Lockdown mental fatigue rapidly reversed by social contact, study finds

By Christopher Hand, Lecturer, Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University
Greg Maciejewski, Lecturer in Psychology, University of the West of Scotland
Joanne Ingram, Lecturer in Psychology, University of the West of Scotland

Many of us are looking forward to a summer of relative freedom, with road-mapped milestones that will grant us more opportunities to see our friends and family. But we’ll be carrying the effects of months of isolation into those meetings, including a sense that our social skills will need dusting off, and our wits will need sharpening.

The mental effects of lockdown have been profound. Social isolation has been shown to cause people’s mental health to deteriorate even if they have no history of

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