Lockdown helped restore happiness, research suggests

The wellbeing inequality gap between wealthy professionals and the unemployed even began to narrow during lockdown, according to a study. Happiness fell as the coronavirus pandemic began – but lockdown helped to restore it, research suggests. The wellbeing inequality gap between wealthy professionals and the unemployed even began to narrow during lockdown, according to the study by Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Researchers used a year’s worth of data taken from YouGov Weekly Mood Tracker surveys and Google searches to track wellbeing in the British population before and during the pandemic. They say it is one of the first studies to distinguish the effects of the pandemic from those of lockdown on psychological welfare, as it uses week-by-week data, rather than monthly or annual comparisons.