by Dr. Jeffrey Desarbo, Neuropsychiatrist

Several months ago, standing between patients during a particularly busy day, I looked over at my office manager, Tam, and asked a question that had quietly been occupying my mind for quite some time: “Does it feel to you like there’s something in the air?” I was not referring to viruses, allergens, or illness. I was referring to a thickness in the air that seemed riddled with an almost tangible anxiety.

As a psychiatrist, anxiety disorders have always been a part of my daily work. Generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, illness anxiety, social anxiety, and phobias have always occupied a meaningful percentage of psychiatric practice. Humans have worried for thousands of years. We have feared uncertainty, illness, financial instability, embarrassment, rejection, and death since the earliest days of civilization.

Yet over approximately the last five years, something feels different. Not simply more anxiety. Different anxiety. More and more people appear to describe feeling chronically activated, perpetually on edge, and unable to fully return to baseline.

It’s Not Just a Feeling, It’s a Fact

Large epidemiological studies from the early 2000s, including the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, suggested that anxiety disorders already affected approximately 18–19% of American adults annually. Since then, according to a 2024 national poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association, approximately 43% of American adults reported feeling more anxious than they did the previous year, up from 37% the year before and 32% the year before that. And based on what I’ve been experiencing in my practice, I’m confident 2025 was higher, and 2026 will be even higher again.

Many patients describe feeling as though their brains are continuously preparing for something bad that never arrives. Others describe feeling overwhelmed, even though they cannot clearly identify what they are worried about. Perhaps many clinicians have quietly wondered the same thing: Have anxiety disorders become more common, or is anxiety itself becoming contagious?

Earlier this year, in my article Your Hijacked Attention: Fear, Anger, and the Case for Selective Ignorance on BucketListDoctor.com, I discussed how media, technology, social platforms, and perpetual information exposure increasingly hijack human attention systems and amplify fear-based thinking. That article primarily focused on what happens when anxiety enters our brains through screens. This article asks a different question: what happens when anxiety enters through other people?

Most people have experienced this phenomenon, whether they recognize it or not. You may wake up feeling relatively peaceful. Your morning feels calm, your nervous system regulated, and your attention focused on your day ahead. Then you encounter someone who appears overwhelmed, worried about finances, illness, politics, uncertainty, the future, or catastrophizing about events they cannot control. Within minutes, something changes. Your shoulders tighten. Your heart rate subtly increases. Your attention begins scanning for problems. The day that began peacefully gradually becomes more stressful.

What happened? You may have simply caught anxiety.

Acute and Chronic Anxiety

It is important to clarify that not all anxiety is the same. Anxiety occurring in response to identifiable stressors, financial hardship, relationship difficulties, illness, grief, job insecurity, or major life changes is understandable. In many situations, acute anxiety serves an adaptive function. It directs attention toward problems, motivates action, and helps mobilize resources during difficult periods. If somebody loses their job and becomes anxious about paying their mortgage, the presence of anxiety itself is not particularly surprising.

What feels different clinically is something else entirely. Increasingly, many individuals describe living in a more chronic state of anxiety that behaves less like a temporary emotional response and more like a persistent condition affecting both mind and body. Patients often describe feeling unsettled, worried, tense, mentally exhausted, unable to relax, or perpetually preparing for something bad despite being unable to clearly identify what exactly they fear. Many describe feeling unhappy or emotionally uncomfortable without meeting the criteria for depressive disorders. Others simply describe feeling as though something is wrong despite being unable to identify what that something is.

This distinction matters because chronic anxiety rarely remains static. Much like many medical conditions, untreated anxiety often becomes progressively more impairing over time. Prolonged activation of stress systems may gradually begin influencing sleep, concentration, attention, digestion, emotional regulation, physical health, relationships, occupational functioning, and decision-making. Eventually, anxiety may stop feeling like something a person experiences and begin feeling like something they live inside.

This progression can carry real-world consequences. Individuals living in persistent states of threat detection frequently become more emotionally reactive, more irritable, less psychologically flexible, and sometimes less empathic toward others—not because they become uncaring people, but because chronically activated nervous systems allocate enormous resources toward self-preservation. Heated emotions become more common. Patience becomes harder. Small problems begin feeling larger. Relationships become strained. Work performance may decline. Financial problems may emerge. In difficult situations, legal consequences, substance use, avoidance behaviors, impulsive decisions, or social isolation may develop as individuals increasingly organize their lives around attempts to reduce distress.

The 3 Types of Contagion

An evolutionary reality may explain why anxiety appears uniquely contagious. Fear spreads because missing genuine danger is costly. False alarms, while inconvenient, are comparatively inexpensive. As a result, anxiety captures attention in ways many other emotions do not. Relaxation rarely demands immediate resources from the brain. Fear almost always does.

The first way anxiety appears to spread may therefore be emotional contagion itself. Parents often unintentionally transmit anxiety to children. Teachers may transmit anxiety to classrooms. Clinicians sometimes transmit anxiety to patients, while patients certainly transmit anxiety to clinicians. Entire workplaces can become emotionally dysregulated when enough anxious individuals occupy the same environment. Human nervous systems evolved for relatively small tribes and communities. Today, they operate inside enormous social ecosystems containing billions of interacting nervous systems.

