Burnout Break

Last week we talked about allostasis, introduced its meaning and defined its origin alongside the notion of homeostasis. Today, we don our specs to peer a little closer into allostatic load.

Consider allostasis as the way our body keeps score. It’s how our body balances the myriad stressors we place on it through our actions, as well as the internal and mental stress over which we have less agency. 

Allostatic load is the “cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events.” There’s a distinction to be made between chronic and acute stress. Acute stress is fleeting. We react, recover and get on with our lives.

Chronic stress, on the other hand, is elongated. It’s when we’re unable to remedy the causes, so the pressure on the system builds and leads to wear and tear to the point where it impacts performance.

Chronic stress contributes to a high allostatic load, which we don’t want. There’s only a finite amount we can tolerate. 

How do you identify it?

There are a bunch of biological parameters that identify allostatic load: cortisol, DHEA, epinephrine, norepinephrine, cholesterol, systolic/diastolic blood pressure, BMI, waist-hip ratio, heart rate variability and glucose levels are all things you might be aware of. 

These are either indicators of your stress response or your general physical standing. Outside of biology, lifestyle factors also contribute to your allostatic load – nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress to name a few.

Combining these metrics gives us an understanding of your ability to perform. The aim is to have a low allostatic load – the higher your load, the more likely you are to fall into what’s known as allostatic overload.

Allostatic Overload

Sounds like the new Spiderman villain and with good reason. Allostatic overload is what we want to avoid.

It’s the modern equivalent of the exhaustion stage of Selye’s 1936 GAS (General Adaptation System) model. In modern parlance: burnout.

Selye’s ideas considered only physical stressors as a route to exhaustion, whereas allostatic load includes psychological and social stress too. Allostatic overload can be thought of simply as doing too much with too little.

Consider the human ability to perform as a battery: the higher your percentage, the more power you have available. The more we increase our allostatic load – the more stress we take on – the faster our battery drains and the less capable we become.

Just as your laptop dims the screen when you drop below 20% to keep going for longer, so too does our body shut down or impair the efficacy of internal processes when we overextend ourselves.

When our body is chronically stressed and is continually asked to maintain a level of performance without reprieve, we end up in allostatic overload. It’s our body’s way of telling us that we’re doing too much. It’s a distress flare.

I’d Like To Speak To Management

In understanding allostasis and allostatic load, we fortify our ability to maintain the resistance stage of stress. This is where we’re being challenged but still have the mental and physical resources to thrive under pressure. By better managing the give and take of life, we can enhance our performance without burning out.

As with everything, balance is the critical component. Recovery, nutrition, hydration, rest, social connection and environment are all conducive to positive well-being and will reduce our allostatic load, recharging our battery. 

The more we drink, eat shit, overtrain, anxiously overthink and experience chronic stress, the faster we drain it.

That’s it for today. Next week’s our final instalment of this run of allostatic articles, where we’ll jump into some of the ways allostatic overload can affect your performance, and what you can do about it.