Did your drinking or smoking habits change?

For many, a glass of wine after work or a cigarette with friends is merely a way to unwind. But under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, our use of substances became uniquely charged— and sometimes escalated beyond our control.

Using data collected as part of the multi-institutional COVID-Dynamic project he co-led, Damian Stanley, PhD, assistant professor in the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, and his colleagues examined links between substance use and people’s emotional, economic and social experiences during the pandemic. Their analysis of the longitudinal data, “Alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use have distinct associations with COVID-19 pandemic-related experiences: An exploratory Bayesian network analysis across two timepoints”¹ (Drug and Alcohol Dependence, July 2023), suggests “specific and nuanced relationships” that merit additional study.

The team found that nicotine use had a negative association with the pandemic’s social impacts, meaning that the more isolated people were, the less they smoked. According to Dr. Stanley, participants simply could have been “social smokers” who had fewer opportunities to smoke in lockdown. Conversely, alcohol consumption had a positive association with people’s social experiences, demonstrating an increase in drinking during pandemic isolation. Cannabis use also had a positive association with the emotional impact of the pandemic, which indicated that people tended to use it as a coping mechanism. Surprisingly, these associations remained stable at two time points seven months apart, long after the first waves of COVID-19 peaked.

While these associations may seem logical, Dr. Stanley notes that the study only examined “measurable behaviors.” One potential future avenue of research is to further dissect the team’s findings, incorporating a range of other psychological variables, to illuminate not just the what of pandemic-era substance use, but the why.

Biography

Damian Stanley, PhD

Damian Stanley, PhD

Damian Stanley, PhD, assistant professor of psychology, initiated and co-led the multi-institutional COVIDDynamic project (coviddynamic.caltech.edu), which followed the same >1000 U.S. residents for more than a year (April 2020–June 2021) with the goal of capturing their personal experiences related to the pandemic as well as their psychological, emotional, attitudinal and behavioral changes as COVID-19 reverberated across the United States. This publicly available dataset is a resource for researchers interested in COVID-19-specific questions and basic psychological phenomena, as well as clinicians and policymakers looking to mitigate the effects of future calamities.

^{¹Papini, S., López-Castro, T., Swarbrick, M., Paul, L. K., Stanley, D., Bauer, A., & Hien, D. A. (2023). “Alcohol, cannabis, and nicotine use have distinct associations with COVID-19 pandemic-related experiences: An exploratory Bayesian network analysis across two timepoints.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 248, 109929. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2023.109929}