Five years ago, the world shut down. Smiling faces were replaced with masks, and kids playing together were replaced with technology. We all know this because we all went through it, unless you were born in 2022.
Again and again, the unusual circumstances the world was in because of COVID are discussed, but I have yet to see many people delve into the true impact it had on adolescent brains, as well as the effect it still has to this day.
Quarantine shifted everybody’s lives out of the norm, causing chaos and uncertainty. For children and young teens who were already going through such a developmental time in their lives, they were thrown even more out of whack.
With the school closures, young students’ daily routines were disrupted. Going to school and having steady daily routines are crucial for adolescent development, as they force children to socialize and challenge their brains. According to Wake Forest Pediatric Associates, “Children thrive on predictability. When kids know what to expect throughout their day, it creates a sense of security that allows them to focus on learning, playing, and developing essential life skills.” Not being able to go to school had a negative impact on mental health.
Anxiety and depression spiked in young teens. While it isn’t uncommon for teens to have struggles with mental health, the specific circumstances they were in were much more difficult than what the average teenager should experience.
It isn’t healthy for kids and teens to spend so much time cooped up inside without companions or extracurriculars. Quarantine was filled with so much stress, with few ways to release it.
Studies show that being under such immense stress that is too much for a young person to handle accelerates the aging in adolescent brains.
The cerebral cortex thins naturally with age, and the chronic stress from quarantine accelerated the thinning tremendously.
According to the University of Washington, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the acceleration of aging in young girls’ brains from the quarantine was 4.2 years, and 1.4 years in young boys.
Being forced to come face-to-face with adversity at such a young age forced kids everywhere to mature prematurely to cope, and they lost valuable years of childhood in the process.
Of course, everyone matures as they age, but people don’t realize the extent their brains age in the span of one and a half years.
It was also observed that the acceleration in girls’ brains was much more significant than in boys’. In the study, scientists found that not being around other people negatively impacted the mental health of girls much more than boys.
This jump in mental age is unnatural, and it is heavily influenced by the extremely stressful conditions. Kids and teens are supposed to go to school and interact with each other, do extracurriculars, and sit in classes. Without these outlets, it’s much harder to release anxieties, and in a way, kids were forced to live like adults.
Typically, kids are shielded from difficult world events to maintain their innocence, but in this case, they had to live in complete awareness of it.
Quarantine also contorted our perception of time. Certain parts of time felt stretched out, while others felt squished together; this is known as telescoping.
People often feel like COVID was much longer ago than it actually was, while the events that occurred during it get blurred together, thinking they happened closer together than they actually were.
Telescoping is much more common with people who experience stressful or traumatic events, which many people experienced during COVID.
Being forced to stay indoors made the days very mundane because there was not much to do. People mostly filled their time with technology and performing their daily routines. So days would often get lumped together while the individual days felt long.
Quarantine was extremely stress-inducing, and our mental health worsened because of that. Our concept of time was altered, and that will stay with us forever. Valuable time of adolescence was lost, and our memory was meddled with without us even realizing it.