Fifteen Tabs Open and a Brain Built for Sundown

A step behind? Can't see through the fog? Fifteen tabs open and not one of them finished? Before you rethink your career choices or question your own intelligence, maybe start by just giving yourself a break. To borrow from the Beach Boys, maybe none of us were made for these times.

Jessica Stillman wrote a great piece in Inc. about the "evolutionary mismatch" we're living in, based on new research out of Singapore. Our brains were shaped for a very different world. We're wired to watch for status and threats within a small area and a group we know, but now those signals come from strangers and screens all day. We're built for the gentle cycles and stimulation of nature, but instead we live in concrete jungles with neon lights and constant notifications.

We've been hunters and gatherers a lot longer than we've been farmers, and we've spent a lot more time closing our days at sundown than working through the night on caffeine hits of our choosing (Bubb'r for me) and blue screen glow. For most of history we ate food from the source. Now a lot of it is engineered in a lab, and we work indoors on our fingertips instead of outdoors in the dirt. Electric light is less than 150 years old. The iPhone isn't even 20.

So not only are we living and working in environments that run against how humans have lived for most of our history, we're also carrying the pressure to learn fast, adapt easily and change on command. Some of that traces back to the 60s, when plastic surgeon Dr. Maxwell Maltz wrote that his patients needed a minimum of about 21 days to get used to their new face. The self-help world ran with it and the 21-day rule was born, along with the promise of a new you in easy 30, 60 and 90-day blocks. The science has never really backed it up, but the spirit lives on in corporate environments and, worse, in our own heads.

Combine the myth of easy change with an environment working against us, and it's a recipe for frustration, stress and anxiety. Any time we tackle something that runs against our human history, we're not just learning something new. We're learning it while our brains are already on edge, against a deadline that was never real.

The researchers make a point that doesn't get said enough. We keep treating stress and anxiety as personal failures to fix with more grit and resilience, even though we know they're also shaped by our environments. Burnout research says the same thing: it's less about people who can't cope and more about workload, control and support.

Evolution isn't catching up anytime soon, and neither we nor our employers can wait around for it. But our environments can change a lot faster than our wiring. That's where the real work is, in how we set up our teams, our workdays and our homes.