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Energy & Wellbeing | Allostatic Load
THE THOUGHT
Without warning, life happens all at once.
Midway through 2024, my days had morphed into a series of overlapping urgent timelines. Countless moving pieces requiring alignment. Personal and professional, physical and emotional, nothing felt optional. I proudly managed it all.
Unsurprisingly, adaptation comes with a price. So I grew irritable, reactive, rushed. Sleep came, but it was never restful. Just something else on my to-do list. Eight hours of dreams felt like minutes because my mind continued working into the next day.
Mornings carried a feeling beyond exhaustion, one that my family also experienced in their own way.
Now, months later, the storm has passed, but we're still waiting to feel like ourselves again. That year I discovered that I can handle anything, but not all at once.
Have you felt the weight of your own resilience?
Every effect of the soul has its echo in the body, every effect of the body its echo in the soul.
THE DIVE
The Science of Overload
Allostatic load is the cost of biological resilience. Every time our body successfully adapts to stress, it pays a price at the cellular level that compounds over decades.
The term emerged from research by Bruce McEwen, who noticed lab animals could survive acute stress remarkably well, but chronic unpredictable stress shortened their lives.
This mechanism was subtle. The constant recalibration to maintain internal balance under pressure gradually eroded their biological reserves. And what held true for lab animals, researchers discovered, applied equally to humans.
Each stress response leaves microscopic changes. Glucose is mobilized, cortisol is elevated, heart rate and blood pressure increased. Our immune system shifts resources toward immediate threats. Our brain prioritizes survival-relevant information. These responses work flawlessly when threats are temporary.
But when stressors become chronic, our biological systems never fully reset. The cardiovascular system learns to operate at higher pressure. Inflammatory response stays partially activated. Sleep architecture changes to accommodate hypervigilance. Researchers call this allostatic overload.
This process unfolds silently while we maintain peak performance. Telomeres (the protective caps on chromosomes) shorten, inflammatory markers climb, and recovery capacity diminishes. We are built for periodic sprints, not an endless marathon.
But at what point does adaptation become limitation?
Books Worth Reading
The End of Stress As We Know It by Bruce S. McEwen
A foundational guide to stress and its effects, from the scientist who defined the concept.Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky
A sharp, witty exploration of stress biology and why modern life wears us down.The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
A landmark work on how trauma embeds itself in the body and alters long-term health.
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THE PRACTICE
Breaking the Accumulation
Stress is often unavoidable, and balancing it is a topic for another issue. But the most powerful intervention for allostatic load is restoring your system's capacity to fully reset between activations.
Track recovery markers. Notice your resting heart rate, sleep quality, and how quickly you return to calm after stress. These indicate whether your system is truly recovering.
Protect transition windows. The five minutes between meetings. The commute home. These are recalibration points for your nervous system. Fill them with restorative inputs, not more stimulation.
Practice active recovery. Two minutes of slow breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Cold exposure followed by warmth builds stress-response flexibility.
While some changes, like shortened telomeres or stress-related illness, may not fully reverse, the body retains a remarkable capacity to heal. What is lost in the buildup can often be regained in the unwinding, though not all at once.
Looking back, I wish I had protected the small moments between demands more fiercely. Going forward, I know recovery isn't optional. And now, so do you.