Two years since lockdown started: How has it changed our priorities?

On March 23 2020, the first set of restrictions on people’s lives were announced, aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19.

It was the country’s first national lockdown and a time where phrases like ‘social distancing’ and ‘self isolation’ still felt like a novelty. In fact, we hadn’t even heard the words ‘lateral flow test yet’. So innocent, so naive.

Three weeks of rules were announced. Three weeks?! Society was united in disbelief that we weren’t allowed to have others in our homes for a whole three. weeks.

But, as we all know, those weeks turned into months; and the months into years.

Two years in, while things are getting back to ‘normal’, with the majority of restrictions lifted (despite case numbers being at record highs in certain parts of the country) there’s no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the lives of many forever.

Many have lost loved ones to the virus, and over 1.5 million people are still suffering with the repercussions of Long Covid.

This prioritisation of family was certainly the case Rachel Murphy, 38, a photographer from the New Forest.

Rachel and her husband finally made the decision to move their family from Reading and start again in the New Forest, during the lockdown of January 2021.

‘The pandemic made us realise that life was too short and that we just needed to get on and live our lives,’ Rachel explains.

‘I’ve found from coaching individuals that people tend to procrastinate constantly and that it takes an almost apocalypse event to make them sit up and take notice of what needs to change,’ says life coach Lynn Anderton.

‘As a nation we’ve not had an event that affected our daily life to such an extent since the second world war, and people get very stuck in their comfort zone.

‘But when this is threatened, it makes people realise that their priorities really do need to be looked at.

‘Most people are on a hamster wheel, any change even bad can create a different way to live which can feel hard at the time but in the long term can be beneficial.’

The world of work

Leah*, 35, from Glasgow felt that this drastic change to her daily life was what forced her to reassess.

She’d been working in a stressful legal job for twelve years, with very little respite. When lockdown happened and she found herself working from home, with a bigger workload than ever, she decided she’d had enough.

‘Until then, I’d just been on complete auto-pilot, a constant state of never ending activity,’ she explains.

‘I didn’t know any better. This was just my life. Late nights in the office, drinks after work, back in the office early the next morning to do it all again.’

When she had some time away from the office, she decided that she wasn’t happy.

‘The disruption to the flow of my life really did make me take a step back. I realised that I wan’t happy and that this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.’

Leah quit her job, took some time off, before starting to apply for new positions.

She now has a part-time role that has seen her take a huge pay cut, but she says she’s happier than ever.

‘The office culture and my work life balance is a hundred times better,’ she says.

‘I also find that I have a lot more time to focus on my health, an didn’t want to take it for granted, so Ia regularly go cycling, running and swimming – something that I never had time to do before.’

As with Leah, work is one area that, for many of us, has seen the most drastic change.

‘Generally speaking, the key area people are prioritising right now is their working environment due to the strong push for return to office across many industries,’ explains career coach, Debbie Gainsford.

‘Employees don’t want to return to an office that has a toxic culture, one they were unhappy in pre pandemic or one that no longer fits with the lifestyle they’ve created over the past two years.

‘They are taking this opportunity to find an organisation that aligns with their values and both their professional and personal priorities in a more meaningful way.

‘Employees are prioritising their mental health and are looking to work with companies who also prioritise that.’ 

Finding meaning and purpose

Siobhan Maher, 36, from Birmingham, runs a jewellery marketing business and is married with one child.

Since the pandemic, she describes letting go of some serious ‘shoulds’. One of these was the feeling that she ‘should’ have a second child.

‘I was ticking along quite happily until the pandemic, when enforced full-time parenting and far too much time with my thoughts unearthed a heap of stresses I’d barely acknowledged before,’ she explains.

‘We’d been experiencing ambivalence about the thought of having a second child, but had decided we’d probably just “do it” at some point because it felt like the “right thing”,’ she says.

‘However, the pandemic threw into doubt that subconscious sense of “one day” that actually means you drift along not doing things – for example, we’d been planning to return to Istanbul since 2008 but somehow hadn’t got round to it in over a decade.  

‘Pausing for breath made us realise how quickly time can pass if you’re not really deliberate about what you want to do and achieve. When the potential is taken away from you, you never want to squander it again.’

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