Allostatic Load
Your body’s long-term adaptation to chronic stress and demands.
Allostatic load is a scientific framework. Recognition of the framework may help reduce your cognitive load and feel seen.
Lawyers and other high-achieving professionals are rewarded for being able to anticipate problems, identify and evaluate risk, find weaknesses in arguments, solve complex problems, remain ever vigilant, suppress personal reactions, function under pressure, prepare contingencies, take responsibility, stay intellectually engaged, and be productive despite discomfort, distraction, or fatigue.
Those are all real professional competencies. You’re probably really good at them.
In professions that reward those competencies as the only proxies for achievement and success, it is very easy to keep deploying them regardless of what else is happening: fatigue, tension, fear, anger, overwhelm, the need to stop, the need for something different.
Those competencies chronically demand heavy reliance on executive and evaluative cognitive function, alongside a learned suppression or overriding of emotional and physiological needs and signals from your body. Over time, your body adapts to those demands. But the underlying needs don’t go away. The adaptive responses are allostatis (your body’s attempts to preserve or regain homeostasis). The repeated or chronic gap between your body’s needs and overriding them is allostatic load.
For instance, things that got you really worked up in your first couple years of practice, probably don’t register as intensely. And, some things (or people) probably do get you really worked up now, but you don’t show it. In both of those examples, some of that may be because you are now a more experienced and confident, some of that may not be. You’ve probably developed strategies and coping mechanisms to numb the stress. That is how you’ve adapted to the demands of the job.
The allostatic load framework helps to conceptualize the relationship between your human needs, chronic demands, and your body’s response to those demands over time.
Your body’s adaptation to chronic demands of the profession is not free. Production is not the only proxy for life.
Chronic demands without sufficient recovery, adjustment, or the ability to stop pushing through, to “turn it off,” come at a cost. Research suggests indicators include effects to: cardiovascular and metabolic functioning, inflammatory processes, the HPA axis, sympathetic and adrenal activity - to name a few. My hunch is you know this already. Perhaps you override that too. That’s okay.
Chronic adherence to the rules of achievement culture can make continual adaptation look like success. As these achievement rules are metabolized, and canonized, they have a tendency to extend beyond the workday. Beyond workplace relationships. And reach far into your so-called personal life.
Allostatic load gives us a lens through which to ask what chronic adaptation may be costing you, which then gives you the freedom to adjust. It gives you the means to value recovery and recovery strategies.
It could even give you permission to start listening to those signals before they start screaming for your attention.