Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have tried to balance the effectiveness of lockdowns (or stay-at-home orders) with their potential mental health costs. Yet, two years into the pandemic, we are still lacking solid evidence about the emotional toll of lockdowns. Across two intensive longitudinal datasets with 14,511 observations collected in Australia in 2021 (total N = 441), we compare the degree, persistence, and regulation of people’s emotions on days in and out of lockdown. We find that lockdowns take an emotional toll, but that this toll is relatively mild. In lockdown, people experienced slightly more negative and slightly less positive emotion; returned to a mildly negative emotional state more quickly; and used low-effort emotion regulation strategies. We conclude that people are resilient to the challenges lockdowns pose to personal and social well-being.

Affective forecasting—how people think they will feel in the future—is theorized to benefit well-being, but there is scarce evidence for this link. Therefore, we aimed to determine whether (1) people can accurately forecast their affect for the next day and week, and (2) whether accurate forecasts benefit well-being. Participants (N = 209) completed 7 days of experience sampling. Each evening, participants forecasted how they would feel tomorrow. The following day, participants rated experienced affect, as well as emotion-focused coping and daily life satisfaction. Participants showed relative accuracy—when they forecasted experiencing higher affect levels than usual, they experienced higher affect—with evidence of slight overestimation depending on how accuracy was operationalized. However, forecasting accuracy did not predict coping or life satisfaction. These findings were consistent across affect valence and using multilevel regression and response surface analyses, calling into question theorized links between affective forecasting and well-being.