Rarely have people been as materially secure as today — and yet a diffuse unease runs through the affluent societies: stress, exhaustion, the feeling of being constantly driven. Why is that, when objectively so much is better than ever before? One of the most elegant explanations comes from evolutionary psychology — and it has directly to do with why wellness has turned, for many, from a treat into a necessity.
The basic idea is quickly told: over hundreds of thousands of years our brain adapted to life as hunter-gatherers — to small, closely bound groups, to plenty of movement, to a low-stimulus natural environment. This imprint is in us to this day. The world we currently live in, by contrast — cities of millions, open-plan offices, screens, permanent availability — is, in evolutionary terms, brand new. Research calls the gap between the two “evolutionary mismatch”. It counts as a contributing cause of many modern ailments, from chronic stress to loneliness.
What the savanna theory really says
This becomes concrete in the savanna theory of happiness, a study by Norman P. Li and Satoshi Kanazawa published in the *British Journal of Psychology* in 2016 — under the pretty title “Country roads, take me home”. The data of around 15,000 young adults were analysed. Two findings are robust: first, life satisfaction sinks as population density rises — city dwellers are on average less satisfied than country dwellers. Second, the more often someone sees their friends, the more satisfied they are. Both fit the picture of the savanna, where one lived in small groups and in constant contact with familiar people.
The really sensational finding, however, is a third: the connection between cultivating friendships and happiness is considerably weaker among more intelligent people. The authors interpret this to mean that more intelligent individuals adapt more easily to evolutionary novelties — such as being among familiar people less often — and that their well-being depends less on it. The result made it into the headlines (“clever people are happier with few friends”), but it should be read with caution: the study is correlational, intelligence only a rough indicator, and its interpretation is very much disputed in the field.
Dunbar's number: 150 as the measure of the social
How large is the group in which we find our bearings by nature? A famous estimate comes from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar: around 150. That many stable relationships, he suspects, a person can keep track of cognitively — a limit said to be connected with the size of our neocortex. This “magic number” is not identical with the savanna theory but complements it aptly, for it turns up astonishingly consistently wherever people organise themselves:
- In modern hunter-gatherer societies a village counts 148.4 inhabitants on average
- Neolithic villages in Mesopotamia typically held 150 to 200 people
- Amish communities comprise around 113 people on average
- The average personal network too moves in this order of magnitude — do count for once how many people you really deal with regularly
It does not follow that communication collapses with the 151st acquaintance. But it does follow that beyond this size it becomes noticeably harder to keep an overview of favours, obligations and trust. In the modern big city that is compounded: we are constantly surrounded by thousands of strangers whose intentions we do not know. In the savanna one knew everyone in the camp — this self-evident familiarity has largely been lost to us.
A mismatch right across life — not only in the city
The mismatch is not limited to your address. It runs through almost all areas of modern life: sedentary work under artificial light instead of movement in the open; the flood of stimuli from screens that hijacks our attention without pause; loose digital contacts that replace close, bodily bonds only inadequately; and a growing estrangement from nature. The biologist Edward O. Wilson coined the term “biophilia” for this: an innate human turning towards the living — towards landscape, plants, animals and water.
That nature really does us good is well documented. The attention restoration theory of the psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan describes how natural surroundings trigger a “soft fascination” that lets our overtaxed, directed attention recover — unlike the screen, which consumes it. Measurably, time spent in nature lowers stress activation and strengthens the parasympathetic nervous system, that part of the nervous system responsible for calm and regeneration. The body does know the difference between a windowless office and the edge of a forest.
Where wellness comes into play
Here the circle closes — and not by way of nice service but by way of the environment itself. A well-made wellness stay is basically a deliberately built counter-environment to overtaxing modernity: low density instead of crowding, nature instead of concrete, silence instead of noise, movement instead of a desk, real encounter instead of notifications. That is precisely why the sense of well-being often sets in after only a few hours — the place speaks a language our stress system understands immediately. A time out does not abolish the mismatch of everyday life, but it corrects it for a while.
None of this is a patent recipe for happiness — the research is correlational, and what makes an individual happy remains highly individual. But the direction in which savanna theory, biophilia and stress research jointly point is remarkably unanimous: less density, more nature, real connection, more movement. A time out in this direction is no romantic return to the Stone Age but a rather clever, temporary correction. And perhaps, to invoke the intelligent sceptic from the study, the cleverest thing is to step out deliberately every now and then anyway.