If the modern world feels like too much, like you’re constantly drowning in bad news, social media, workplace pressure, and a constant barrage of bad news, both global and personal, the problem may not be you. According to a new review published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, the human brain evolved to live in small communities, and it’s struggling to cope with life inside sprawling cities and an internet life that never stops being as dramatic.
Researchers say that the cause of your brain constantly feeling like it’s being stressed and on the verge of frying out stems from what they call an “evolutionary mismatch,” which means that our brains are still running on software designed for relatively small villages where everybody knows each other, and yet we live in a world where we are being constantly bombarded with billions of strangers and their problems, which may or may not directly relate to any one of the endless cycle of crises’ happening concurrently at any given time.
It’s good that our brains are hardwired to make us care deeply about the people around us and their physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. That’s how our communities survived and thrived. But maybe we were a little too good at it, so good that we eventually built vast, sprawling communities of billions that are now as interconnected as they’ve ever been, and our brains just can’t handle all that data.
Every scroll through a social media feed is a constant reminder of someone else’s misery or wild success, making us feel miserable. It’s instilled in us a desperate sense of competition that isn’t so much fueling us to keep pace as psychologically punishing us.
Your Brain Wasn’t Built for Modern Life, and Researchers Say That May Explain Why Everything Feels So Overwhelming
The authors also point to the aforementioned series of overlapping crises, which they summed up in a word: “polycrisis.” We live in a world of pandemics, wars, streaming economic inequality, climate change, and here we are, caught in the middle of it all, seemingly unable to decide who to put in charge of handling it all, if we even believe any of it is solvable in the first place.
Our ancient ancestors didn’t have to think about how something happening on the other side of the world could affect them, and yet their tremendous success in community building has led us to worry about the interconnectedness of it all. Our brains treat that kind of information as immediately relevant to us, even when we can’t do anything about it.
The authors made it clear that this isn’t one of those reductive and frankly quite stupid “the past was better than the present” arguments. It’s all about recognizing that our mental health is impacted by our individual choices and the immediate environments we exist within, but also by the vastly broader environments that our brains just weren’t evolved to handle.
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