Italy was the first Western country to face a COVID-19 outbreak, with over 246,000 documented cases and more than 35,000 deaths due to the disease as of July 26, 2020 (Fortunato et al., 2021). Since the first case of COVID-19 in Italy, detected in a town close to Milan on February 20, 2020, the Italian government employed several drastic measures to contain the epidemic within some areas, to prevent a collapse of the healthcare system. However, these proved unable to contain the run of virus, and on 10^th March a national quarantine was adopted for the entire Italian population. The first lockdown concluded on 4th May 2020, followed by a second phase (4th May-15th June 2020), characterized by the possibility of visiting close relations and going out for health and work reasons. After 15th June 2020, the third phase was characterized by a partial return to normality, with the possibility of accessing places of entertainment while retaining the obligation to maintain social distances and to wear a mask in enclosed spaces. Since then, several emergency restrictions have been enacted and subsequently eliminated by the Italian authorities. The restrictive measures primarily limited social behaviors: maintaining a social distance of at least one meter; leaving home only if necessary (foods, pharmacy, medical need); and limiting the number of people gathering in public places. Schools were closed and all educational and didactic activities were provided online. Many hospitals restricted ambulatory services and non-emergency admissions. Work habits were also extensively modified: people were only permitted to go to work if it was not possible to carry out the work remotely.

The restrictive measures impacted on all aspects of daily life and the pandemic caused several fears and worries in many people, especially because the new Coronavirus was previously unknown and spread very quickly, claiming hundreds of thousands of victims in a very short time (Lanciano et al., 2020). All these factors contributed to a great distress worldwide (Yu et al., 2020), forcing people to develop new coping strategies to manage daily life, with relevant implications for mental health (Gritti, 2020; Gritti et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Mari et al., 2020; Mariani et al., 2020; Yao et al., 2020).

Several studies highlighted a consistent variety of psychopathological manifestations of self-isolation, quarantine, and inactivity (Brooks et al., 2020; D’Ambrosi et al., 2020; Pfefferbaum and North, 2020). Principal outcomes are related to increased levels of stress, anxiety, emotional instability, worry, and depressive symptoms (Winkler et al., 2020), matching the most commonly reported effects in populations that have suffered similar conditions in past adverse events (Ettman et al., 2020). In the Italian scenario, Casagrande et al. (2020) found that the principal predictors of psychological lockdown-related distress were linked to time (long duration of quarantine, boredom), fear of infection (to be infected or infect a close person), agency (frustration), communication (inadequate or ambiguous information), economic (financial loss, impossibility to work), and stigma. Moreover, several surveys were administered to evaluate the level of distress. Mazza et al. (2020) found that gender played a role in the development of anxiety and depression as well as increased levels of stress, while age was a significant factor only for anxiety levels and perceived stress.

During the pandemic, high levels of distress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, negative well-being, decreased quality of sleeping, and decreased vitality and perceived general health are examples of the disturbances experienced due to confinement and uncertainty (Casagrande et al., 2020; Iorio et al., 2020; Moccia et al., 2020; Orgilés et al., 2020; Parrello et al., 2021; Sommantico et al., 2021). Mazza et al. (2020) highlighted that a history of stressful situations and medical problems increased anxiety and depression during national lockdowns. Other authors (Biondi and Iannitelli, 2020; D’Ambrosi et al., 2020; Femia et al., 2020; Boursier et al., 2021) also reported emotional states of anxiety and sadness. This increasing psychological discomfort was evident from the first weeks of the lockdown. To address and prevent it, the Italian National Council of Psychologists encouraged registered specialists to provide online psychological support to the population (Crescenzo et al., 2021a,b; Limone and Toto, 2022).

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent measures of containment have stimulated multiple studies aimed at assessing the impact both on medical staff (Simione and Gnagnarella, 2020; Chirico et al., 2021; Saladino et al., 2022; Tarchi et al., 2022) and on people’s psychophysical well-being (Saladino et al., 2020).

