In 2018, researchers at MIT published a study in Science that tracked how different types of information move through social media. They found that false and emotionally charged content spread roughly five times faster than accurate information.

That number came up in my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who specializes in anxiety and habit change. Jud has spent years studying how anxiety moves through populations, and he frames the problem in a way I hadn’t considered before. He treats anxiety like an infectious disease, not as a metaphor but as a framework with real clinical utility.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s article “Anxiety Is Contagious. Your Phone Is a Super Spreader.”

What Anxiety Actually Is

Jud uses a working definition in his clinic that I find incredibly useful. Anxiety is fear of the future. Not fear of what’s happening right now, in front of you, but fear of what might happen. And because the future is always unknown, anxiety has an endless fuel supply if we let it.

That distinction matters. Fear is often tethered to something concrete, like a dog running at you or a car swerving into your lane. Anxiety floats. It attaches itself to whatever is available, including the emotions of the person sitting across from you, or the headline you just scrolled past.

The Problem of Emotional Contagion

Jud described something from his clinical practice that illustrates this well. If a patient walks into his office carrying heavy anxiety and he isn’t deliberately grounded, he absorbs it. Then he carries it into the next appointment, where the new patient picks up on his shifted energy and asks what’s wrong. One anxious patient has now infected two people without anyone realizing what happened.

This isn’t unique to a psychiatrist’s office. You walk into a lively party and your mood lifts before anyone has spoken to you. You walk into a funeral and everything in you goes quiet, even if you didn’t know the person well. The emotional atmosphere of a room changes your internal state before your conscious mind has time to catch up.

I told Jud about my experience during COVID. I was doing telemedicine, so patients weren’t physically in front of me, but the anxiety still transferred. Patients were scared and wanted answers I didn’t have, and I was already anxious myself about a situation none of us could predict. That emotional charge came through the screen, through text, through the tone of emails. I’d read a perfectly benign message and filter it through my own anxiety until it felt like a threat. The contagion doesn’t require physical proximity, just a channel.

Why Your Phone Changes the Math

In person, emotional contagion is limited by the size of the room. Only so many people can be near you at once. Social media removes that constraint entirely. Millions of people connected through a single platform, each one a potential carrier and a potential host.

If you’ve ever forwarded a panicky social media post because it alarmed you and you wanted other people to know about it, you’ve participated in the contagion. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the system is designed to exploit exactly that impulse. Emotional content gets shared, and alarming content gets shared even faster. And the algorithm takes note of every click, every share, every comment, and serves you more of the same.

Your phone is the first thing most of us see in the morning and the last thing we look at before sleep. There is no social distancing from a device that lives in your pocket.

The Evolutionary Logic

A listener named Lou asked a great question during our live. Is this an evolutionary adaptation?

Jud pointed to herd animals. When a deer senses a threat, its eyes widen and the amount of visible sclera increases. That’s a signal visible from across a field. One deer’s wide eyes can spook an entire herd in seconds, and that capacity for rapid transmission of fear kept those herds alive for millions of years.

We see the same wiring in human crowd behavior. A section of a stadium panics and suddenly there’s a stampede, even though most of the crowd never saw the original threat. The prefrontal cortex goes offline, rational assessment shuts down, and everyone shifts into pure reaction. The mechanism that once protected us from predators now gets activated by a push notification.

The Infectious Disease Playbook

This is the part of the conversation I found most useful. Jud doesn’t just describe the problem. He applies infectious disease logic to it.

If anxiety spreads like a virus, through aerosolization of emotional content via social media, then we can borrow from the same playbook we use for physical contagion, including immunization, protective barriers, and basic hygiene.

Recognize that it happens. Most people don’t think of anxiety as something they can catch. But you’ve lived it. A friend calls in a panic, and you hang up the phone feeling wound up even though nothing in your own life has changed. Just naming that phenomenon starts to take away some of its power.

Build grounding practices as immunization. Jud described two specific practices his lab has studied.

Five-finger breathing uses top-down and bottom-up nervous system regulation simultaneously. As you breathe in, you trace from your pinky up to your thumb. As you breathe out, you trace back. Ten breaths, done anywhere, no equipment required.

Noting practice is even simpler. You pause and note whatever is most present in your experience, moment to moment, cycling through your five senses plus thinking, including seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking. You label what’s happening and move on.

Jud’s lab recently completed a three-year brain imaging study on noting practice. They induced worry in participants, including a high-anxiety group, and found that worry activated the default mode network, the self-referential processing center of the brain. After participants learned the noting practice (that same day, not weeks of training), the practice completely deactivated the default mode network below baseline. Even in people who had never meditated before. Experienced meditators showed an even greater decrease, which suggests the skill deepens with repetition.

Practice curiosity as long-term immunization. Jud kept coming back to this one. Curiosity, he said, is one of the best defenses against social contagion. When a headline triggers that familiar tightening in your chest, the difference between getting swept in and staying grounded often comes down to one internal shift. Instead of “oh no,” you go to “oh, interesting.”

That shift is small but physiologically significant. It gives your prefrontal cortex a moment to come back online before the emotional reaction takes over.

I experienced something like this a few years ago. We were in Florida, in the ocean in December, and the water was rough. Choppy on the surface, calmer underneath. I could feel anxiety swelling up, which is rare for me. But something very similar to what Jud describes as noting kicked in. I looked around. I checked in with what was actually happening rather than what I was afraid might happen. The anxiety dissolved, still there for a moment and then simply gone. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds, but it was a visceral demonstration of what grounding can do in real time.

What I Learned the Hard Way About Headlines

I shared something with Jud that felt relevant. When I first started writing on Substack, I occasionally used more urgent-sounding titles. Things like “number one cause of death as you get older.” I was trying to get people to stop scrolling and pay attention to something important. My subscribers told me it was anxiety-provoking. They said they didn’t come to me for that kind of energy.

They were right. They were protecting themselves from exactly the contagion Jud is describing. Even well-intentioned content can function as a vector if it triggers fear before it delivers value. I changed my approach after that.

A Practical Screen Trick

My son does something worth mentioning. He keeps his phone screen in grayscale mode. No color at all. He finds that the absence of bright, saturated visuals makes him significantly less likely to fall into a mindless scroll. It’s a small friction point, but friction is exactly what you need when the system is engineered to be frictionless.

What You Spread Comes Back to You

Jud ended our conversation with something that reframed everything we’d discussed. The goal isn’t just to protect ourselves from catching anxiety. It’s to deliberately spread something better.

Social contagion works in both directions. Some of the most popular content on Instagram is people doing kind things for strangers, and that content goes viral for the same reason fear-based content does, because emotions are contagious and we instinctively share what we feel.

The algorithm learns from your behavior. If you engage with fear-based content, the algorithm feeds you more of it. You amplify whatever chamber you’re in. But if you consistently engage with content rooted in curiosity and genuine usefulness, that’s what comes back to you.

We have a responsibility in this. Not just to ourselves, but to everyone we have influence over. What you amplify with your attention is what you’re spreading.

As Jud put it at the end of our conversation, here’s to spreading curiosity and kindness.

This article is based on my monthly conversation with Dr. Jud Brewer. You can watch the full interview in the video above.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s Inside the Curious Mind Substack

References

Vosoughi S, Roy D, Aral S. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 2018;359(6380):1146-1151. doi:10.1126/science.aap9559

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