Article
May 1, 2026
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What Allostatic Load Actually Is and Why You Can't Push Through It
I sleep fine, but I’m still exhausted. What’s up? Allostatic load, that’s what.
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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. We all feel it. Taking time off to rest doesn’t help. Sipping the air along the coast doesn’t replenish. Reading under a willow tree and listening to a whip-poor-will brings only momentary lightness. Every day begins with dread and ends with another well, at least we got through it.
Who can be blamed for turning on oneself?
Is this another failure of mine? Is it a discipline problem? Is it a matter of better time management or positive thinking? Is it because I walked under a ladder that one time? Do I lack grit?
No.
In this case, what feels like a willpower problem is more often a physiological one. And at its center is something called “allostatic load”.
What is allostasis
Allostasis is your body’s adaptive system. It maintains stability through change.
The baseball player out in left field who has sensed something in the body language of the batter starts to jog forward, his eyes locked on the ball flying from the pitcher’s hand. When the ball eventually pops up into the air, the player is already in motion, already underneath it, mitt reaching. This is allostasis.
Allostasis is your body predicting demands and preparing for them. It is why you begin to shiver when you step into cold air — your body has sensed the change in environment, knows a sudden drop in body temperature is possible and dangerous, and so rapidly contracts and relaxes your muscles to generate heat.
Prediction and preparation. The aim is homeostasis — internal balance.
This makes allostasis extraordinarily effective under normal conditions. The problem is what happens when those conditions are no longer normal.
What happens to the game if, after catching the ball and tossing it back to the pitcher, the baseball player does not return to his original position and instead runs around after imaginary fly balls?
Where the system begins to fail
There is a physical cost to allostasis. Changing bodily processes and triggering actions to pre-emptively maintain homeostasis have consequences. If allostatic processes are activated too often or stay activated for long periods, these consequences accumulate.
Called allostatic load, this accumulation leads to inadequacy and dysfunction.
If an allostatic process is activated frequently and never shuts off, eventually the changes it affects will grow less and less appropriate, its abilities to respond to anticipated needs stunted.
Your body, still driven by the need for homeostasis, sets other allostatic processes going to compensate.
Allostatic load is very obvious in chronic stress.
Your stress response is fundamentally allostatic and can cause a lot of damage if it becomes dysregulated.
Stress and allostatic load
During a stress response, your body releases adrenaline, cortisol, and pro-inflammatory cytokines. These are not inherently harmful. In the context of a brief, genuine threat, they are precisely what keeps you alive.
Adrenaline sharpens focus and mobilizes energy. Cortisol sustains the response and modulates immune function. Pro-inflammatory cytokines coordinate the immune system's rapid activation.
Duration is the problem.
When cortisol remains chronically elevated, your cells begin to downregulate their sensitivity to it, a biological response to over-signaling. The immune system, which normally depends on cortisol as a brake, begins to lose that brake. The result is immune dysregulation, which typically manifests as chronic low-grade inflammation.
Chronic inflammation is thought to weaken the lining of your gut, weakening the barrier between your gut and your bloodstream. Inflammation also spreads like a rumor, only deepening the problem. Chronic stress is widely accepted as a major driver of noncommunicable conditions such as metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic pain, and neurological conditions, including depression. A large UK Biobank study published in 2025, drawing on data from over 200,000 adults, found that allostatic load independently predicts cardiovascular risk.
This is how chronic stress becomes structural illness. And it isn’t your fault.
Why modern stress is a particular problem for this system
Your allostatic system evolved for a different threat landscape.
A predator appears. Adrenaline spikes. Cortisol sustains the response. You flee, or you fight. The threat resolves. The parasympathetic nervous system re-engages. Cortisol clears. The system resets.
The entire sequence from activation to recovery might take minutes.
Modern psychological stressors, however, seem never to resolve.
A difficult conversation with a manager, a delayed email, anxiety about financial instability, and low-level dread about the news all trigger your allostatic stress response. But then your body never gets the signal that the threat has passed. There’s always another email.
