Understanding the links among stress, inflammation, mental state, and behavior is vitally important to human and planetary health.

According to our hypothesis, inflammation acts as a multiscale driver connecting stressors that affect individuals to large-scale societal dysfunction and ultimately to planetary-scale impacts on the environment, which in turn drive inflammatory stress via a positive feedback loop.

We propose a “central inflammation map” hypothesis to explain how the brain regulates inflammation and how inflammation impairs perception, emotion, cognition, consciousness, and behavior.

The interdependent inflammatory and neural processes, and the inter-individual transmission of environmental and infectious stressors—amplified via high-throughput digital global communications—culminate in a multiscale, runaway, feed-forward process that could detrimentally affect human decision-making and behavior at scale, ultimately impairing our ability to address these same stressors at both the individual and population levels.

We propose a mathematical model that can be used to elucidate and test the links between stress, inflammation, neural control/cognition, and healing, with resultant implications on stress transmission, possible intervention (e.g., via lifestyle modification or medication), and resilience.

A coordinated, interdisciplinary, international research effort is needed to define interventions that would improve the lives of individuals and the resilience of communities to stress—involving multilayered, multiscale stress mitigation interventions covering lifestyle measures, precision therapeutics, and human ecosystem design.