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We have not evolved to cope with modern life.

We face too much input from too many directions, and we are overloaded.

Key environments need to change to better meet our psychological needs.

There is something I have known for a long time, something that clients are increasingly bringing into their sessions with me, and something that needs to be written about way more often than it currently is. And it’s this: All the stress, all the exhaustion, all the mental health issues; it’s not you. It is not your fault. It’s not even your responsibility. Basically, our brains just aren’t built to handle modern life. They have not evolved enough to cope with the constant demands, distractions, and decisions that our societies contain, involve, and heap upon us each and every single day. And finally, psychological research is saying it too.

A recent meta-analysis, published in the journal Behavioural Sciences, highlights a rather large evolutionary mismatch between the environments we human beings actually evolved for and the environments we currently find ourselves in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mismatch is causing many of our mental health problems. Our brains and our bodies are still hunter-gatherer brains and bodies, only they haven’t been living the hunt-and-gather lifestyle for many thousands of years. 1

We were made for small close-knit groups of people (our tribe); immediate physical threats that were over quickly (sabre-toothed tigers); gentle stimulation from the natural world (think of the wind rustling the leaves........

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