During the last couple of years, many studies probed the experience of the first wave of the pandemic through a mixed-method design, collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. Among those studies, those which combined validated questionnaires and open-ended questions or in-depth interviews focused on specific populations, mainly health care workers, nurses and doctors (e.g., Svantesson et al., 2022; Harris et al., 2023; Richards et al., 2023), but also medical students (Rolland, 2022), family caregivers (Leleszi-Tróbert et al., 2022), women with young children (Wandschneider et al., 2022), children with obesity (Welling et al., 2022), supermarket workers (Mayer et al., 2022), and university students (Mourad et al., 2022). To our knowledge, three studies explored the effects of stress during the first wave of the pandemic through a mixed-method design. Two studies focused on the adult population: Bin Helayel et al. (2022) examined stress-related disorders during the quarantine period to underscore the importance of both an early detection of the symptoms and of supporting quarantined individuals. Cipolletta et al. (2022) focused on the episode of the worst experience according to the levels of peritraumatic distress. A third study investigated the impact of the pandemic on youth’s daily life according to their levels of post-traumatic growth, their sociodemographic characteristics, and their coping strategies, mainly maintaining social contacts, engaging in leisure activities, and physical exercise (Hébert et al., 2022).

Assuming a different perspective, our research interest was on the impact of the first lockdown on people’s well-being, and our study aimed to explore how participants made sense of their experience of the first lockdown 1 month after the resumption of activities (after the third phase). For exploratory and descriptive purposes, we asked people to think back to the period of the first lockdown and to describe how they experienced that period, by means of an open-ended question. In addition, we asked them to rate their state of health and quality of life and sleep during the first lockdown compared to the moment of their participation in the survey. Finally, we measured their state of well-being, perceived stress, and perceived risk of contracting the virus at the time of survey participation through validated questionnaires.

Our research questions concerned:

Based on the research questions, we hypothesized that participants would report: (1) a more positive self-evaluation of quality of life, sleep, and well-being levels at the time of the survey (1 month after the resumption of activities) compared to the lockdown period; and (2) a worse self-evaluation of perceived stress, perceived risk of contagion, and COVID-19-related fears during the lockdown compared to the time of the survey. We also hypothesized a consistency between the content reported in the open-ended question and the results of the questionnaires measuring stress level, fear of contagion, and well-being.

Participants’ sociodemographic characteristics are reported in Table 1. Most participants (65.3%) lived in the North-Center of Italy and had a high level of education (71.3% having completed a university degree or a post-university degree; 52% having completed high school). Most (73%) were employed (12.5% unemployed or retired and 11.8% students). Among workers (73% of respondents), 27% reported that they never stopped working (even during the lockdown period), 15% went back to work after the first lockdown, and 4.1% did not work or lost their job because of the lockdown.

Most participants (97.9%) declared they were not affected by COVID-19, while 1.5% spent a period at home in quarantine and 0.6% declared they spent a period in the hospital because of COVID-19. Most (75.8%) also declared they did not have a health condition aggravated by COVID-19, while a minority (17.7%) reported that the coronavirus brought them to difficult health conditions, both physical and psychological. The majority (90.9%) also declared not to have suffered from the loss of relatives and friends because of COVID-19 and 69.1% did not contaminate their family. Finally, almost half the participants (41.3%) declared that COVID-19 caused financial problems for their families.

Unprecedented situations and fears deeply affected the global population during the first lockdown that was imposed to limit the SARS-COV-2 spread (Yu et al., 2020). The psychological extent of this experience over time was not predictable. Increased levels of stress, anxiety, emotional instability, worry, depressive symptoms, negative well-being, decreased quality of sleeping, decreased vitality and perceived general health, were reported in several studies across countries (inter alia, Brooks et al., 2020; Casagrande et al., 2020; D’Ambrosi et al., 2020; Moccia et al., 2020; Orgilés et al., 2020; Winkler et al., 2020; Sommantico et al., 2021). This mixed-method online survey had exploratory purposes and was aimed to detect the psychological impact of the first lockdown on people’s well-being, and to understand the process of making sense of the experience during the lockdown, 1 month after going back to previous habits.

