Homeostasis and Allostasis

Virtually everyone is familiar with homeostasis.  To refresh that concept: it refers to the fact that a healthful physical condition must be maintained within a narrow range regardless of the external environment  wherein we find ourselves.   Among  the many processes to be maintained are those such as temperature control, pH balance, and glucose levels. 

Not so widely known,  however, is the allostasis concept—the process by which the body regains homeostasis when homeostasis is challenged or lost due to stress.  Some of the stressors are purely physical, such as frigid weather and some are less so, such as angry disputes.  Most stressors, of course, include an amalgam of physical and non-physical stress (e.g., mental) in various combinations.  Unlike homeostasis, allostasis operates by ANTICIPATING increased bodily demands and challenges.  For instance, allostasis begins to operate long before your body temperature has deteriorated to a critical, life-threatening  level.  ALLOSTATIC LOAD is defined as the bodily wear and tear (e.g., heart disease) due to chronic stressors  whether more physical, more mental or a combination of both.

To a considerable extent, our health and happiness depend on how we manage our physical and non-physical allostatic load, and  the management often is very difficult.  We have an improved chance of succeeding if we augment the automatic, unconsciously directed allostatic  physical anticipation with a consciously directed allostatic  mental anticipation.   Ideally, we must  develop the habit of anticipating stressors before they occur, or at the very start of their deleterious action.

Because physical homeostasis and physical allostasis  are automatic, we rarely think about their functioning.  So, we are unlikely to attempt to predict their failure, and we do not feel responsible when they do fail.  By contrast, we can exert a modicum of both mental homeostasis and mental allostasis stress influence by employing  stress anticipation.  Sometimes that stress anticipation enables us to forgo or mitigate stress, and sometimes it causes us to instigate or accentuate stress.  In the latter case, we might increase our stress and allostatic load only eventually to discover that the anticipated stressor never materializes.

One common cause of mental stress  and its mental allostatic load  is our mistakenly using affect (emotion) as information  (Schwar, & Clore, 1983).  But unlike the just-cited authors, I must replace their use  of the generic word “information” with my phrase, OBJECTIVE  DISPASSIONATE VALID INFORMATION.  I do so  because affect is information that , at minimum, is a highly personal, sometimes idiosyncratic, emotional information signal, causing us to predict that something noteworthy might, will, or soon will occur.

The major issue, of course, involves what one does with the affective information signal that is received.  Try transforming  an uncontrollable, affective information signal into controllable, objective  dispassionate valid information by asking yourself  questions such as the following:

Am I about to improperly use my CURRENT emotional state as a heuristic or shortcut when making judgments or decisions. For example, if I am feeling  poorly right now, will I evaluate a situation more negatively than is warranted, or vice versa?

Am I about to attribute my current feelings to the wrong source and make an unwarranted decision?

Might my present affect be more current context-dependent than I realize,  causing me to make a decision now that harms my long -term well-being?

Conversely, could my present affect prompt me to overestimate the impact of my current decision on future events that will deleteriously influence my emotional well-being?

The bottom line of all this is to say that we should mindfully think about all our homeostatic and allostatic circumstances in order to reduce our stressors or, at least, to better cope with them.  However, since we have relatively greater control over our mental homeostasis and mentally-induced allostatic load, that should be our central concern.  Moreover, given that the social environment usually is our most common and intense form of encountered stress (Almeida, 2005), we should strive to maximize our salutary interpersonal relationships and minimize our negative ones.  

REFERENCES

Almeida, D. M. (2005).    Resilience and Vulnerability to Daily Stressors Assessed via Diary Methods.  Current directions in psychological science, Volume 14, Issue 2.   https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00336.x

Schwarz, N. & Clore, G. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 513-523. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.513