Casting Off COVID Cope

GenX and GenZ are processing the COVID damage differently

Photo by Fitsum Admasu on Unsplash

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I’m 8 months sober from alcohol today and it feels great. I made the decision after realizing I couldn’t remember the last time I went more than a day without some kind of alcoholic beverage.

Like many people, my drinking habits revved up during COVID, and even after lockdowns ended I continued on with my coping mechanism until one day it just seemed like entirely too much. My body was suffering, my mind was suffering and my time was suffering, so I took a break and 8 months later I feel like a different woman.

Funny enough, I’ve been running into a lot of people in my age range who have recently made the same decision. Like me, these are not chronic alcoholics, but people who realized they’d developed into problem drinkers over the last few years and want to get healthier. But it’s not just GenX or Millennial drinkers who are starting to shed their COVID cope. A recent news articles article highlighted how older GenZ-eres (in the 20-25 range) are picking up marathon running in higher numbers than ever. It seems to be a bit of a trend for that age bracket.

It’s my opinion this is the Genz version of shedding the COVID cope. Most of them were pretty young to be developing drinking problems to cope with the pandemic. Most of them were still in some kind of schooling at that time. Used to being stimulated at all times, they struggled with being forced to sit around and isolate. Their drug of choice was streaming, social media and video gaming. So it makes sense that as that generation begins to emerge from their COVID coma their version of “kicking the habit” is doing something active. They’re desperate to get moving, just like I was desperate to get mental clarity.

There aren’t a lot of silver linings that have come out of our national pandemic nightmare, but perhaps one is the pressure of that time has forced many of us overcompensate in a more healthy direction.

Would 25-year-olds be flooding the marathon market right were it not for COVID? We can’t know for sure, but I suspect this recent trend is because of COVID, not in spite of it. And that’s kind of cool, I guess.

So what’s your COVID cope, and have you dealt with it yet? If the trends are as I suspect, now is as good a time as any to break that cycle and make a healthy change for yourself.