A Vision for a Calmer World
Imagine a world that is less angry, less anxious, less stressed.
A world where tempers cool before they flare and anxiety ebbs before it floods emotions. I recently proposed a non-invasive device named Calmate that provides one second of sanity when anger rises. It relies on monitoring a person’s heart rate and sends a cool pulse to the back of the neck to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Because it is an autonomic response based on purely physiological signals, it does not require any conscious effort on behalf of the wearer. Since anxiety and stress share the same physiological signs (i.e. increased heart rate, reduced heart rate variability, increased blood pressure), the device can also be applied to alleviate anxiety and stress.
Benefits to society
Over time, calmer homes become calmer cohorts. Nearly one third of adults have trouble controlling their anger. When adults argue less often and erupt less violently, children have the space to grow up without chronic stress and anxiety. Childhood self-regulation predicts adult health, earnings, and even criminal convictions, although these links reflect broad population patterns rather than destiny for any individual. When we reduce household volatility, the population distribution shifts gently towards better educational performance, fewer attempts to anaesthetize childhood trauma with substances, and lower rates of adolescent anxiety. The next generation enters adulthood smarter and healthier.
Outside the home, less anger means fewer impulsive outbursts in traffic and fewer accidents triggered by road rage. Calmer online users cyberbully less; this reduces one important path that contributes to self-harm in teenagers. Although devices such as Calmate cannot reach every bully, they can attack a part of the problem at the source.
Workplaces benefit as emotional turbulence correlates with drops in creativity and rises in conflict. Anxiety narrows our attention and degrades working memory, which leads to more errors and fewer useful ideas. A more stable workforce therefore makes fewer costly mistakes and requires fewer resources to manage interpersonal friction.
Communities gain resilience, too. Chronic stress distorts social perception and inflates threat sensitivity. Stressed individuals interpret ambiguity as danger and strangers as rivals, partly because the prefrontal cortex is less active. When we reduce stress, trust becomes easier and neighbourhoods more cohesive, because social trust increases local prosperity and civic participation.
A population that is less stressed and less angry generates fewer violent incidents, which eases the burden on police, courts, and prisons. Interventions that improve emotion regulation in youths reduce reoffending rates later, which shows how strongly affective stability shapes public safety. These interventions require parents, teachers, and peers to work together; anger and stress really need to be tackled at the societal and not merely the individual level.
The same goes for hospitals. Fewer stress-related complaints and fewer acute mental health crises lighten emergency rooms, shorten waiting times and reduce clinician burnout. Effective anxiety treatment frees significant healthcare capacity. When doctors are less overwhelmed, they deliver better care.
The political consequences are subtle but real. High collective stress increases susceptibility to polarizing rhetoric and out-group hatred. Threatened citizens choose more punitive policies and less cooperative leaders.
Reduce stress, anger, and anxiety in individuals and we can improve behaviour that strains families, schools, workplaces, roads, and institutions. We can also spare a generation of children from developmental conditions that would otherwise ripple for decades more.
Economic benefits to society
Calmate has to be globally affordable rather than a luxury gadget. A device meant to reduce stress, anger, and anxiety should not become yet another privilege product. Most wellness hardware sells for hundreds of dollars. At that price point it excludes the very people who bear the heaviest psychological burden. A design based on widely available components can plausibly keep the price well below that of a cheap refurbished smartphone, low enough to be within reach for most adults in middle- and high-income countries, and over time, for many in low-income countries too. That alone is a $100 billion opportunity in which every dollar consumers spend on a Calmate, society benefits by up to fifty.
Why now?
As I noted in One Second of Sanity, domestic violence and mental health problems worsen with rising ambient temperatures. Climate change is about to turn the world into a hotbed for affective problems. Insecurity due to climate change will initially increase anxiety and stress in coastal populations and then in high-income nations as climate refugees start pouring in.
Another silent stressor affects daily life. Microplastics are everywhere, from the oceans to the air and even inside organs. Humans consume several milligrams of microplastics from both processed and unprocessed foods daily, though particularly from ultra-processed foods. Oxidative stress from microplastics damages cells and causes inflammation, which in turn burdens the nervous system that is responsible for regulating mood. The consumption of ultra-processed foods is related to higher rates of anxiety. Microplastics are toxic to neurons and disrupt neurotransmitter systems, which may contribute to rising rates of several mental health conditions.
What’s next?
Calmate is still a proposal grounded in well-understood physiology rather than a clinically validated device, yet the underlying mechanism is robust. The challenge is in translating this into a reliable, consumer-grade device that works across diverse populations. As ambient stressors rise, such as heat, pollution, and insecurity, the ability to regulate our physiology becomes a form of public infrastructure. Like sanitation and vaccinations, the benefit scales not with individual virtue but with ubiquity; the more physiologically regulated a population is, the less strain falls on families, schools, clinics, and courts. A small, affordable device won’t save the world, but it can give millions an extra second of sanity in this tense century. That, in itself, is a small step towards a calmer world.