OUT OF THE BLUE

AS THE PANDEMIC WEARS ON, EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON WAYS TO STAY POSITIVE.

- JANE MARION

WHILE MARY ALICE FALLON-YESKEY, a publicist at Johns Hopkins Press whom you may know from her stint on Ace of Cakes is a famously sunny-side-of-life person, there’ve been times when the state of the world has gotten to even her. And when the clouds come, she gives herself permission to mope.

“I can have a night where I can just be sad and drink wine and listen to mopey ’90s music,” says the 44-year-old mother of two young boys. “And that’s how I deal with it—just knowing that sometimes that’s a place I need to go.”

Between a killer virus, political chaos, racial strife, and encroaching environmental catastrophe, it is far from hyperbole to say that 2020 was a rough year for our collective psyche—for even the cheeriest among us. And as we’ve moved through spring, summer, and fall in a pandemic, now is the winter of our discontent.

In fact, according to a recent study, people in the United States are the most unhappy they’ve been in nearly 50 years. This sobering—yet unsurprising—conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago this past May.

Among the findings: 14 percent of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31 percent who said the same in 2018. That year, 23 percent said they’d often felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50 percent say that. (And the survey was taken just before the death of George Floyd, which led to nationwide protests, compounding the stress and loneliness caused by the pandemic.)