This is a different take on the art of changing (see “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” June 2006). And it’s a deeper foray into exploring the idea of “homeostasis,” (homoios- same or alike; stasis- standing). It’s important to clarify what homeostasis is really about, in part because it’s become something of a buzz-term that’s bandied about in popular articles and websites about wellness—and it’s the key feature underlying our ability to change.
In its broadest sense, homeostasis is the tendency of things, organisms, systems, people, ecologies and celestial bodies to seek a stable state within themselves and in relationship to their surroundings. In physics and chemistry, it describes the general tendencies of matter and objects to seek and remain in a state or relationship that doesn’t require the continual input of energy. That said, I’ve rarely heard “homeostasis” used to describe the allegedly inanimate world—until scientist James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis to describe the total global ecology and health of Earth. “Homeostasis” has been mostly used to describe biological systems. Forward thinkers in systems theory, economics, cybernetics and more, however, have begun to recognize the appropriateness of using this concept to describe the behavior of the complex systems they study.
But there’s been a semantic drift in the popular wellness press, and “homeostasis” has recently become misinterpreted and misused as a synonym for “wellness.” While some writers are correct to point out that achieving wellness involves learning to maintain healthy homeostasis in our lives, it’s wrong to imply that homeostasis is, in itself, wellness. It only means we’re at our best when we’re in a health-maintaining balance, which is a healthy homeostasis. The best way to think about this is to realize wellness is a state of health in which basic needs are being met and homeostasis is being maintained.
The physical force or rule that underlies homeostasis, however, is not affected by human misconceptions. Homeostasis is amoral in the way it can apply itself to unhealthy states as well as to healthy ones. When we’re healthy and well, we’re in an optimal state of self-regulated balance, harmony and equilibrium. The mechanisms of homeostasis will tend to keep us there. But, while homeostasis has an important positive balancing function, it also has an undesirable feature. Whether you’re in a healthy state trending toward illness or in an unhealthy state trying to become well, homeostasis resists every change you apply to your body. When you want to lose weight or improve your fitness, homeostasis turns the process into an uphill battle. It loves the status quo. If you start dieting, after a while you may feel like your body doesn’t respond to—and even resists—the diet. If you exercise, after some progress you reach a plateau, beyond which you may have to quadruple your efforts to continue progressing.
How to break homeostasis without breaking yourself is the most important concept you need to understand before you can expect to successfully transform your body or your psycho-social life.
When we lose the equilibrium of homeostasis, there are usually clues that something is going wrong—if we choose to pay attention. Generally, you’ll tend to be aware of something when equilibrium is upset and homeostasis is disturbed. It may be a general malaise (“I just don’t feel well”), unaccustomed emotional sensitivity (“I don’t usually snap at people like that”) or feeling tired without clear cause (“I just don’t know where my energy has gone lately”). Injury, disease, tension, stress and overindulgence in food, drink or drugs all tend to move us away from healthy homeostasis. They wear down our bodies, lower our resistance to illness or further injury, upset our emotional, hormonal and/or immune balance and make us more accident-prone.
When healthy homeostasis is beginning to be disrupted and degraded, we experience symptoms that inform us of adverse changes. Symptoms tell us we’re veering toward a state of dis-ease. Obvious or overt disease usually doesn’t appear all at once. More often, the body/mind sets up a new state of relative equilibrium of mind, body and environment—in other words, homeostasis. A new stable dynamic state is achieved, but it may not be healthy. Over time, this new state of balance comes to feel normal to you, but it’s actually just what you come to learn at an unconscious level is your “normal” (or habitual) routine, even if it’s in equilibrium with dysfunctional bodily pathology, like obesity, hypertension, nicotine addiction, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, asthma, strange skin conditions or worse. If you’ve been in such a state for most, or all, of your life, you may literally have no concept whatsoever about what a healthy homeostasis feels like.
Unhealthy homeostasis may feel normal, but it leads away from wellness. It always takes the form of unhealthy circles of things that feed back upon each other so you stay where you are. The psychiatrist-philosopher R.D. Laing long ago described how vicious cycles take root in our lives in his groundbreaking book, Knots. A modern vicious emotional cycle might go like this (with apologies to Dr. Laing):
• Jack spends most of his waking hours at the office.
• Jill needs some of Jack’s time to feel loved by Jack.
