Psychology says people who constantly compare themselves to others aren't just overthinking: Researchers say the modern world may be pushing the human mind beyond what it evolved for

If you’ve ever scrolled through Instagram at midnight and felt like everyone else has a better job or a better life than you, you’re probably not alone in this. A new study, titled ‘Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era,’ published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, by researchers Jose Yong, Amy Lim, Edison Tan, and Sarah Chan, suggests that the urge to measure yourself against others may have less to do with personal insecurity and more with how the human brain was built.

The paper argues that this is not simply insecurity or lack of self-control, but a predictable stress response when modern life makes comparison an almost constant social test. The authors frame that as an evolutionary mismatch: instincts honed for small, familiar groups now struggle with dense cities, digital platforms, and a constant stream of curated status signals.

Your brain wasn't built for this many people
For most of human history, humans lived in small groups of a few dozen to a few hundred people, where everyone knew everyone. Status, danger, and belonging were worked out through familiar faces, not strangers on a screen. The study says that human minds are evolved for that kind of world, a world with a small, stable set of points of comparison.


The paper also points out that the mismatch is not just in how many people but in what kind of social information they provide. In small groups, danger, belonging, and status were read through familiar faces and daily interaction; online, the same comparison instinct can be triggered by strangers, algorithmic feeds, and endless visible achievement.

Today, the average American adult is exposed to thousands of strangers' curated lives every day, through Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and group chats. That gap, the researchers say, is called "evolutionary mismatch," what happens when instincts built for one kind of environment get repeatedly triggered in a different one. Your brain is still running on legacy software, and it was never designed to handle this much input.

Why comparison feels like a full-time job now
The authors propose a concept at the heart of the paper: the "social evolutionary mismatch and competition hypothesis". The study found that modern life can make everyday existence feel like one long competition, not just make people more stressed. The rising cost of living and economic inequality only feed into that feeling of always being behind.

Dr. Yong, one of the study's authors, summed it up plainly: "Competition is not new, but modern life can make it feel constant." The reason people respond so strongly to comparison and falling behind is that those instincts developed in response to people they knew, not strangers or algorithms, he said.

It's not just in your head; screens make it worse
This is not just some theory sitting in an academic journal. In a widely cited study titled ‘No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,’ from the University of Pennsylvania, 143 college students who reduced their Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to a combined total of about 30 minutes a day for three weeks reported significantly less loneliness and depression than a control group that used social media as usual. It’s not that social media is bad; it’s that the unlimited exposure to other people’s highlight reels can take a toll on mental health over time.

The numbers back it up
This isn’t a niche problem for a small, very online crowd, either. In the Pew Research Center's 2024 survey of U.S. teens, the percentage of U.S. teens who say social media helps them feel supported during tough times has declined to 52% in 2024 from 67% in 2022. The same survey found that teen girls are much more likely than boys to say these platforms make them feel worse about their own lives, 34 percent of girls vs. 20 percent of boys. If comparison culture is so obvious in teenagers, what about millennials trying to make rent, careers, and student debt work on the same feeds?

Pew also found that 45% of teens now say they spend too much time on social media, up from 36% in 2022, and 48% say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, compared with 32% two years earlier. Girls were most cautious, with 25% saying social media was bad for their mental health, compared with 14% of boys.

This isn't about willpower
Here’s the thing: this isn’t a story about weak-willed, oversensitive people. The researchers are clear that their paper is a conceptual review of existing research, not new data, and the ideas still need to be tested in real-world studies before anyone takes them as settled fact. They also emphasize that this is not a plea to go back to some simpler pre-modern past, or a claim that modern life is fundamentally broken.

Dr Chan, a co-author based at SUTD's Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, connected this to city design. Stress, loneliness, and anxiety are often seen as entirely personal or lifestyle issues, she said, but they might also point to a disconnect between the environments people live in and the conditions human minds evolved to deal with. But density alone, she suggests, isn’t what makes a city feel crowded or stressful. Greener surroundings and stronger community ties can relieve that pressure without cities needing to be less packed.

What might actually help
The researchers suggest that future studies could explore how comparison and wellbeing vary in greener neighborhoods, more connected communities, and digital spaces designed to encourage less comparison rather than more. They argue the solution is not simply a matter of personal willpower or logging off. It’s also about how cities, workplaces, and apps are designed in the first place.

As Dr. Yong put it, "We need to design interventions that work with rather than against our evolved human nature." The next time comparison creeps in at 1 am, it might help to remember your brain isn't broken. It's just navigating a world it was never built for.