Global happiness unchanged by COVID pandemic, surprising experts

March 20, 2023

Despite the world shutting down for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it apparently hasn’t negatively affected people’s overall happiness.

According to a study published in the annual World Happiness Report that surveyed more than 100,000 people in 137 countries, respondents are happier now than before the coronavirus caused worldwide lockdowns and worldwide uncertainty.

The study, conducted by Gallup, asked people to rate their quality of life between 2020 and 2022, finding that they marked it as high as they did prior to COVID from 2017 to 2019.

Participants answered the evaluations themselves, breaking down the notion of happiness into six key factors — social support, income, health, freedom, generosity and absence of corruption.

Researchers used those factors to help determine the differences in overall happiness in each country.

The polling found levels of misery worldwide dropped slightly during the three years of COVID-19, also reporting that elderly people — those over 60 on average — responded to the survey as happier compared to younger groups surveyed.

Woman with flower crown blowing bubbles. — Despite a global pandemic, people are happier on average than in previous years.

“Average happiness and our country rankings, for emotions as well as life evaluations, have been remarkably stable during the three COVID-19 years,” said co-author John Helliwell in a news release.

“Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness.”

Although the survey results say benevolence globally was largely unchanged, it noted that “it is important to remember that some of those most affected by COVID-19, including the homeless and the institutionalized, are not included in the survey samples.”

Co-author Lara Aknin said one interesting insight to come from the report was the increase in pro-sociality in comparison to previous years.

Girl in car window with Finnish flag. — Finland was ranked No. 1 for happiness.

“For a second year, we see that various forms of everyday kindness, such as helping a stranger, donating to charity, and volunteering, are above pre-pandemic levels,” Aknin said.

“Acts of kindness have been shown to both lead to and stem from greater happiness, which is the focus of Chapter 4.”

The authors suggested that while well-being unsurprisingly slipped in Ukraine during the ongoing war with Russia, benevolence “grew sharply” there — and was, the study said, higher than when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

“The devastating impact of the war is evident to all, and so we also find that well-being in Ukraine has taken a real hit,” noted Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. “But what is surprising, however, is that well-being in Ukraine fell by less than it did in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, and this is thanks in part to the extraordinary rise in fellow feeling across Ukraine as picked up in data on helping strangers and donations — the Russian invasion has forged Ukraine into a nation.”

The US rose from 16th to 15th in the rankings compared to last year’s report, with war-torn countries like Afghanistan (137th) and Lebanon (136th) ranked as the two unhappiest countries in the report.

The study comes after a British Medical Journal (BMJ) review found that people’s general mental health symptoms hardly deteriorated during the pandemic.

However, previous studies have stated it has contributed to mental health issues worldwide, including depression and eating disorders.