In This Story
There is something about this time of year that seems to accelerate life.
As routines resume and schedules fill, overwhelm can seem almost built into the season. The feeling is especially visible on campuses and in families preparing for a new school year, but it is hardly confined to them. Across work, home, and daily life, many of us are moving from the relative looseness of summer into a period of greater structure, expectation, and demand.
We often assume that overwhelm simply means we have too much to do. Yet there may be another dimension to it. Modern life has dramatically expanded what we are able to see, know, monitor, anticipate, compare, and worry about.
The question may be less about how many tasks are on our lists and more about how much of the world we are trying to carry at once — and how we can bring that load back to a more manageable size.
When the World Seems Bigger
A recent review in Behavioral Sciences by Jose Yong and colleagues offers an intriguing way to think about this experience. The researchers examine contemporary psychological stress through the lens of evolutionary mismatch, the idea that characteristics that developed under one set of environmental conditions may function differently when those conditions change dramatically (Yong et al., 2026).
Human beings have always faced stress, uncertainty, competition, and social comparison. What is unusual today is the scale and reach of those experiences. Our social worlds can include thousands of people. We can learn about disasters or conflicts anywhere on Earth within minutes, remain connected to work nearly continuously, and compare our accomplishments, appearance, parenting, homes, vacations, and happiness with people we have never met.
The Yong paper raises an important possibility: Some of what we experience as overwhelming may be a reasonable response to an environment whose scale has expanded extraordinarily quickly.
As an epidemiologist, I find this perspective compelling because epidemiology encourages us to look beyond the person experiencing an outcome and examine the surrounding conditions and exposures. When we feel overwhelmed, then, it may be useful to ask: Has the scale of what I am trying to hold become larger than what actually requires my attention?
There are several ways to bring that scale back to a more manageable size.
1. Shorten the Time Horizon
One reason this time of year can feel overwhelming is that we begin mentally experiencing the entire fall before it has happened. We think simultaneously about the semester, the school year, deadlines, the family calendar, upcoming travel, unfinished projects, and problems that may arise weeks or months from now.
A useful question is: What actually needs something from me today?
Many things deserve planning, but planning for October does not require psychologically living in October. Narrowing attention to the next appropriate step can make a large mental landscape considerably more manageable.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that prolonged stress can affect concentration, sleep, decision-making, and health. Adequate rest, movement, recovery, and manageable priorities all support our ability to respond to demanding circumstances (CDC, 2026).
2. Narrow the Field of Responsibility
Modern communication makes us aware of far more than we can personally influence. We encounter problems in our families, workplaces, communities, country, and world, often in the same stream of information.
It can help to distinguish among what requires action from us, what we may be able to influence, and what we are simply aware of. Caring deeply about something does not require giving it continuous attention, and recognizing a problem does not automatically make us responsible for resolving it.
We can remain informed and engaged while becoming more deliberate about where our limited attention and energy can actually make a difference.
3. Shrink the Comparison Group
One of the most interesting ideas in the Yong paper concerns competition and social comparison.
Human beings have always paid attention to status, accomplishment, belonging, and how we are doing relative to others. What has changed is the size of the population available for comparison. Digital life allows us to measure our careers, parenting, bodies, homes, productivity, or happiness against an almost limitless collection of highly visible examples.
Comparison can motivate us and expand our sense of possibility, but an enormous reference group can also quietly raise our standards until ordinary accomplishment or contentment begins to feel inadequate.
A useful question is: Is comparison changing my definition of enough?
Becoming more conscious of whose standards shape our own can restore a sense of proportion.
4. Create Limits Where There Are None
Many features of contemporary life provide few natural stopping points. There is always another email, headline, notification, activity, meeting, or task. Work can follow us home, family schedules can absorb every open evening, and our phones can make events occurring anywhere in the world feel immediately present.
When the environment provides few boundaries, we may need to establish some ourselves. This can mean choosing when to read the news, leaving some evenings unscheduled, turning off unnecessary notifications, protecting time away from work, or allowing a message that does not require an immediate answer to wait until tomorrow.
The U.S. Surgeon General's workplace well-being framework similarly emphasizes work-life boundaries, rest, autonomy, social connection, and organizational conditions that support well-being (Office of the Surgeon General, 2022). These principles remind us that overwhelm is shaped by more than individual behavior. Families, workplaces, schools, and institutions can also examine whether the environments they create are asking people to carry more than is necessary.
Make Life Smaller When It Feels Too Big
Modern life gives us extraordinary access to information, people, opportunities, and events throughout the world. That access enriches our lives, but it also requires us to be more deliberate about what deserves our attention.
As the new academic and school year begins, we do not need to mentally live the entire fall in September. We can focus on what genuinely needs our attention now, be more selective about what we carry, and notice when comparison or constant input begins to distort our sense of what is enough.
Making life smaller does not mean withdrawing from the world. It means engaging with it at a scale that leaves room for the people, responsibilities, and experiences directly in front of us.
The larger world will still be there tomorrow, and we may be better able to meet it when it arrives.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2026). Managing Stress. https://www.cdc.gov/mental-health/living-with/index.html
Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. (2022). The U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being. https://wellnessatnih.ors.od.nih.gov/news/Pages/The-U.S.-Surgeon-General%E2%80%99s-Framework-for-Workplace-Mental-Health-and-Well-Being.aspx
Yong, J. C., Lim, A. J., Tan, E., & Chan, S. H. M. (2026). Evolutionary mismatch, stress, and competition: Making sense of psychosocial problems in the polycrisis era. Behavioral Sciences, 16(5), 650. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16050650
This story was originally featured on Psychology Today in the Dean's recurring column The Mindful Epidemiologist.
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