Table Of Contents:
- A client who should be fine, and isn’t
- Allostatic load, defined
- The backpack
- Why more stress is not the enemy, and neither is less
- What is happening in the body
- What this changes in practice
- Where to take this next
- FAQ
- References
A client who should be fine, and isn’t
Maria is a senior clinician. She sleeps enough. She exercises. She has good people around her. On paper, nothing is wrong. Yet she arrives at coaching flat, foggy, and quicker to tears than she would like, and she cannot point to a single event that explains it. Her own summary is the one most people reach for: “I think I’m just not coping very well at the moment.”
That sentence is where a lot of coaching goes wrong. It treats the problem as a deficit of character. Maria is not failing to cope. She is carrying a load she has never been allowed to put down, and her body is doing exactly what bodies do under that condition. The name for what she is experiencing is allostatic load, and once you can see it, you stop coaching willpower and start coaching capacity.
Allostatic load, defined
Allostatic load is the cumulative biological cost of repeatedly adapting to stress. The term was introduced by the neuroscientist Bruce McEwen in 1998 to describe what happens to the body not during a single stressful event, but across many of them, over time [1][2].
To understand the load, you first have to understand the adaptation that produces it. Your body does not hold its internal state perfectly still. It shifts heart rate, hormones, glucose, and attention to meet whatever the moment demands, then returns towards baseline afterwards. This active process of maintaining stability through change is called allostasis, “stability through change” being the phrase researchers use to distinguish it from homeostasis, which implies a fixed set point [3].
Allostasis is healthy. It is the system working. Allostatic load is what accumulates when the system rarely gets to complete the return.
The backpack
I find the clearest way to hold this is a backpack.
Every unresolved demand you carry adds a little weight to the pack. A difficult conversation you did not get to close. A deadline that moved. A night of broken sleep. None of these is heavy on its own, and a capable person can walk a long way with a loaded pack without complaint. That is allostasis. You adapt, you carry, you keep moving.
The problem is not the weight. The problem is never setting the pack down.
Allostatic load is what the body registers when the pack is never fully unloaded. McEwen described three specific ways this happens: stressors that repeat too often to recover between, stressors that exceed your capacity to cope, and, the one people miss most, an inability to switch off the stress response once the stressor itself is gone [1][2]. That third route is the quiet one. The meeting ended hours ago. The pack is still on.
This reframes what resilience actually is. Resilience is not a bigger back, and it is not the ability to stop feeling the weight. It is how efficiently you load, carry, and unload. A resilient system is not one that never gets tired. It is one that recovers.
Why more stress is not the enemy, and neither is less
There is a tidy assumption that stress is simply bad and less of it is simply better. The research does not support the tidy version.
The relationship between stress and performance is not a straight line. Too little challenge and the system is under-stimulated and under-prepared. Too much, sustained, and it is overwhelmed and degraded. In the manageable middle, something useful happens: controlled exposure to stress, followed by real recovery, increases your capacity to handle the next stressor. Current work on the neurobiology of resilience frames this precisely. Resilience is not the passive avoidance of stress; it is an active process, built largely through adaptations the system makes in response to demands it can recover from [4].
This is the distinction that matters most for anyone building resilience. It is the difference between recovery and avoidance. Removing all pressure from a life does not build resilience; it removes the very mechanism that builds it. What builds resilience is exposure that is followed by genuine unloading. Load, then unload. The unloading is not the reward for the work. It is part of the work.
What is happening in the body
You do not need to be a neuroscientist to coach this well, but the mechanism is worth understanding because it tells you where to intervene.
When you perceive a demand, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the HPA axis, coordinates the release of stress hormones including cortisol, mobilising energy and sharpening attention [2]. This is designed to be a spike, followed by a return. Under allostatic load, the spike stops resolving cleanly. The switch-off fails. Cortisol stays elevated when it should have fallen, and the systems that depend on the off-switch working, notably sleep and emotional regulation, start to degrade [2][4].
