It All Adds Up

Your allostatic load is the cumulative sum of all stressors you experience, from any origin.

There are many possible origins:

• Environmental Stress
• Social Stress
• Physical Stress
• Existential Stress
• Emotional Stress
• Mental Stress

There are no solid boundaries between those categories.

Within each one, there are many possible sub-categories and infinite examples and degrees.

The important thing to know is that it all adds up.

You want to have a healthy amount of total stress, so that it pushes you to grow, and improves your ability to handle more stress over time, within reason.

What you don’t want is for your allostatic load to climb up into the zone in which you start to respond negatively to stressors.

This ‘red’ zone is characterized by: low energy, poor mood, anxiety depression, poor sleep, poor recovery, lowered immune system function … and a list that I could continue to write on for several paragraphs, in increasingly serious order.