The Pandemic as a Stress Test for Reengagement

The early COVID-19 pandemic created an unusual setting for studying goal adjustment: many people faced blocked plans at the same time, but they did not lose the same amount of control over their goals. This chapter uses a three-wave longitudinal study of U.S. adults to examine what goal reengagement and disengagement were associated with during that period. The value of the study is conditional. It shows why reengagement may matter most when control is perceived to have fallen, while also showing why a short study of temporarily frozen goals cannot settle the long-term value of disengagement.

A shared crisis with unequal control

The pandemic was a useful stress test because it combined a broad external disruption with individual variation. Office and school closures, layoffs and job insecurity, travel restrictions, physical distancing, and stay-at-home orders interfered with goals in work, education, relationships, health, and daily life. In that sense, the pandemic functioned as a natural experiment: a common historical event made goal blockage widespread. But “common” did not mean uniform. Some people retained control over their work or routines; others lost access to opportunities that had been central to their plans. Even among people facing the same public restrictions, perceived control over valued goals varied.

That variation is essential to interpreting goal adjustment. If everyone had lost the same goal in the same way, it would be difficult to tell whether a person benefited from reengaging or simply had more options to begin with. The study instead asked whether adjustment capacities were especially consequential for people who reported that their control over personal goals had declined compared with before the outbreak. The focus was not only on whether the pandemic was stressful. It was on whether the relationship between a person’s usual way of adjusting goals and their well-being changed with the person’s sense of influence over those goals.

The time period also introduced an important ambiguity. Some goals were permanently lost; others were frozen. A course, trip, job plan, or social activity could be impossible under the restrictions while remaining possible in a later period. A person might therefore reduce effort without fully relinquishing the goal. If the study observed only the first weeks of the disruption, it could detect the value of finding a current alternative more readily than the later value of releasing a goal that would never return. The historical setting was not just a backdrop. It shaped which kinds of adjustment could be observed.

The researchers used data from the NDSU National COVID Study. They recruited 301 U.S. adults aged 18 to 80 through Prolific during the first wave of the pandemic and collected online data at three points: April 16, May 1, and June 17. The analyses included 292 participants who contributed data at two or more waves. The sample was designed to be nationally representative for age, sex, and race; in the analyzed group, the mean age was about 45, half were female, and participants varied in race, income, and education. These details matter because the result is not a single-person case narrative. It is a population-level association observed across repeated measurements, with the limits that its sampling and historical context impose.