‘Come out of your cave!’
For three weeks I have been sitting at home with a broken ankle. After my first outside drink in almost a year, my bike got tangled up with that of my boyfriend on the way home. ‘I had forgotten how to do that, public life!’ I joke when people ask me how on earth this could happen.
But is that really a joke? At a festival in a park, I run into some acquaintances for the first time since Covid. After some pleasantries back and forth, we just stand there, awkwardly staring at each other. Everyone seems to be wondering: socializing, how did we do that again?
Psychologists have dubbed this phenomenon (the difficulty to pick up ‘normal life’ post-Covid) the cave syndrome. For most of us, this will feel like a mild unease. In the past year, we have had to learn new routines. Now we are being asked to completely change those again, which can make one feel uncomfortable. But in more extreme cases, the cave syndrome can result in anxiety and stress, for example when seeing groups of people. We still feel the threat of the virus, and do not have a clear view of exactly how high the risk of contagion still is.
Clearly there are large individual differences in the ease with which we ‘come out of our caves’. Much of our social lives consists of culturally determined rules that we learn ourselves and teach others through the years, also referred to as social scripts. ‘In case of an awkward silence, start talking about the weather.’ ‘Don’t interrupt someone mid-sentence.’ ‘If your conversation partner starts looking at his cellphone in boredom, change the subject.’ For some people, such scripts feel very natural; they won’t unlearn them easily and will start applying them again effortlessly. But for certain groups of individuals, this will be way less self-evident.
For example, people with social anxiety are overly sensitive to negative social signals. They will be much quicker to interpret someone’s facial expression as bored or annoyed. This means social situations in themselves are already stressful to them, but especially after such a long break. Or take autistic individuals: they often mention that applying social rules has been something they had to teach themselves very consciously, in order to camouflage their communicative difficulties. This process of camouflaging is often very tiresome for them. Already at the start of the first lockdown, many autistic adults indicated being anxious about partly having lost their acquired skills by the time the pandemic would end.
Finally, teenagers and young adults are mentioned as a group deserving extra attention right now. In the midst of a phase of their lives that is highly important for social development (a phase in which they usually learn to stand on their own two feet, to make new friends, to experiment), everything was suddenly put to a halt. More than others they may look at this past period as lost time that needs to be made up for – but how?
It is not at all strange that we are all experiencing some nervousness around this, after spending more than a year mostly at home. Still, it is good to be alert to people that experience an extraordinary amount of anxiety, or that still do not dare to leave their house after some more time. Possibly, for them, more active guidance and help are needed. Generally, psychologists mention the importance of respecting that everyone adapts at their own pace, and that some people may continue to choose to spend some more nights on their own than before. And although I cannot wait until the plaster can be removed from my ankle so that I can truly enjoy the regained freedom, the thought of a society that has more understanding for the more introverted among us, definitely soothes me.
Annabel Nijhof 