Our first research question dealt with the extent of the psychological impact of the first lockdown, 1 month after going back to previous habits (after the third phase). We asked participants to evaluate the experience of lockdown and their actual status and we hypothesized that the participants would report a more positive self-evaluation of quality of life, sleep, and well-being levels at the time of the survey (1 month after the resumption of activities) compared to the lockdown period and a worse self-evaluation of perceived stress, perceived risk of contagion, and COVID-19-related fears during the lockdown compared to the time of the survey.

By the end of the first lockdown respondents began to feel an improvement in perceived quality of life, quality of sleeping, and satisfaction about health. At the moment of the survey, participants acknowledged that their situation was still improving, they appreciated a better quality of life and slept better, they also were more confident in their health and felt more protected from the risk of contagion. Instead, during the lockdown, fear of Covid 19 still reached quite critical and pathological levels; in particular less educated, unmarried, and younger respondents were more impacted. According to Doshi et al. (2021) the higher the education level, the higher the ability to use information on the risk of contracting the infection, and the lower the possibility to develop related fears. The condition of being younger or unmarried may be related to a higher feeling of solitude (Rosenberg et al., 2021; Banerjee and Kohli, 2022). Overall, these data are coherent with the statement given by participants that social and physical withdrawal were retrospectively the most critical aspects of the first lockdown: fear was felt more strongly by people who lived alone or had fewer strategies, either cultural or personal ones, to deal with it. Fear was also stronger in women: as already known in the literature, women and men reported quite different experiences of the first lockdown, with women generally more psychologically affected by that period (Hossain et al., 2020; Mazza et al., 2020; Winkler et al., 2020; Alsharawy et al., 2021; Doshi et al., 2021; Favieri et al., 2021; Orrù et al., 2021; Quadros et al., 2021; Broche-Pérez et al., 2022a,b).

Following other authors (Alon et al., 2020a,b), we agree that increased levels of anxiety and depression, fear of contagion, and worse quality of sleep may be pooled by cultural factors, mainly the domestic management that involved working mothers in the care of children after the closure of nursery schools and childcare centers. We suggest that fear of contagion may be associated with the forethought of the impact of contagion on the management of domestic issues that would increase the stress due to stressful events (Bitan et al., 2020; Uddin, 2021). The literature shows that women over men tend to prefer jobs with a good work-life balance (Burnett et al., 2010; Mellner et al., 2014; Pace and Sciotto, 2021). As a matter of fact, this aspect might have influenced the stress perception due to working from home and to other work aspects that interfered with home management during the pandemic (İlkkaracan and Memiş, 2021; Lonska et al., 2021). Rossi et al. (2020) pointed out that Italian women who responded to a questionnaire on mental health during the lockdown reported higher levels of adjustment disorders, anxiety, depression, and perceived stress than men. Furthermore, according to Cori et al. (2021), women were more likely to consider the consequences of COVID-19 infection more serious than men, with greater compliance with government-imposed rules to contain the spread of the virus.

The lack of significance between those who had an infected loved one and those who did not, is quite unexpected and it shows that the fear of contracting COVID-19 does not depend on the bond of affection. Moreover, the absence of significant results among people who were infected compared to those who were not can be explained by the inhomogeneity of the two groups (low number of the former compared to the latter). Likewise, the absence of statistical significance among people who have lost a loved one compared to their opposite.

Our second research question was about the process of sense- making of the experience during the lockdown and we hypothesized a consistency between the content reported in the open-ended question and the results of the questionnaires measuring stress level, fear of contagion, and well-being. The content analysis points out two main narratives: the description of emotional states (overall hedonic value of the period), experiences, and feelings opposed to the objective description of daily activities and how they managed to reconcile them (study, family). The second concerns the emotional connotation of the experience through a very rich set of adjectives and expressions from positive to negative ones. Descriptions of changes in daily routines or interpersonal relationships due to the first lockdown already emerged in the narrative research study by Venuleo et al. (2022), however, in our study, participants also provided evaluations of the experience related to this change, which are both negative (fear, loneliness, stress, nightmarish, boring, anger, sadness) and positive (serenity, reflection, freedom, opportunity, strength). During the lockdown, participants in our study recounted feelings of fear related to possible contagion as well as loneliness and sadness at being forced to stay locked in their homes (e.g., Marinaci et al., 2021). At the same time, they tried to reconcile their various activities (work, family) as best as they could, even if there were management difficulties. It was both a period in which they could care for intra-family relations and a period of loneliness and sadness for not being able to visit loved ones, even sick ones. The study by Tomaino et al. (2021) similarly highlighted both the presence of negative emotions and coping modes implemented to deal with lockdown measures. Coherently, authors also noted that the main concerns are related to work aspects and dealing with the separation of one’s private and work spheres.

