Two years of lockdowns caused by COVID-19 have made us lonelier, made us addicted to screens and disrupted our sleep patterns, according to a survey. It has been carried out by the British arm of market research firm Ipsos.
More than half of the respondents in the findings released on Wednesday said they fear the pandemic is not over yet, and a small proportion of them even said that things will never return to the way they were.
The survey is based on online responses from 1,229 people aged 16+ in the United Kingdom between March 4 and 7. It was conducted by Ipsos and Policy Institute at King's College, London.
A third of the British nationals said that their physical and mental health has got worse due to lockdowns, the Ipsos survey said. However, one in four (or 23 per cent) said it had improved.
More women (38 per cent) said their mental health is now worse than men (28 per cent).
At least half of the respondents also said that they are spending more time looking at screens than before the pandemic. Just over two in five people (46 per cent) said they check social media at least once a day for news about the pandemic, according to the findings of the survey. Of these, seven per cent respondents said they check their social media feeds hourly.
When it comes to sleep, around a third of the respondents said that the overall quality of their sleep has got worse, according to Ipsos survey. While 25 per cent of respondents said their sleep pattern is now more disturbed, 20 per cent said they are sleeping for fewer hours.
The survey also said that 48 per cent of respondents were ready to support bringing back previous restrictions if there was a new vaccine resistant variant. Only 34 per cent of respondents wanted a national lockdown again.
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
