recognising that is not the same as surrendering to it. It is closer to being honest enough with ourselves to understand what we are actually carrying.

As the world slowly opened back up, the task in front of us was never only about returning to how things used to be. It was worth asking whether normal was something worth rushing back to at all, or whether some of what we learned during that strange, difficult period deserved to stay with us. The importance of checking in on people. The value of slowing down occasionally instead of treating exhaustion as a badge of honour. The recognition that our work is not the whole of our identity. The understanding that asking for help was never a weakness, however loudly certain communities insisted otherwise. And perhaps the simplest lesson underneath all of it, that we are human beings, not machines built to operate indefinitely under pressure.

There will always be another headline, another crisis, another difficult season somewhere on the horizon. We cannot control most of what reaches our front door, but we can become more deliberate about how we respond to it when it arrives. Stay connected to the people who matter to you. Question what you consume before you let it settle into fact. Move your body when you can. Rest without guilt attached to it. Make room for the harder emotions instead of trying to talk yourself out of them, and when what you are carrying starts to feel too heavy to manage alone, reach for support. There has never been a prize for suffering quietly.

COVID 19 will be studied for years to come, and rightly so. But perhaps its most enduring lesson is that the invisible consequences of a crisis deserve just as much attention as the visible ones. You cannot see anxiety on an X ray. You cannot measure loneliness with a thermometer. You cannot put grief behind a mask. None of that makes any of it less real.

So as we keep finding our way forward, it is worth holding onto what the pandemic taught us about ourselves, and about each other. We were never meant to carry all of it alone.

Mind over matter.