Life is a balancing act: Homeostasis
what physiology can teach us about everyday life
Life is hard - I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. As a biologist, I often sit in awe of how life has been sustained over 3.7 billion years. Our bodies are constantly being bombarded with noxious stimuli like temperature, polluted air, the disturbing news of the day, and the lights from whatever screen you are reading these words off of. Some of these stimuli even have the potential to disrupt the delicate subjective experiences we curate for ourselves.
For example, last Friday the light from my laptop screen deeply pierced my psyche. I had to use my computer to analyze data for my research, but my progress was slow that day. The screen light made me nauseous and miserable. My sensory systems were overloaded in that moment, and the balance of my emotional and physical well-being was skewed. Eventually, I was able to rebalance my psyche after spending a few hours away from my computer.
How do you gauge whether your internal state is unbalanced?
Believe it or not, biologists have a word for life-sustaining balancing mechanisms: homeostasis. The word itself is Greek in origin with “homeo” meaning “same” and “stasis” referring to “standing still.” In short, homeostasis is a set of bodily processes that seek to keep the body at a constant, manageable state.
The classic example is temperature regulation. When we are exposed to high external temperatures, our bodies naturally respond to counteract this and lower the body’s temperature. For instance, we sweat when our bodies are overheated so that the water in sweat can evaporate. As the water evaporates (i.e. goes from a liquid to a gaseous state), it absorbs heat around it. In the case of sweat, some of the absorbed heat comes from the skin’s surface - thereby cooling the body.
Even though the goal of homeostasis is to keep the body in stasis, the actual homeostatic mechanisms need to be dynamic. As stimuli change, so must the body’s responses. When you sit out in the warm sun, your homeostatic systems are putting in a lot of energy and effort "behind the scenes” so that your internal temperature stays the same and your body continues to function normally.
To do this, homeostatic mechanisms typically contain at least three components:
1. A sensor that gauges whether a potentially harmful stimulus is present. For temperature regulation, your skin is filled with neurons that respond to changes in temperature.
2. A central processing center that interprets communications from sensors and integrates them to launch a response. In the body, the brain serves this function, with a specific brain region responsible for thermoregulation.
3. An effector that takes action in response to decisions made by the processing center. We have already discussed one effector in temperature regulation - sweat glands which produce sweat after receiving signals from the brain.
If any of these three components are hindered, then homeostasis is much more difficult - if not impossible.
Homeostasis typically lies solely in the domain of physiology, but we can expand the notion to encompass our whole health and well-being. Often, our subjective peace is fragile and can be upset by something unforeseen - like my hypersensitivity to computer light last week. The ramifications extended beyond pure physiology and disrupted my emotional balance. And, the changes I made to my routine (including an embrace of crip time) were homeostatic in seeking to return me to my psychic baseline.
Our moment-to-moment experiences are incredibly fluid, and therefore our self-regulation should be dynamic too. We can (and probably already are) practicing emotional homeostasis in our everyday lives. It starts with noticing common disruptions to your emotional balance. If we recognize them as such, we can take actions to counteract them.
I can’t provide a prescriptive solution because this will look different for everyone. But evolution has showed us a modular process that works for every living being. And that’s good enough for me.
What can you do to maintain your emotional homeostasis?
ah yes (just came inside from staring straight at the sun for a couple minutes to compensate for not leaving my bedroom for three days)