A second mechanism may involve behavioral contagion. Anxiety does not simply spread emotions; it spreads behaviors. Consider somebody increasingly worried about illness. They repeatedly check symptoms online, seek reassurance, constantly discuss medical concerns, avoid activities, or repeatedly monitor bodily sensations. Gradually, those around them begin changing their behaviors as well. Family members become more attentive to symptoms. Partners begin checking more frequently. Friends become increasingly focused on potential health threats. Behavioral psychology has long demonstrated that humans learn through observation. We watch how others respond to uncertainty and, often outside awareness, begin copying those behaviors ourselves.

The third mechanism, psychiatric contagion, may be the most complicated. Psychiatric disorders themselves are not directly contagious in the traditional sense. Spending time around somebody with panic disorder does not automatically create panic disorder. Spending time around somebody with obsessive-compulsive disorder does not automatically create OCD. Anxiety disorders remain influenced by genetics, temperament, neurobiology, developmental experiences, trauma histories, and environmental exposure. However, psychiatric symptoms clearly cluster socially. We observe this phenomenon repeatedly across families, schools, workplaces, friend groups, and communities, and increasingly in online environments. Humans are not isolated psychological units functioning independently from one another. We function more like networks.

Biology also matters. Genetics influences vulnerability toward anxiety. Some individuals inherit nervous systems that appear more reactive to uncertainty, more sensitive to physiological arousal, or more prone toward threat detection. The brain itself, as a network of structures involved in emotional processing, threat detection, salience assignment, memory formation, and autonomic regulation, continuously communicates with itself. Once anxiety repeatedly activates these systems, the brain often becomes increasingly efficient at identifying additional reasons to remain anxious.

The uncomfortable possibility is that modern society may have unintentionally created ideal conditions for large-scale anxiety transmission. Humans evolved within relatively small communities. Today, we exist inside enormous emotional ecosystems where fear, outrage, uncertainty, economic instability, political conflict, health concerns, and catastrophic information spread continuously.

A Brain-Based Understanding 

From a neuroscience perspective, what many clinicians may increasingly be observing is something I informally think of as infectious chronic anxiety—not a formal diagnosis, but rather a state in which persistent anxiety appears capable of amplifying itself both within individuals and between individuals. Brain regions involved in threat detection, salience assignment, autonomic regulation, emotional processing, executive functioning, and memory, including the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and broader salience networks, continuously communicate to determine what deserves attention and what can safely be ignored.

When anxiety becomes prolonged, these systems may gradually become biased toward uncertainty detection and hypervigilance, increasingly allocating resources toward potential threats while becoming less efficient at returning to baseline. Repeated activation strengthens fear-based learning pathways and reinforces communication between these systems, effectively training the brain to attend to uncertainty itself. Because neuroplastic systems strengthen what they repeatedly practice, anxious brains may gradually become increasingly efficient at producing anxiety.

What makes this particularly interesting is that nervous systems rarely function independently. Humans continuously exchange emotional information through facial expressions, behavior, language, social interactions, and countless subtle cues processed outside awareness. In this sense, chronic anxiety may behave less like an isolated emotional experience and more like a network phenomenon in which activated nervous systems increasingly activate other nervous systems.

How to Avoid Contamination

Fortunately, contagious processes work in both directions. Calm spreads. Optimism spreads. Curiosity spreads. Purpose spreads, although perhaps, if not certainly, without the same vigor.

As a psychiatrist, one of the first distinctions I try to make is whether anxiety appears acute and situational or more chronic and pervasive. When clear triggers are present, medications or biological interventions may help individuals cope during difficult periods as circumstances improve. However, when anxiety behaves more like a chronic condition, with or without identifiable triggers, without obvious triggers, psychotherapy and mindfulness training are almost always indicated, whether medications are prescribed or not, as treatment often requires understanding the underlying patterns maintaining anxiety itself.

This is partly why psychotherapy remains such an important tool. Sometimes therapy helps identify triggers and patterns that individuals cannot easily recognize in themselves. Other times, therapy focuses less on discovering the same hidden causes and more on helping individuals understand how their nervous systems operate, why anxiety maintains itself, and how to develop practical strategies that reduce suffering and restore psychological flexibility.

This is also partly why I continue returning to concepts such as bucket listing, novelty exposure, mindfulness, social connection, and purposeful living. Not because these interventions magically eliminate anxiety, but because they may strengthen something I increasingly think of as our emotional immune system. In my book The Neuroscience of a Bucket List, I write about three categories everyone should include in their bucket list, including mindfulness activities. Mindful pursuits are important for the brain and quality of life.

Mindfulness teaches individuals to observe emotional states without automatically absorbing them. Novelty teaches the brain that uncertainty is not always dangerous. Purpose provides attention to something constructive to go. Bucket listing intentionally exposes individuals to manageable uncertainty, challenge, social connection, curiosity, creativity, and growth, all experiences that may strengthen psychological flexibility.

To avoid being infected with anxiety, the goal is not to avoid anxious people. That would be impossible. The goal may instead be to build nervous systems resilient enough that, when we inevitably encounter anxiety, we do not automatically catch it.

Perhaps the better question is not whether anxiety is contagious. Perhaps the better question is: How strong is your emotional immune system when you encounter it?

Dr. Jeffrey DeSarbo, is a neuropsychiatrist and author of The Neuroscience of a Bucket List: Getting the Most from Your Brain and Life. In addition to being a frequent guest on various media shows and lecturing internationally, he has a practice in Garden City, New York where he works with a variety of patients to achieve optimal mental health.

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