Allostasis, adaptation and a new definition of health

What is health?

Are we measuring health in a way that promotes disease?

This quote jumped out at me from a book I just picked up and am officially geeking out about - it's always amazing to find a perfect distillation of the amorphous thoughts that have been swirling around in your head.

Peter Sterling coined the term allostasis in 1988 to describe the propensity of living organisms to maintain stability through change, and his new book "What is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design" expands on the concept.

He sets allostasis in opposition to the prevailing paradigm of homeostasis, which assumes living organisms instinctively act to defend a series of physiological set points.

Why is that important?

Because it hands us a completely new model of how our body and mind are designed to function.

We're built to adapt, not to conform to a norm - and there is no single picture of physical or mental health because each person is different and every situation is different.

When we focus exclusively on symptoms, we're operating in a homeostatic model. We're doing what Sterling describes above - isolating appropriate and inappropriate lab values - or in the case of mental health, appropriate and inappropriate behavior - and attempting to artificially adjust those behaviors to fit an imaginary average.

It doesn't work, because there is no true average of behavior, and we wouldn't be happy if we achieved it anyway because that's not how we're built! But as a result of this obsession with behavioral deviations, we become more and more absorbed in our symptoms to the point where we begin identifying with them and then defending that identity.

This confusion of identity gets to the heart of what stands between us and true mental health, true resilience. If you've been following my posts, you'll know I usually end on this note, because it's the crux of the whole thing:

I am not my body.
I am not my mind.
I am not my symptoms.

I am a spark of living energy
Connected to every other living being