Understanding Allostasis

You’re either a health nerd or an aspiring one. Either way today’s topic, allostasis, is equally informative and performance-enhancing.

We’ve got to go back to go forward – as with most things of note, we head to the land of the souvlaki.

Ancient Greece did a lot of heavy lifting for our modern understanding. Their theory of vitalism was the generally accepted explanation for how our bodies work until the 1800s. The gist was that something unquantifiable differentiated between the living and non-living; a non-physical element governed by different principles to inanimate things, like a spirit.

In the mid-to-late-1800s, compounding scientific findings and theories reached the point where chemistry, biology and physics began to reveal natural mechanisms that explained life, based on empirical evidence instead of invoking religious explanations. Icons like Pasteur and Darwin are well known, but today we introduce Claude Bernard who coined the phrase milieu interieur (internal environment).

Building on Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bernard suggested that our ancestors’ ability to “leave the oceans” required that they develop the ability to “carry the ocean with them,” in the form of an internal ocean, bathing their cells constantly in fluids that resemble the very seas from which they evolved.

Supplanting the previously accepted idea of humourism, Bernard suggested the human body “at each instant compensated for and equilibrated… external variations… all of the vital mechanisms,” he went on, “however varied… [the body has] always one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of life in the internal environment.”

If this sounds like homeostasis, it’s because this was the skeleton on which it was developed. In 1915, Walter Cannon coined the term fight or flight for the body’s stress response. In 1926, Cannon introduced the notion of homeostasis.

We’ve since come to understand homeostasis as an inherent urge by the body to maintain its “internal environment without being overcome by external stimuli that exist to disrupt the balance.”

Cannon’s 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body is the first detailed account of how our bodies preserve their stability against the stress they encounter, outlining processes of energy efficiency and preservation.

Right, all contexted up? Good. None of that’s what we want to talk about today. But it’s necessary to understand.

The topic of today’s piece is a modern understanding of how we deal with stress: allostasis. Its literal definition is “stability through change.”

Coined in 1988 by Peter Sterling and John Eyer, allostasis is the process by which, “to maintain stability, an organism must vary all the parameters of its internal milieu and match them appropriately to environmental demands.”

The prefix homo means similar/same, whereas allo means other/different, and stasis refers to equilibrium.

So things like body temperature and pH balance and levels depend upon homeostasis – you don’t want these to change much at all.

Regarding other health metrics like heart rate variability, hormone levels or blood pressure (as demonstrated below), it’s in our best interest for these to fluctuate in the pursuit of performance.

If your HRV is the same when you’re chilling in bed as it is when you’re competing in Hyrox, that’s not a good thing. Allostasis is an empirical extension of Nietzsche’s idea of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or Taleb’s antifragility. Essentially, it’s a principle that acknowledges how stress – both positive and negative, eustress and distress – is necessary for performance. 

You won’t build muscle in the gym without resistance.

You won’t enhance your immune system without exposing it to pathogens.

As humans, we need stress to – can’t believe we’re quoting BoJo – build back better.

Allostasis acknowledges the endless fluctuations of life, internally, externally and mentally, which consequently lead to a concoction of slow/fast/hard/soft days. It appreciates that a mixture of intensity is required to maintain balance and performance.

Allostasis considers the brain, body and its place in the world as the three defining determiners of one’s health. It factors in the impact of social and psychological stress as contributors to ill health and is an all-encompassing view of performance.

The homeostatic approach is that if your X isn’t Y, you must take Z to rebalance. That previous quote by Cannon sums it up: the idea that “external stimuli… exist to disrupt the balance.” 

Allostasis, on the other hand, considers external stimuli as an immutable factor in the balance of life. It considers lifestyle as important as genetic tendencies and somatic (bodily) processes. 

Allostasis affords individuals the bandwidth in their biomarkers to expand and retract according to the task ahead of them. It acknowledges that your hormones, nutrition, perspective and disposition all contribute to optimal functioning in addition to internal processes. 

We built ZAAG as a supplementary vehicle to deliver micro and phytonutrients to your bodily systems to afford them the resources they need to adapt to the countless daily stresses they face. It’s why we see double-digit percentage improvements in key allostatic markers like heart rate variability and resting heart rate – because your body’s able to perform better when it has more of what it craves.

Ultimately, if you’re a go-getter you’ll experience stress in your life. Allostasis is all about understanding that we have the agency to better fortify ourselves to thrive amongst it, rather than wait for it to get the best of us.

We believe that allostasis is the unspoken experience we witness every day. 

The body keeps the score. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’d better believe it.