How people are finding calm in a crisis

We’re living through a chaotic moment, so we thought we’d take a look at how people are finding moments of quiet amidst it all.

Using our Consumer Research platform, we found over a million English-language online mentions of meditation online since the beginning of March, and popularity of the trend has risen in tandem with lockdown measures.

These conversations are defined by wellness and spirituality – associated hashtags are #Mindfulness, #Yoga, and #UnlockYourInnerPower, and accompanying emojis are scattered with ‘prayer hands’ and hearts.

Perhaps the most accessible way to get into meditation is via the massive selection of dedicated apps.

We found that both the Headspace and Calm apps have seen upticks in online chatter since the outbreak began, appearing in lists like ‘best apps to help you with Covid-19 anxiety’.

Calm was recommended by pop stars Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello in a recent Instagram story where they spoke about the importance of looking after your mental health right now, while Headspace has been praised for offering free resources during the pandemic.

And meditation isn’t the only way people are finding time for quiet. As we mentioned above, ‘yoga’ is very much associated with meditation in online conversations, and Google search interest in yoga mats has increased sharply in recent weeks.

While many businesses find themselves rapidly losing custom, Spring 2020 could be one of the most profitable months ever for apps and products that help people relax and find some peace amidst the chaos.

Things to look forward to

As lockdown drags on, it’s only natural that people are missing all the fun activities they’re now barred from doing. To find out what people were looking forward to the most when restrictions are lifted, we analyzed mentions from March and April around activities people were missing, planning, or waiting for.

In March and April, there have been 49m people talking about plans, so we clearly aren’t letting the lockdown get in the way thinking ahead. But what exactly are people looking forward to doing?

Way out in front was family meet ups. With millions physically separated from their loved ones, this isn’t much of a shock. Getting more specific, we found 12k people planning family barbeques.

Despite virtual alternatives to dates (we covered this in our Drinking, Dating and Dire Headlines bulletin) people are aching to meet in person. We found 434k users excited about this, and another 336k people were looking forward to getting, let’s say, intimate when lockdowns are lifted.

For 246k people, outdoor activities are what they’re missing most. And for 222k, hitting the gym is a priority. In terms of sports, swimming is the most anticipated activity, with 30k people discussing it.

A further 180k people are hankering for their first sip of barista-made coffee. Surprisingly, getting out to a bar only made 7th on our list, with 157k mentions.

Grabbing fast food is top of the agenda for 136k people, making it more popular than people who are looking forward to going out for a meal at 95k. Fast food mentions were driven primarily by people sharing one another’s cravings.

Perhaps it’s the ‘grass is always greener effect’, but people mentioning vacations were up 30% in March and April compared to January and February. For an industry currently taking a battering, this could be a glimmer of hope for travel companies that survive the pandemic.

It’s encouraging to see people looking forward to a return to normality, even though we have no idea when that might be. And for the companies who specialize in the services and products people are pining for, it can’t come soon enough.

You got a light?

We’ve looked at eating and drinking in previous bulletins, but we’ve yet to take a look at smoking. With one in five people smoking globally before the crisis, we wanted to know if Covid-19 had changed their habits.

To investigate, we ran a Qriously survey that polled 8,045 adults across Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US via their smartphones and tablets.¹ We asked them about their tobacco products purchases.

Here’s what they said.

As we can see, a significant percentage of people in all the countries we surveyed have upped their tobacco purchases.

On average, 15% of respondents said they’d bought more tobacco products in the last week than they normally would.

Spain and Italy top the list, while Australia brings up the rear. We wanted to try and find out why this was the case.

To start, we looked at smoking rate by country, and there was next to no correlation. For example, Germany has the highest rate of smoking, while Australia has the lowest, yet they sit together as the least likely populations to be buying more tobacco..

What about when we consider the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths? This fits with Spain and Italy’s positions, but the UK and Germany also have fairly high numbers, and they’re far less likely to be buying more tobacco.

Where we did find some correlation was in the strictness of a country’s lockdown. Using Oxford University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, we found that a country’s stringency level on measures had the strongest correlation with increased tobacco purchases of all the factors we looked at.

In other words, the more stringent the rules, the higher the number of people buying more tobacco products than usual.

This is no surprise. Being stuck indoors, bored, and spending less time in places where smoking is not allowed is extremely conducive to smoking more.

There are obviously other factors at play, such as culture and access to these products, but the data suggests lockdowns, while aiming to stop the spread of Covid-19, could be causing us to smoke more than usual.

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team

¹ Note: All surveys are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a survey result lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this survey, and a 2 in 3 chance that they lie within 2 points.