JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Mental disorders remain among the leading causes of non‑fatal disease burden worldwide, with anxiety and depressive disorders accounting for a large share across diverse settings in the most recent Global Burden of Disease Study 2023 estimates. This persistent and widespread burden invites reflection on whether rapid transformations of everyday life have altered the baseline conditions under which human attention, emotion regulation, and social functioning must operate. This perspective article develops a hypothesis that four successive digital revolutions such as the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, and generative artificial intelligence have compressed adaptation demands into an unusually short historical period. Drawing on literature on neuroplasticity, technostress, and environmental change, it argues that although the human brain is highly plastic, repeated adaptation to rapidly evolving digital ecologies has metabolic, emotional, and attentional costs. When technological environments change faster than biological and social systems can stabilise, cognitive overload, uncertainty, and chronic vigilance may become background conditions of daily life. In such a context, anxiety can be fuelled by constant comparison, information excess, and fear of obsolescence, while depressive symptoms may emerge through exhaustion, degraded sleep, and weakened embodied forms of rest and belonging. Rather than proposing a single cause for anxiety and depression, this article suggests that accelerated digital transformation may function as an amplifying ecological factor acting alongside familiar determinants such as adversity and inequality. It calls for mental health research and policy to consider not only individual technologies, but the cumulative impact of repeated, layered technological transitions across the life course.