I'm Mismatched?
Why So Many People Feel Unwell in Modern Life
Hi Folks, I’m experimenting with a more informal style please let me know how you find it in the comments or message me directly, thanks!
If you are reading this I’ve got bad news for you because you are most likely mismatched in some way. The good news is there are ways to reduce this mismatch and align more closely with what your body and brain evolved to expect.
As you probably already know human beings didn’t evolve for constant emails, notifications, shift work, social media, processed food, online dating, fluorescent lighting, sitting indoors all day, or being psychologically available to hundreds of people at once. We find ourselves in modernity carrying nervous systems shaped over hundreds of thousands of years in environments that looked completely different to the ones we now inhabit.
No wonder it feels like you’re always out of step, out of rhythm.
The basic idea behind evolutionary mismatch is actually very simple. Traits that were once useful can become unhelpful when the environment changes faster than we do. Evolution works slowly over large timescales. Technology and culture do not. In evolutionary terms, modern life happened just only yesterday.
Now this is not to say mental disorder or mental illness is due to mismatch (although it can be exacerbated by it). I’m focusing more on burnout, loneliness, dissatifcation, distress etc which are areas of low mental wellbeing which in my view reflect a growing disconnect between ancient human needs and modern conditions.
This doesn’t mean the past was idyllic or that we should all go back and live as hunter-gatherers. Absolutely not. Our ancestors dealt with starvation, violence, infection, high infant mortality, and forms of suffering most modern people never experience. But despite all that, the human brain and body were calibrated within those conditions because those were the conditions present for most of human history. Appetite, sleep, attention, stress responses, attachment, reward systems, social behaviour and more evolved in a world of movement, small groups, natural light, intermittent scarcity, and deep social interdependence.
Modern environments often disrupt those systems.
Take food as the obvious and simple example. Humans evolved strong preferences for sugar, fat, and salt because calories were scarce and valuable. In ancestral environments, craving energy-dense food was adaptive. In modern environments, where ultra-processed foods are cheap, heavily marketed, and available 24 hours a day, those same instincts can contribute to obesity and metabolic disease. The body is not “failing”. It’s responding exactly as it was designed to but just in a context it was never built for.
Mental health and wellbeing work similarly in my view.
Anxiety as a symptom, for example, is not simply a defect in the brain. Anxiety is part of a sophisticated threat-detection system. For most of human history, missing danger meant death. From an evolutionary perspective, it often made sense for the brain to err on the side of caution. Better to have a few false alarms than one missed predator. (See Nesse’s smoke alarm analogy).
But modern threats are strange and subtle. They’re chronic, abstract, symbolic. Mortgages. Performance reviews. Notifications. Social comparison. News cycles. Financial uncertainty. The nervous system still reacts as if threat is immediate and physical, even when the “predator” is an urgent unread email from your boss sitting silently in your inbox.
The same can probably be said for low mood and depression (as a symptom) in many cases. Humans are deeply social creatures. We evolved in small groups with regular contact, shared rituals, physical activity, time outdoors, and relatively clear roles within communities. A modern person can now spend most of their day indoors, sedentary, socially isolated, sleeping badly, eating poorly, staring at screens, and still technically appear “successful”.
Mismatch theory doesn’t argue that every problem is evolutionary, or that we should romanticise hunter-gatherer life. It’s more of a new lens to look through than a total explanation. A way of asking slightly different questions.
Instead of only asking: “What’s wrong with this person?”, we can also ask: “What kind of environment is this person trying to function in?” Or even, “What evolved needs are not being met here?”
Sometimes symptoms begin to look less like random malfunctions and more like understandable responses to difficult conditions. I don’t know about you but that elicits much more empathy and reduces stigma in my experience.
That shift can make all the difference clinically. Because if distress is partly arising from mismatch, then treatment can’t just be about symptom suppression. It also has to involve helping people build lives that fit their human nature a little better. Better sleep. More movement. Better relationships. More time outdoors. Less fragmentation. More meaning. More genuine connection. More community. Less constant overstimulation.
Not because these things are fashionable wellness trends, but because they seem to align with the kinds of conditions human beings are adapted for and where there is good evidence.
Mismatch Reduction Therapy starts from this idea. Many people are not broken in the way they think they are. Often they are trying to survive environments that pull against ancient emotional systems in ways we barely notice anymore because they’ve become normal. Some people can handle this better than others or longer than others, but ultimately everyone can benefit from taking stock of their mismatches and thinking about how they can gently reduce some of these.
The first therapeutic step is recognising that there is a mismatch there at all.
References
Gluckman, P. D., Hanson, M. A., & Beedle, A. S. (2007). Early life events and their consequences for later disease: A life history and evolutionary perspective. American Journal of Human Biology, 19(1), 1–19.
Li, N. P., van Vugt, M., & Colarelli, S. M. (2018). The evolutionary mismatch hypothesis: Implications for psychological science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(1), 38–44.
Nesse, R. M. (2019). Good reasons for bad feelings: Insights from the frontier of evolutionary psychiatry. Dutton.
Williams, G. C., & Nesse, R. M. (1991). The dawn of Darwinian medicine. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 66(1), 1–22.
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I'm glad to have found your work. I've been writing lately about a concept I've been calling "orphaned instincts," which are human impulses triggered but then left without a place to go. They're often hijacked by super-stimuli such as sugar, porn, video games. Here's my definition:
"An Orphaned Instinct is an evolved action tendency that was triggered by a precipitating event, mobilized at the autonomic and motoric level, and prevented from reaching its biological completion. The orphaning may have been imposed by external constraint (the threat was inescapable, the response was punished, the social field made the action impossible) or by internal conflict (a competing drive overrode the primary one). Orphaned Instincts persist as the symptomatic core of trauma. They generate intrusions, autonomic dysregulation, and the feeling-of-knowing signal that something remains undone."
I would enjoy interviewing you sometime for a livestream or a recorded podcast that we edit and release later. My authorly mileau involves the focus upon EMDR therapy and traumatology, especially as explained by evolutionary psychology.
Simple and profound: “What evolved needs are not being met here?”
Just as an evolution-aware psychiatry can de-stigmatize and re-humanize individuals, an evolution-aware politics can help us democratize and re-humanize governance.
For an evolution mismatch theory of politics, please see my essay, 'A Measure of Democracy'
https://meyerja.substack.com/p/a-measure-of-democracy