Still, results need to be interpreted in the light of some limitations. The first limitation concerns the convenience sample, which did not allow us to analyze, for example, differences between those who had or had not contracted the virus, or to analyze differences in age or health condition with respect to the lockdown narratives. However, the survey made it possible to collect data from all over Italy and suggested possible territorial differences to be investigated in future studies. Another limitation is the use of self-report measures in the online survey. These measures, especially if administered remotely, may be subject to data collection bias, as they do not ensure consistency of context when compiling the research protocol. As reported in other studies on the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of an online survey was the best solution when social distancing measures limited data collection. Finally, although this study is informative regarding how people lived during the first lockdown, inferences drawn from this study through descriptive analyses do not define causal association.

Despite these limitations, from a methodological point of view this study highlights the importance of integrating information from validated quantitative instruments with information gathered in depth by qualitative insight. A mixed-method approach made it possible, on the one hand, to quantitatively understand the impact of COVID-19 on people’s daily lives and on their level of well-being, stress, and fear through the use of validated instruments; on the other hand, to collect and understand in depth how participants experienced the period of the first lockdown on each aspect of their lives through the use of a narrative stimulus (e.g., Parola, 2020; Cipolletta et al., 2022).

In conclusion, our study contributes to enriching scientific knowledge regarding the period of the first lockdown in Italy, assessed at approximately 1 month after the third phase.

A month after the first wave of the pandemic, participants in our study were improving their overall sense of wellbeing. The quantitative analyses tell us that they felt better at the time of the survey (in terms of quality of life, health, sleep, fear of contagion) than they did during the lockdown; they also were able to partially return to normalcy, with the possibility of accessing places of entertainment while maintaining social distances and wearing a face mask. People’s qualitative narratives of that period denote anxiety, sadness, fear of contagion, but also the discovery of a new daily life as an opportunity to experience relationships and activities in a different way (related to work, school, family, and leisure time management, etc.).

Participants experienced a high level of COVID-19-related fears that affected their personal well-being, mediated, however, by the level of perceived stress. Stress level, as we know, is influenced by difficulties, major events, and changes in adaptive resources daily. Probably, the unpredictability or uncontrollability of that moment, as well as the fact of being overburdened by everyday life, also influenced the COVID-19-related fears.

The persistence of the fear and the emotional ambivalence in their narratives suggest that psychologists and social professionals should pay particular attention to the sense-making of an unprecedented event such as the COVID-19 pandemic to support a correct reconstruction of experiences as well as of the emotions in the events of that period. Indeed, more vulnerable individuals were more affected by the lockdown: in our study they were less educated, unmarried, and younger adults, while Hébert et al. (2022) pointed out the sufferance of youth gender and sexual minorities. The analysis of the experiences of the first lockdown also allows us to understand what condition people were in when the second wave arrived in the autumn of 2020, resulting in a new lockdown and worsening of the infections. Overall, the results of our study underscore the need for a customized approach in the analysis of the effects and the narratives of the pandemic, in the long term. Given the proportions of the pandemic phenomenon, the experience of the pandemic period has been in flux over the past 3 years. It would therefore be interesting for future studies to understand how after 3 years the pandemic experience has been understood and signified, also because the virus is now close to becoming endemic.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

VC, MC, EC, GM, VM, MP, and DC: conceptualization. VC, GM, PC, and EC: formal analysis. VC, GM, PC, and MC: data curation. VC, MC, PC, GM, AM, and MV: writing–original draft preparation. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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