A Mind That Never Powers Down
Picture this: it is 7 a.m. Before you have said a word to another human being, you have already checked your sleep score (6.4 — not great), scrolled through headlines about a new climate report, and noticed a faint ache in your shoulder that you did not have yesterday. By the time your coffee is ready, your nervous system is already running at half-sprint. Sound familiar?
What you are experiencing has a name: hypervigilance, a state of sustained, heightened alertness in which the threat-detection system stays switched on long after any real danger has passed. Clinically, it was first described in the context of trauma and post-traumatic stress (APA, 2022). Nevertheless, today, it has quietly migrated into the everyday lives of people who have never experienced a traumatic event. It is being shaped, instead, by something far more diffuse: the culture we swim in.
When Staying Healthy Starts to Feel Like a Full-Time Job
At some point in the last decade, wellness stopped being something you did and became something you performed. Researchers call this the moralization of health: the gradual process by which dietary choices, sleep routines, and exercise habits become proxies for moral character (Rozin, 1999). Eating ultra-processed food is no longer just unhealthy, it is lazy. Skipping the gym is not just a preference, it is a failure.
Layer optimization culture on top of this, the idea that every biological function can and should be tracked, improved, and measured and you have a recipe for compulsive self-surveillance. The wearable on your wrist does not just record your heart rate; it renders you legible to yourself as data, and data can always be optimized further. Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory tells us what happens next: scrolling through someone else’s sunrise workout post while still in bed is not neutral consumption. It is a comparison that quietly registers as a deficit.
The cumulative toll of all this striving is what Cederström and Spicer (2015) aptly called wellness culture fatigue: an exhaustion that, from the outside, looks exactly like the thing it was supposed to prevent. Clinically, this intersects with health anxiety not in its diagnostic extreme, but in the low-grade, persistent version many of us carry: the inability to sit with bodily uncertainty without reaching for an explanation (Abramowitz & Braddock, 2008). Every notification from a health app is, in this sense, both a reassurance and a fresh invitation to worry.
The Planet is Anxious Too (and So are We)
For a growing number of people, the body is not the only thing they are monitoring. The news cycle brings wildfires, floods, and heat records with such regularity that catastrophe feels ambient. This is the terrain of eco-anxiety, a term Clayton et al. (2017) use to describe the chronic, functional apprehension about environmental collapse that many people now carry as background noise. The APA (2017) has documented its measurable impact on psychological well-being, particularly among younger adults who grew up during the crisis rather than watching it unfold.
What makes this especially exhausting is the mechanism Sweller (1988) described as cognitive load: working memory has a finite capacity, and a mind that is simultaneously tracking personal biomarkers and planetary collapse has very little room left for anything else. Concentration frays. Small decisions feel disproportionately heavy. Rest, when it comes, is shallow because the threat-scanner never fully closes.
The Feed That Feeds the Fear
There is one more actor in this story, and it is the one most of us carry in our pockets. Doomscrolling, the compulsive, almost trance-like consumption of distressing content, is not a personal weakness. It is an algorithmically predictable output. Threat-laden content generates more engagement; engagement-maximizing systems therefore surface it first (Bail et al., 2018). We are not failing to look away. We are behaving exactly as the system was designed to make us behave.
Running beneath this is what Bucher (2018) calls algorithmic anxiety: the unsettling awareness that what appears in your feed is not neutral, that unseen decisions are shaping your perception of reality, and that you have no meaningful way to audit them. For someone already primed to scan for threats, this opacity is not a minor inconvenience. It is one more thing that cannot be known, one more uncertainty that cannot be resolved and the hypervigilant mind does not do well with unresolved uncertainty.
What Can Actually Help
For clinicians, the first shift may be a perceptual one: the hypervigilance presenting in consulting rooms today is not only an intrapsychic pattern, it is also a culturally and technologically produced one. Formulations that ignore the environment in which a person is living risk missing half the picture.
Both ACT and CBT offer evidence-based tools for interrupting self-surveillance cycles and building tolerance of uncertainty (Hayes et al., 2012). Nevertheless, for many people, change begins somewhere more practical: turning off non-essential notifications, setting deliberate limits on news consumption, and perhaps most countercultural of all relating to the body not as a performance to be optimized, but as a home to be inhabited with some degree of self-compassion. We live in a moment in which vigilance looks like responsibility, and rest looks like negligence. Unlearning that equation is slow, unglamorous work. However, it may be some of the most important psychological work available to us right now.
References
Abramowitz, J. S., & Braddock, A. E. (2008). Psychological treatment of health anxiety and hypochondria: A biopsychosocial approach. Hogrefe & Huber.
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). APA Publishing.
American Psychological Association. (2017). Mental health and our changing climate: Impacts, implications, and guidance. APA.
Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W., Bumpus, J. P., Chen, H., Hunzaker, M. B. F., Lee, J., Mann, M., Merhout, F., & Volfovsky, A. (2018). Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(37), 9216–9221. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804840115
Bucher, T. (2018). If… then: Algorithmic power and politics. Oxford University Press.
Cederström, C., & Spicer, A. (2015). The wellness syndrome. Polity Press.
Clayton, S., Manning, C. M., Krygsman, K., & Speiser, M. (2017). Mental health and our changing climate: Impacts, implications, and guidance. APA & ecoAmerica.
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and commitment therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Rozin, P. (1999). The process of moralization. Psychological Science, 10(3), 218–221.
Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00139