The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that you can’t step into the same river twice, for you aren’t the same person at each visit, and the water is ever flowing. It is a powerful way to represent the reality of impermanence: Everything is always changing.
Yet so many people have fraught relationships with change. We deny it, resist it or attempt to control it — the result of which is almost always some combination of stress, anxiety, burnout and exhaustion. It doesn’t have to be that way.
No doubt, change can, and often does, hurt; but with the right mind-set, it can also be a force for growth. It’s not as if we have any choice in the matter. Like it or not, life is change. We’d be wise to shift our default position from futile resistance to being in conversation with change instead.
A concept called allostasis can help. Developed in the late 1980s by a neuroscientist, Peter Sterling, and a biologist, Joseph Eyer, allostasis is based on the idea that rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline is a moving target. I see it as parallel to the concept conceived by Richard Rohr of order, disorder and reorder. Allostasis runs counter to a more widespread but older and outdated model for change, homeostasis. Essentially, homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y to X. By contrast, in allostasis, healthy systems also crave stability after a change, but the baseline of that stability can be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.
Allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.
From neuroscience to pain science to psychology, allostasis has become the predominant model for understanding change in the scientific community. The brain is at its best when it is constantly rewiring itself and making new connections — what we experience as a thriving and stable consciousness is actually a process of ongoing change. Overcoming pain, be it physical or psychological, is not about resistance (which often worsens the experience) or trying to get back to where you were before a distressing event or situation. It’s about balancing acceptance with problem-solving and moving forward to a new normal. A healthy response to change and disorder, whether it’s within ourselves or our environments, is one based on the allostatis process. And yet this concept is still little known to laypeople. This is unfortunate.
Adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it. It recognizes that after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder. Via this shift, you come to view change and disorder not as something that happens to you but as something that you are working with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment. You stop fearing change, which is to say you stop fearing life.
To be clear, this shift is not easy. I know from experience. I like to have a plan and stick to it. If you were to draw a line, with stability on one end and change on the other, you could plot me about a millimeter away from the stability extreme, and that would be generous. Yet, in recent tumultuous years, after the publication of a book, having a second child, leaving a secure job, moving across the country, having major surgery on my leg, stopping a sport that had been an outsize source of my identity and becoming painfully estranged from certain family members, I realized that no such line exists. If I had any shot at attaining stability, I would need to get comfortable with change. By adopting an allostatic mind-set, I felt increasingly stable, even amid volatility.
Overwhelming science demonstrates that the more distress — what researchers call allostatic load — people experience during periods of change, the greater their chances of disease and demise. Fortunately, the same science agrees that we can also become stronger and grow from change and that much about how we navigate change is behavioral; that is, it can be developed and practiced.
The time to start practicing is now. Over the past few years, the river of change has been flowing mercilessly, and it shows no signs of letting up.
Societally, we’ve undergone a pandemic and its economic fallout, the combination of which has shifted how we live and work. Hardly a decade after the widespread adoption of social media, a new technology that may be far more powerful, artificial intelligence, is looming on the horizon. In our personal lives, we continue to do what we have always done: relocate, start jobs, quit jobs, change jobs, get promoted, retire, get married, get divorced, experience illness, have children, become empty nesters, bury loved ones and on and on.
It’s like our friend Heraclitus advised: The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time. Our ability to work with these changes is directly related to our life satisfaction.
Given all this, simply normalizing and creating a steadfast expectancy around change goes a long way. So does realizing that the allostasis mind-set doesn’t ask us to sacrifice all agency. Rather, it asks us to partake in change by focusing on what we can control and trying to let go of what we can’t. When I catch myself resisting or shutting down in response to change, in my head I say some version of the following: This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best that I can. What, if any, skillful actions can I take? Do this repeatedly and eventually you start to get better at it.
Navigating this gulf requires equal parts ruggedness and flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough, determined and durable, to know your core values, what you stand for. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to evolve, grow and even change your mind. Put these qualities together and the result is a gritty endurance, one that helps you maintain your strong core even in fragile moments. It allows you to step into allostasis’s cycle of order, disorder and reorder — which is, of course, one and the same with stepping into Heraclitus’s river — and to chart it skillfully and whenever possible, to your own benefit.
To thrive in our lifetimes — and not just survive — we need to transform our relationship with change, leaving behind rigidity and resistance in favor of a new nimbleness, a means of viewing more of what life throws at us as something to participate in, rather than fight. We are always shaping and being shaped by change, often at the very same time.
Brad Stulberg writes about excellence and mental health, and is author of the new book “Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You,” from which this essay is adapted.
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