This is why the physiological drivers are not a wellness footnote. Deep sleep is one of the body’s primary unloading mechanisms; it is when the stress system recalibrates. Movement supports the same recovery machinery and the neuroplasticity the brain relies on to adapt [4]. When Maria said nothing was wrong because she slept and exercised, she was describing inputs. What her system had lost was the ability to complete the unloading, and that is a different problem with a different intervention.
What this changes in practice
Once you see load rather than weakness, the coaching moves change.
You stop asking a depleted client to push harder, because pushing harder adds weight to a pack that is already full. You look instead for where the unloading has quietly stopped. Concretely, that means asking operational questions rather than reflective ones. Where does the working day actually end. What is the first recovery activity to disappear when things get busy. Is the tiredness a signal to rest, or a signal being overridden. Is this avoidance, or is this recovery, because the two can look identical from the outside and they are opposites underneath.
And it means treating recovery as scheduled behaviour, not leftover time. Not “prioritise rest,” which cannot fail because it commits to nothing, but a specific, unloading action with a time attached. A ten-minute walk after the third meeting. A hard stop on screens ninety minutes before sleep. One evening a week with nothing owed to anyone. Small, deliverable, and repeated.
This is also where a structured resilience measure earns its place. The Personal Resilience Indicator (PRI) treats the physiological foundation of resilience, sleep and lifestyle, as trainable drivers measured in their own right, rather than a single box ticked and moved past. It lets you see whether a depleted client’s issue sits in the loading, the carrying, or the unloading, so the plan targets the actual constraint rather than the presenting complaint.
Maria’s problem was never that she could not cope. It was that no one had shown her where the pack was still on. That is a solvable problem, and it starts with naming it correctly.
Where to take this next
If you coach others, learning to read where a client’s load sits, across the drivers rather than by guesswork, is part of what certification in the Personal Resilience Indicator trains you to do.
If you want to understand your own load, a certified PRI practitioner can take you through your resilience profile in a structured debrief.
FAQ
What is allostatic load in simple terms?
Here is the short version: allostatic load is the wear and tear your body accumulates from adapting to stress over and over without fully recovering between rounds. Think of a backpack you keep adding weight to but rarely set down. The occasional heavy day is not the issue. The issue is never unloading. The term was coined by neuroscientist Bruce McEwen in 1998, and it is one of the most useful ideas in resilience because it moves the conversation off “am I strong enough” and onto “am I recovering enough.”
Is allostatic load the same as stress?
No, and the difference is the whole point. Stress is the demand in the moment. Allostatic load is the cumulative cost of meeting demand after demand without the system resetting in between. You can handle a great deal of acute stress and carry very little load, provided you recover well. You can also face fairly ordinary stress and carry a heavy load, if recovery has quietly stopped. Two people, the same week, entirely different biology.
Can you reduce allostatic load?
Yes. The load is cumulative, which is the bad news, but it is also responsive, which is the good news. You reduce it by restoring the unloading: protected sleep, regular movement, and the deliberate switching-off of the stress response once a demand has passed. The lever that people underuse is that last one. The meeting is over long before the body files it as over. Building in real recovery, rather than more endurance, is what brings the load down.
How does allostatic load relate to resilience?
Resilience is not the absence of stress and it is not a bigger capacity to suffer. It is how efficiently your system loads, carries, and unloads. High allostatic load is what resilience looks like when the unloading has failed. Strengthen recovery and you are strengthening resilience at its physiological root, not decorating around the edges.
References
[1] McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease. Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, 33-44.
[2] McEwen, B. S. (2000). Allostasis and allostatic load: implications for neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology, 22(2), 108-124.
[3] Karatsoreos, I. N., & McEwen, B. S. (2011). Psychobiological allostasis: resistance, resilience and vulnerability. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(12), 576-584.
[4] Nestler, E. J., & Russo, S. J. (2024). Neurobiological basis of stress resilience. Neuron, 112(12), 1911-1929.
