A nervous system for another world: evolutionary mismatch and the wrong turns of contemporary life

M Many of those who seek help want to be rid of anxiety, low mood and pressure, but preferably without slowing down, and without squeezing in recovery or anything else that might be good for the body and the self. There is not enough time, and the reactions, what the body and feelings are trying to say, are seen as obstacles rather than signals. The risk we easily run is that the work becomes a matter of managing even more, rather than stopping to look at the pace itself and the life that demands it. As I listen, I sometimes think the difficulty lies not solely in the person in front of me, but in the relationship between her and the world she lives in.

A new article by Jose Yong and colleagues, published in the journal Behavioral Sciences in 2026, attempts to offer a unifying explanation for just that feeling. It is not a treatment study but a conceptual review, an attempt to weave many scattered observations into a common framework, and that framework is called evolutionary mismatch.

Adapted to a world that no longer exists

The basic idea is that our feelings and reactions were shaped over thousands of generations, in small groups of perhaps a hundred and fifty people, in natural environments and in societies that were relatively egalitarian. The psychological mechanisms were built for that world. The problem is that that world has largely gone. We now live in cities with hundreds of thousands of strangers, in societies marked by large differences in status and resources, with social media endlessly showing us other people’s successes and a news feed that never lets the threats end. The nervous system keeps running its old rules in an environment they no longer fit.

The authors remind us that there is nothing mysterious about this. The same logic explains why we are drawn to sugar: an adaptation that once protected us from starvation becomes, in a time of abundance, a route to ill health. Their point is that the same kind of mismatch also applies to the psychological and social, not only the physical.

When the environment manufactures competition

What is really new in the article is a hypothesis they call the social mismatch and competition hypothesis. It proposes that it is above all the social forms of mismatch – the large populations, the loosened communities, inequality and the constantly inflated status signals – that drive up competition, both real and perceived. And it is competition, rather than modernity in general, that the authors argue leads on to status-seeking, hostility and withdrawal. In that light, the feeling of constantly competing and measuring oneself against others becomes not a personal character trait but a predictable response to an environment that continually feeds the system with comparisons.

Why it concerns the therapy room

For me, working with metacognitive therapy and ISTDP, this is interesting for several reasons. Metacognitive therapy starts from the position that suffering is kept going by processes such as worry, rumination, dysfunctional coping and constant self-monitoring, what is called the cognitive attentional syndrome. What Yong and his colleagues describe is an environment almost ideally suited to sustaining precisely those processes, because it supplies us with an endless stream of threats to monitor and others to compare ourselves with. The monitoring always has something to monitor.

In ISTDP, on the other hand, we work with the emotional bonds and needs that have been there since childhood, for survival, and with the defences and bodily reactions that arise when those needs are not met. Here too the framework feels relevant, because much of what the article describes concerns communities that have grown thinner and relationships that have become more numerous but thinner. The body often carries a longing that contemporary life has made difficult even to put into words, particularly when we try to numb suffering with behaviours that mainly seek to avoid feelings.

The most important clinical value, I think, nevertheless lies in the shift of perspective itself. A person seeking help almost always carries a quiet conviction that the fault lies with her, that she ought to manage what others seem to manage. Being able to see her worry or exhaustion as an old warning system meeting an environment built to keep it running can bring a relief that makes further work easier. It is the same movement therapy often tries to bring about: making visible the patterns that maintain suffering without placing the blame on the person who suffers. In therapy, we then challenge these patterns, defences and behaviours, call them what you will, to open up the possibility of flexibility that is both metacognitive and emotional, where deliberate and alternative actions become clearer to the patient. It is about insight, about flexibility, about emotional experience and about rest.

What the article does not say

The article is a theoretical review, not a study. It contains no patients, no measurements and no effect sizes. It puts forward a hypothesis and indicates how it might be tested, but it has not yet been tested. The authors themselves are clear about this, and they explicitly warn that so broad a framework risks becoming an explanation for everything, and therefore an explanation for nothing in particular. They emphasise that evolutionary mismatch is not the only cause of contemporary problems; culture, economics, institutions and personality play at least as great a role.

The suggestions with which the article ends follow the same caution. Seeking more face-to-face encounters, moderating one’s use of social media, spending more time in nature and curbing constant consumption are reasonable ideas, but they are proposed measures at the level of lifestyle rather than tested treatment, and the authors point out that such changes can sometimes feel worse before they feel better.

Even so, I take something from this text into the room. Not a prescription, and not a truth to assert, but a way of understanding why so many people today carry a vague sense of never being enough. Sometimes it is not the person who is at fault, but the distance between her and the world she is trying to live in. Lifestyle advice may have its place to some extent, but what I am most curious about is understanding contemporary life and the self’s place in it, and the gravity between them.

Part of that work is helping the person seeking help to see that diagnoses are categories, not explanations. A diagnosis can describe a pattern, but says nothing about why the pattern arose, and it absolves neither contemporary life nor the context. I am sincerely troubled by the eagerness with which more and more difficulties today are to be assessed, medicated and treated, as though the answer to a substantial part of the population no longer being able to keep up were to use methylphenidate, amphetamine or pep talks to make them function a little better in a world that needs adapting more than the people struggling in it do. I am deliberately putting this sharply. My point is not that assessments and medical treatments are never needed, because sometimes they are, particularly when a treatment is not working, when it is unclear what maintains the suffering, or when comorbidity is so high that categorical diagnoses cloud the picture rather than clarify it. Psychotropic medication can likewise be a temporary solution, but it also carries significant risks, and all too often we confuse a societal problem with an individual one.

Psychological suffering is rarely an illness in the body in the way an infection is. Here I draw a conclusion that the article itself is too cautious to formulate, but viewed through the lens of mismatch it seems close at hand: it is more often contemporary life that is sick than the individual’s own make-up. Much of what we call ill health consists of understandable reactions to circumstances that ought to be met with adaptation and political will as much as with treatment.

At the same time, that does not mean the individual is left helpless, and this matters to me. As a psychologist in clinical practice, I do not see my task as curing someone by relieving their symptoms. The symptoms are, rather, the way towards understanding the cause, and a large part of the work consists in helping the patient towards that insight. As the assumptions about where the symptoms come from begin to clear, it is natural for the symptoms themselves to fluctuate, and only when the patient can see the body’s reactions as function and as a protective system, rather than enemies to silence, does lasting change become possible. It is about making one’s own agency visible, and with it a more meaningful adaptation to the norms and dysfunction that nevertheless characterise the society we live in.

Therapy is a process of change that begins in the sessions but continues long after they have ended. One day we will die, but on all the other days we shall live. But how we shall live, that is the question.