The COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked young people’s personalities, generally seen over a decade. The adults have become more conscientious, agreeable, extroverted, and neurotic. As a result,
COVID-19 has changed young people’s lives
in a more negative way rather than a positive way, with fewer stable personalities formed over the last year.Research and studies show that this sudden personality shift among young adults has taken a toll on their mental health and personal lives. They have lost touch to regain positive relationships and succeed in their workplace. Neuroticism should automatically decrease as people mature, but the ongoing pandemic has led to the opposite. The mental health outcome, therefore, has become more prominent, causing anxiety and depression attacks among young adults.
On the other hand, adults over 65 years have a more concrete sense of their self-experience and less significant personality shifts.
A leading study author Angelina Sutin, who is a professor at Florida State University College of Medicine, told CNN that the personality of young adults is less stable, especially during the pandemic, and this was indeed a great opportunity to witness how a collective stressful event could have an impact on the individual’s personalities. He also said that this is most likely to happen as they are not indulging in routine activities like going to school or starting or transitioning into careers. In an ideal world, they would have gone out, interacted with more people, and formed relationships with them.
The study was conducted on 7,109 personalities. The team compared the personality traits in three diverse periods:, six years pre-pandemic, early pandemic (9 months), and later half of the pandemic. The study also confirmed that the pandemic might be just one of the contributing factors to this sudden personality change. He mentioned that people didn’t have drastic personality shifts in 2020 when the pandemic struck because they consciously tried to unite and support the community and people around them, which fell apart the next year.
These sudden personality changes are generally experienced when stressful events like hurricanes, cyclones, or earthquakes occur. The pandemic has changed every element of how we live our lives, how we think, behave and feel, eventually leading to young adults being more stressed, less cooperative, and more neurotic as they age. A wide range of personalities that are key elements of personality growth, such as openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, trust, and agreeableness, have all shown a steep decline comparing the pre-pandemic era.
It becomes impossible for humans to control the effect of these forces and the subsequent events synonymous with them. The pandemic has been a life-altering event, and many scientists and researchers are still trying to understand how stress has affected our lifestyle greatly and what implications are likely to occur on our health, especially mental health and the functioning of our society.
