Then the global nervous system evolved with the telephone, radio, television and, of course, the internet.

These connections are, in many ways, making us ever closer. We can email or text or Skype or Facetime or play multiplayer online games in real time with people 10,000 miles away. Physical distance is increasingly irrelevant. Social media has enabled collective action like never before, from riots to revolutions to shock election results. The internet has enabled us to join together and make change happen. For better and for worse.

The trouble is that if we are plugged in to a vast nervous system, our happiness – and misery – is more collective than ever. The group’s emotions become our own.

Mass hysterics

THERE ARE THOUSANDS of examples in history of individuals getting their emotions influenced by the crowd, from the Salem witch trials to Beatlemania.

One of the most amusing/frightening examples is the case of the French convent in the 15th century where a nun began to miaow like a cat. Pretty soon, other nuns started to miaow, too. And within a few months the nearby villagers were startled to hear all the nuns miaowing for several hours a day in a loud cat chorus. They only stopped miaowing when the local authorities threatened to whip them.

There are other odd examples. Such as the Dancing Plague of 1518, where, over the course of a month, 400 people in Strasbourg danced themselves to the point of collapse – and in some cases death – for no understandable reason. No music was even playing.

Or during the Napoleonic Wars when, legend has it, the inhabitants of Hartlepool, England, collectively convinced themselves that a shipwrecked monkey was a French spy and hanged the poor, confused primate. Fake news has been around for a while.

And now, of course, we have a technology – the internet – that makes collective group behaviour more possible and more likely. Different things – songs, tweets, cat videos – go viral on a daily, or hourly, basis. The word ‘viral’ is perfect at describing the contagious effect caused by the combination of human nature and technology. And, of course, it isn’t just videos and products and tweets that can be contagious. Emotions can be, too.

A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.

Baby steps

IT WAS THE same again. ‘Matt, get off the internet.’

Andrea was right, and she was only looking after me, but I didn’t want to hear it.

‘It’s fine.’

‘It’s not fine. You’re having an argument with someone. You’re writing a book about how to cope with the stress of the internet and you’re getting stressed on the internet.’

‘That’s not really what it’s about. I’m trying to understand how our minds are affected by modernity. I’m writing about the world as a nervous planet. How our psychology is connected. I’m writing about all aspects of a—’

She held up her palm. ‘Okay. I don’t want the TED talk.’

I sighed. ‘I’m just getting back to an email.’

‘No. No, you aren’t.’

‘Okay. I’m on Twitter. But there’s one point I’ve just got to get across—’

‘Matt, it’s up to you. But I thought the whole idea was that you were doing all this to try to work out how not to get like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘So wrapped up in stuff you shouldn’t be wrapped up in. I just don’t want you ill. This is how you get ill. That’s all.’

She left the room. I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn’t going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else’s life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watched each letter disappear.

An ode to social media

When anger trawls the internet,

Looking for a hook;

It’s time to disconnect,

And go and read a book.

Mirrors

NEUROBIOLOGISTS HAVE IDENTIFIED ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates – including us – during interaction with others.

In a connected age, the mirrors get bigger.

When people feel scared after a horrific event, that fear spreads like a digital wildfire.

When people feel angry, that anger breeds.

Even when people with contradictory opinions to us exhibit an emotion, we can feel a similar one. For instance, if someone is furious at you online for something, you are unlikely to adopt their opinion but it is quite likely you will catch their fury. You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state.

I have done this many times, which is why Andrea was frustrated with me. I have become embroiled in some argument with someone who has called me a ‘snowflake’ or ‘libtard’ or who has tweet-shouted ‘LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL DISORDER’ at me. I kind of know that arguing with people online is not the most fulfilling way to spend our limited days on this earth and yet I have done it, without much control. I recognise this now. And I need to stop it.

Anyway, my point is that while I am politically very different to the people I argue with, psychologically we are fuelling each other with the same feelings of anger. Political opposition but emotional mirroring.

I once tweeted something silly in a state of anxiety.

‘Anxiety is my superpower,’ I said.

I didn’t mean anxiety was a good thing. I meant that anxiety was ridiculously intense, that we people who have an excess of it walk through life like an anxious Clark Kent or a tormented Bruce Wayne knowing the secret of who we are. And that it can be a burden of racing uncontrollable thoughts and despair but one, just occasionally, that we can convince ourselves has a silver lining.

For instance, personally I am thankful that it forced me to stop smoking, to get physically healthy, that it made me work out what was good for me, and who cared for me and who didn’t. I am thankful that it led me to trying to help some other people who experience it, and I am thankful that it led me – during good patches – to feel life more intensely.

It was essentially what I had written in Reasons to Stay Alive. But I hadn’t expressed it very well in this tweet. And then, suddenly, I was getting a lot of attention on Twitter.

I decided to delete my tweet, but people had screengrabbed it and were rallying the ranks of the Twitter angry to direct their ire in my direction. ‘SUPERPOWER???? WTF!!!’ ‘@matthaig1 IS TOXIC’ ‘Delete your account’ ‘What a fucking idiot’ and so on. And you stay on, scared, watching this car crash of your own making, as your timeline fills with tens then hundreds of angry people, convinced that as they were touching a raw nerve they had a point. By the way, ‘touched a raw nerve’ is an irrelevant phrase if you have anxiety. Every nerve feels raw.

The anger became contagious and I could feel it almost like a physical force radiating from the screen. My heart started to beat twice as fast. Everything felt like it was closing in. The air got thinner. I was backed into a corner. I began to feel a bit like reality was melting away. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.’ I lost myself in a brief panic attack. I felt an unhealthy fusion of guilt and fear and defensive anger, and became determined never to live-tweet my way out of anxiety again.

Some things are best kept to yourself.

But also – more importantly – I wanted to find a way to stop other people’s view of me becoming my view of me. I wanted to create some emotional immunity. Social media, when you get too wrapped up in it, can make you feel like you are inside a stock exchange where you – or your online personality – is the stock. And when people start piling on, you feel your personal share price plummet. I wanted free of that. I wanted to psychologically disconnect myself. To be a self-sustaining market, psychologically speaking. To be comfortable with my own mistakes, knowing that every human is more than them. To allow myself to realise I know my inner workings better than a stranger does. To be able for other people to think I was a wanker, without me feeling I was one. To care about other people, but not about their misreadings of me within the opinion matrix of the internet.

How to stay sane on the internet: a list of utopian commandments I rarely follow, because they are so damn difficult

1.Practise abstinence. Social media abstinence, especially. Resist whatever unhealthy excesses you feel drawn towards. Strengthen those muscles of restraint.

2.Don’t type symptoms into Google unless you want to spend seven hours convinced you will be dead before dinner.