The Psychological Impact of COVID-19 on Students

How COVID-19 is affecting students’ anxiety about the upcoming school year, and how they can be better prepared and more at ease about returning to school.

By Emily Zaretsky

As summer comes to a close, students face the looming return to school. Students are finding it hard to be optimistic when their last year at school was so chaotic due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many students are left unsure and fearful at the prospect of returning to school and their everyday lives. And now, with vaccinations prevalent, the hope of returning to normal can finally be realized. But what does normal look like now?

COVID-19 has made a tremendous impact on the world and the daily lives of millions of people. Students found themselves vulnerable, transitioning between remote and in-person school environments that offered minimal contact with others. Many have been isolated from their friends and teachers so long that an eventual return to normalcy has become unimaginable. To find out how students can get ready to return to a near normal semester, we must first look at how COVID-19 has impacted students’ daily lives.

Students part of The Detroit Writing Room’s Journalism Camp said it was challenging to attend school during the pandemic. Photo by Dominick Sokotoff

Schools chose different models to protect students throughout the pandemic: in person, fully remote and hybrid. Each school model came with a different set of struggles for students.

Dr. Jonathan Pastor, associate director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Princeton University, says no matter the model, many students experienced anxiety.

Some students who were fully remote felt a lot of sadness, isolation, longing and weariness from the repetition of Zoom all day. They felt it was tough to engage in school this way, and many students were negatively impacted by so much screen time, he says. Many also had sleeplessness, insomnia and nightmares, and some experienced weight gain from lack of activity.

Students with underlying health conditions had it even worse, especially those with depression and anxiety. “The stress and anxiety from COVID-19 tore me apart. It's like my ears now turn up to 100 when someone within a 3-mile radius coughs,” says Hallie Pomerantz, a rising junior at York Prep School in New York City.

There were three key categories of problems experienced by students during the pandemic, Pastor says. “One category would be unpredictability, so just the uncertainty of week by week, month by month of whether you’d be in school or out of school. Whether you’d be socializing with friends or not, whether you had to wear masks or not. It was just so much uncertainty that caused a lot of anxiety in people,” he says.

A second category is grief and loss. “All the pain of lost graduations, lost sporting events, lost science fairs, lost model UN. Thousands of loved ones died or fell ill, and some people are still ill with symptoms. People don’t talk about that,” he says. “People have either shame about that, or it’s just hard to talk about, so that makes it even worse for people.”

Isolation is the third big theme, Pastor says, describing students not being able to see their friends regularly in person. “For that (high school and college) age group, it may be the most important age to have direct contact with people,” he says. “For introverts, it was a little easier to manage, but for extroverted people, it was brutal.”

As an introvert, Ava Kimmel says she didn’t mind the isolation aspect of COVID. “In the beginning, I found it easy to adjust to working at home and not seeing my friends as much as I did before, but as isolation continued, I started missing people,” says Kimmel, a rising junior at Dwight School in New York City.

For Pomerantz , the worst was when “everything suddenly stopped,” she says.

“Everything that was promised to be temporary became normal. It became normal for me to grab a mask on the way out, and that was the scariest thing,” she says.

As the new school year draws closer, students are fearful of returning and are unsure what it will look like given the aggressive Delta variant. There is still a lot of fear for what the future holds and how the variant might impact this upcoming school year.

Dr. Allison Pastor, a psychologist with a private practice in New Jersey.

“Students want control, like all of us, and it is difficult to feel like we have any right now, given the situation,'' says Dr. Allison Pastor, a psychologist with a private practice in New Jersey. She advises students to be more patient with themselves and take time to build back courage and confidence. “Kids need to be able to be kids and not have to have so much fear,” she said.

We asked the Dr. Pastors for some tips to reduce anxiety related to the return to normalcy and school. Here are their top tips:

1. Students need to be open and honest about how they are feeling; they should tell a loved one or friend and talk about it. A certain amount of social anxiety is average right now. However, students should consider counseling if they are very stressed.

2. Students should ask questions to adults or teachers to help reduce their anxiety. Given that so much is unknown right now, it can be helpful.

3. Students should take advantage of free mindfulness and meditation apps and resources on the internet.

4. Students should advocate for themselves in school based on their individual and group needs.

5. Journaling can be a helpful took to relieve stress and anxiety.