• Jack works very long hours because he loves Jill and wants to take care of her because she’s very important to him, but he’s exhausted when he comes home late at night.
• Jill feels hurt when Jack is too tired to show that he cares for her.
• Jack loves Jill, so he feigns interest and attention when tired to accommodate her needs.
• In feigning interest, Jack comes to resent Jill while becoming overweight, hypertensive and depressed from lack of sleep, no exercise and a catch-as-catch-can diet.
• Jill feels Jack is hurting her with his feigned interest.
• Jack then feels guilty because she feels hurt and resents her for it.
• Jill resents his resentment.
• Jack feels guilty resenting Jill for his guilty feelings, so he works more to avoid these feelings.
• Jill feels lonely, neglected and unloved because she gets very little of Jack’s time and attention.
• This makes Jack feel worse about being near her, so… (return to beginning of cycle).
It can take substantial conscious intervention to extricate ourselves from an unhealthy (often self-perpetuating) situation. These vicious cycles also can, and do, play out inside our bodies in ways that aren’t separable from what we do during our daily hustle.
It takes effort, both in magnitude and frequency, to change any homeostatic balance whether it’s good or bad. Change from one state of equilibrium to another always requires the input of effort and energy.
Change ingredients are: awareness (change from usual consciousness); identification of what’s amiss; planning (formulating a goal); strategy (identifying and prioritizing the steps required for change); tactics (what you’ll specifically do to bring about change); and assessment (evaluating or measuring your achievement of each step). So, changing yourself is actually no different from running a corporate enterprise—except it’s harder to do.
You may be aware that you’re stuck in an unhealthy equilibrium such as obesity or hypertension. But you may eventually discover the central activity in your life—your job—may be the chief cause. For several reasons, you may discover you can’t throw out the bathwater without the baby. You may believe you really value your multi-six-figure income, but come to realize the job carries such overwhelming responsibilities and time demands that it’s nigh on impossible to find time for regular exercise and relaxation. Thus, you can’t get physical as often or as intensely as your body requires, and you never get to blow off the stress the way you used to on the basketball court, the tennis court, during sexual marathons or playing soccer. Even though you can clearly identify something as a root contributor to what’s awry in your life, you may discover a big resistance to healthy change.
Resistance is all those things that impede your progress with change. For example, you may be unwilling to sacrifice income and a new Bimmer Cabrio next year in favor of a less pressured lifestyle and a possible reduction in blood pressure. Frankly, unconscious resistance is usually much more subtle and insidious than crass material desires, but the spiritual descendants of Crassus who make choices like this every day are still very much among us. To change toward wellness, you’ll need to discover a path that takes you above, below, around or obliterates resistances.
OK. So you’ve passed various resistances and have accepted change is necessary. The question is how to go about it. There are two broad approaches to change. The one we all fantasize about is the dramatic, seemingly instantaneous strategy. The “clean break.” The “overnight sensation.” The bold leap that faces up to the challenge “cold turkey,” also known as the 50-ways-to-leave-your-lover approach to major life change. A big downside to this approach is that none of us is perfectly conscious enough to know every single factor that keeps us enmeshed in our daily unhealthy homeostasis.
Despite our very best intentions and iron determination, we very often unconsciously sabotage our own best efforts. More, we tend to ignore, or just be in denial about, how sudden and major shifts in our daily lives are often, in and of themselves, capable of causing major and even life-threatening stress. Witness the commonplace case of men (it’s still usually men, but women are coming up fast along the inside track) who fight their way through challenging careers while wistfully looking forward to retirement, only to succumb to a major heart attack or stroke just months into the radically changed life-rhythm of a pensioner. As a New Age coroner might intone, “The cause of death was sudden, complete loss of homeostasis.”
Because of our resistances and the need to treat our homeostatic mechanisms gently, positive change is usually something best carried out gradually and repetitiously so your system can get used to it. This is why comprehensive (some might say “boring”) weight loss programs like Weight Watchers and the like are so much more effective at achieving long-term weight reduction than are so many of the flash-in-the-pan fad diets. The more gradual and sustained the change, the lower the production of stress hormones, the less strain on your system, the better homeostasis is maintained during transition and the more likely you are to succeed.
Thus, we arrive at the take-home message for today: Prevent unrealistic and impatient expectations when embarking upon positive changes toward wellness. The homeostasis you save may be your own!
