If you’ve felt lonely during the pandemic, you certainly haven’t been the only one. A new study from McCann Worldgroup exclusively shared with SELF highlights how sweeping loneliness has really been during this pandemic, along with other illuminating wellness findings. The goal of the Truth About Wellness report was to understand the meaning of wellness in people’s lives across the world. The study surveyed 48,600 people in 26 countries and also put together a 1,000-person online ethnographic community to ask people qualitative questions. When it came to loneliness, the study found that in 2021, 46% of people in the U.S. reported not having any real friends. Sadly, that seems relatively universal—the exact same percentage of global respondents said the same thing. While loneliness has certainly become a more pressing issue during the pandemic—especially when stay-at-home orders and social distancing were at their most intense—it’s been a problem pre-COVID-19 as well. In 2019, 77% of people surveyed worldwide felt emotional connections were already weaker than they had been in the past, according to the report. The report also took an in-depth look at the relationship between trust and wellness among respondents. Globally, people value their friends and family over all other sources of health information, with 42% of respondents worldwide giving loved ones that top spot. But in the U.S., respondents reported trusting doctors the most (45%), although only half of U.S. respondents felt they actually had access to trustworthy health care. Friends and family were the second-most valued sources of health information for U.S. respondents (31%). Online communities ranked toward the bottom (16% in the U.S.), but people still found them more trustworthy than pharmacists and brands. People’s levels of trust in these various sources have unsurprisingly shifted thanks to COVID-19; when asked to choose all the groups or institutions they’d lost trust in during the pandemic, 66% of U.S. respondents selected “governments and politicians,” 52% selected “information on social media platforms,” 49% selected “mainstream news media,” and 42% selected “people from my own country.” The pandemic has also, of course, prompted some massive shifts in how we view wellness overall. Globally, 40% of people said they’ve reconsidered what really matters to them in the past few months, and 38% reported reconsidering what really makes them happy. (The numbers were nearly identical for U.S. respondents.) Nearly half of global respondents said that mental health—which has only relatively recently fallen under the “wellness” umbrella for many cultures—should be a major health focus for people going forward, ahead of cancer treatments, universal health care, and environmental toxins. But interestingly, openness to therapy has seemingly declined. While 13% of U.S. respondents said they’d never see a therapist in 2012, that number jumped to 35% in 2012. Increases in therapy hesitation happened in other countries as well—in 2021, 30% of people across all countries surveyed said they’d ruled out therapy. One of the biggest pandemic lessons many public health experts have emphasized is that an inextricable link has been established between individual and community health. It’s clear in the report that people worldwide are really feeling those effects. Globally, in 2012, 37% of respondents agreed with the statement, “I am only as healthy as the people around me.” That figure jumped to 51% in 2021. In the U.S. specifically, the shift in agreement went from 23% in 2012 to 39% in 2021. Ultimately, in 2021, 56% of people globally (and 44% of those surveyed in the U.S.) believe wellness is a community issue, not an individual one. Although it’s been a terribly hard-earned lesson, the more emphasis we place on that pandemic takeaway, the better.
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