Flashcard: Allostatic load

How to avoid stress blindness

Your allostatic load is the cumulative effect of multiple stressors on your body and your mind. Since you can google allostatic load theory as well as I can, I’ll leave the deep dive to those better qualified to discuss it. But as a concept, I am finding it so useful in executive coaching that it’s become a flashcard.

I tend to discount chronic stressors that have been around for a long time. It’s like when I scan the living room and don’t really notice the brown leather chair that I’ve had for years. The term “nose blindness” refers to getting so used to a scent we no longer actively smell it. I can have “stress blindness” – I become so accustomed to a certain level of distress that I no longer intellectually register it as distress.

The problem is that my body is still registering it as distress, and the distress stays in the background taking up energy, focus and attention. In the first few years after my son died, I was surprised at how exhausted and irritable I was. I had lost loved ones before, but I didn’t think grief could be so disruptive for so long. I couldn’t understand why I was struggling a year or two after his death. Was it this new job? The amount of travel required? I always traveled for work, but in those first couple of years I kept losing things. I scheduled a 24 hour turn around for a meeting in Atlanta. Waiting for my return flight, I was working on my laptop.  I left the laptop on the table. I opened my briefcase on the plane and there was no laptop. Because I’d left it in the terminal. I expected to be able to work like I had before. And I was wrong. I didn’t understand then that grief was impacting my body, my mind and my spirit. And by extension, my work and career.

I had stress blindness. I wasn’t solving the actual problem – dealing with how grief and loss impacted my ability to work – because I wasn’t able to see it anymore, it was part of the furniture of my life. Instead, I was wasting thought and energy on trying to make it about  something else, something easier to solve like the travel schedule, or the merger my company was going through.

I’m not alone in minimizing stress, that’s why it’s a flashcard. The way I use the concept of allostatic load is to imagine a gauge, like one that monitors heat in an engine. Too cold isn’t ideal; we need some positive stressors. But when the gauge pushes up into the red zone, we need to be aware and see what we can do to reduce any stresses that are in our control. Not looking at the gauge, pretending it’s not there, like I did, isn’t helpful.

First, look at the allostatic load in your personal life. Then look at your professional life. Consider your community or communities, from neighborhood to softball league to faith community. Then look at the world at large. Consider them all together. Imagine each stressor has the weight of a stone. Are you dealing with pebbles? Rocks? Boulders? Does the combined weight push your gauge up into the red zone? Don’t assume that just because something happened in the past that it’s not still weighing you down.

Here are a list of rocks to consider. The death of a loved one. The end of an important relationship. The loss of a job. Health and mental health challenges for you or a loved one. Financial concerns or reversals. A change in a job – a sought after promotion can still be stressful.

For some of us, the stressors in the world are heavy burdens, whether it’s politics or global warming. This can be a stress boulder for some people. And just because the pandemic has stretched into another year doesn’t mean that the real impacts have disappeared.

This isn’t meant to be depressing or dispiriting. It’s meant to be grounding. Because we can’t accurately assess our work performance without understanding what physical and emotional resources we have available to us. If my allostatic load is high, I should be focusing on conserving my energy where I can. Often, when stressed, we will regress. This means that behaviors we’ve learned to control, like being impatient or critical, can break through and become harder to manage. Our ability to regulate all our emotions can diminish. Our perspective can be impacted, and we might not be as creative or innovative or able to solve problems as effectively as we once could.

If you know what kind of load you are carrying, you can get resources to help. If your gauge is in the red zone, maybe you build in more breaks in a day to stretch your body and breathe. Maybe you rely more on a co-worker to test your narratives and assumptions.

A few years ago, I had two major surgeries in four months. I went from being very active to getting exhausted from walking from couch to kitchen and back. A friend of mine who has a chronic illness told me about the concept of “spoons.” Her disability means that some days she has very little energy and other days she has more. She told me to think of my energy like it was measured out in spoonfuls. Good days might be seven or eight spoons. Bad days might be two spoons. On a five-spoon day she might be able to get some work done. On a two-spoon day she knew to focus on rest.

I’ve been back to many spoons for a few years now, but the concept of assessing my energy and capacity when I am making plans has stuck with me. After my surgeries, a trip to the end of the driveway and back was as taxing as a 5k run. Which was terrible. I’m not discounting the difficulty of dealing with bad things. But pushing myself too hard or railing against Cruel Fate for my health issues wouldn’t have been super productive. I was finally able to accept that for a period of time I would have very limited physical capacity, and I got strategic about planning where I would spend that energy.

As we’re planning for the holidays, or planning for our work goals for next year, let’s take a moment to assess what kind of emotional weight we might be carrying. Try to think of yourself with the compassion you might show a close friend. Instead of thinking “well, sure, the divorce was just final but we separated a year ago, I’m over it” try reframing that to “my divorce is final, and that’s for sure a rock. This will be the first holiday season as a single person in a while.” It’s not about judgement, should I or should I not be impacted by a thing. It’s about reality – this thing weighs on me.

How much we carry impacts how nimbly we move through additional stressors or changes. Most of the big stressors aren’t optional. We can’t just jettison pieces of our life to reduce our allostatic load. It’s more about understanding how much energy we have left to give and being realistic and strategic about where to spend that. 

And a postscript reminder:  when we’re figuring out where to allocate our precious spoons of emotional energy, work should not be the first item on the list. Family, friends, community, time in nature – investing energy in areas outside of work can go a long way to building the support system and resilience to carry us through whatever comes our way.