After associating large groups of people with danger for so long, it can also just feel uncomfortable to see big gatherings again, even if your brain knows you’re safe. Earlier this summer, Rebecca Jackson thought she really wanted to get back to the concerts, festivals, and restaurants in Montgomery, Alabama, that she and her husband had been missing. Because she has an autoimmune condition, they hadn’t eaten at a restaurant since the virus started spreading, but once she felt secure in her vaccination status they made plans to go get a beer inside. The couple got to a brewery and saw tables being set up for a group of 60-plus people. Jackson told me she then turned to her husband and said, “Nope, we gotta leave.” They got crowlers to go. She said the entire feeling of going out, especially in a state with a relatively low vaccination rate like Alabama, just isn’t the same, and she’s more skeptical of other people than she was before. “I miss going out, but I don’t have a desire to do things around a lot of people.”

The reality is that our brains have changed after so many months of dealing with what often felt like—and sometimes were—life-and-death decisions. Andrei Novac, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Irvine who studies the impact of traumatic stress, told me that most people can’t just flip a switch to get over the past 17 months, no matter what their experience has been during the pandemic. A crisis of this magnitude “can be compared only to a world war,” he told me. Whether people experienced firsthand loss and grief or just spent an inordinate amount of time digesting the devastation that hit other people, that stress not only sticks with them but can also cause deep existential fear. “A survivalist instinct can be triggered in these cases, and that can cause very unusual behavior.” Survival behavior, he said, could mean that people go into a kind of pleasure frenzy, “really blinded by their drives to enjoy life,” while others become depressed, anxious, or hopeless. But Novac doesn’t think this period will last forever. “Human beings bounce back, in general,” he said—though a massive upheaval like this will probably take more time than we think to get over.