Whether the threat is a predator or a deadline, both converge on the same downstream stress response: the same hormones, the same physiological activation, the same suppression of recovery. Allostatic load is the result of an ancient adaptive system confronting conditions it was never designed for.
And you can feel it.
Wired by tired. Non-restorative sleep. And even the self-loathing, which one meets with the mantra of the modern world: work harder.
Why you can’t push through the accumulated load
The dominant cultural response to stress is effort.
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”.
Work harder, focus more, manage time better. Sleep when you’re dead.
This response makes intuitive sense if stress is understood as a performance or discipline problem.
It is exactly the wrong response if stress is understood as a physiological state. This is what people often get wrong about burnout. They miscategorize it and so mistreat it.
When allostatic load is low, the stress response is appropriately calibrated. You engage, you recover, you adapt. This is what the system is designed for.
When allostatic load is high — when the failed shut-off pathway has been running for months, when inflammation is chronically elevated, when cortisol sensitivity is impaired — the system is already dysregulated.
Pushing harder does not clear the load. It adds to it.
When a system designed for recovery is never given the conditions to recover, trying harder means feeling worse.
What recovery actually means in this context
To reverse allostatic load, you need to allow your parasympathetic nervous system space and time to do its job. And this is why the vagus nerve is getting more focus these days.
It is the primary arm of your parasympathetic nervous system. You can read more about ‘The Wanderer’ here. Activating the vagus nerve more regularly provides that parasympathetic moment. Slow deep breathing activates the nerve, particularly extended exhalation.
Sleep is also helpful as it is the primary window during which cortisol clears and inflammatory markers reduce.
Social safety and perceived control appear to reduce the frequency of allostatic activation in the first place. The more often you’re around people you trust in environments you know, the less primed you are for predict and prepare.
Heart rate variability, or HRV, is one of the cleaner signals of whether you’re accumulating allostatic costs or shedding them.
HRV reflects the dynamic balance between stress and relaxation activity — a measure of how flexibly your autonomic nervous system responds rather than how rigidly it holds a fixed state.
Research shows that HRV declines with increasing allostatic load. Improving vagal tone and HRV over time may help reverse allostatic load, but the link is tenuous and an active area of research.
What now?
The person who turns on themselves — who counts the ladders they've walked under, who wonders if it's a grit problem — is not weak. They are doing the only thing that makes sense when no one has explained the biology.
Now you have a better explanation.
Allostatic load is real, it is measurable, and it responds to the right conditions. The body that accumulated it is the same body that knows how to recover from it. It just needs to be given the chance.
Give your body a chance with yōjō.
Ph.D.
Lead of Clinical Well-Being
Public health, fitness, academia, and MedTech specialist, Atkinson has 25+ years in turning research into real-world impact.
DC, AFMCP, AcuP
Vagal Health Advisor
Director at large of the Vagus Nerve Society and author of Activate Your Vagus Nerve, Habib has 15+ years of experience in chiropractic and functional medicine.
Ph.D.
Behavioral Psychology Advisor
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Business Administration, and Psychology, and world-renowned behavioral scientist, Adams has 21+ years of experience and focuses mainly on processes that drive better decision-making.
M.D., Ph.D., FASRA
Chief Medical Officer
An expert in anesthesiology and specializing in vagus nerve stimulation, André ensures yōjō is safe, effective, and grounded in rigorous scientific research. He also helps develop yōjō's educational resources.
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Article
August 14, 2026
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How Do You Know If Your Nervous System Is Dysregulated?
"I just feel a bit off, not myself, but I don't really know why." Here’s why.
As a wellbeing coach and health psychology specialist, I've worked with hundreds of clients — executives running global teams, athletes preparing for competition, busy working parents spinning a dozen plates — and one of the most common things I hear, in slightly different words each time, is: "I just feel a bit off, not myself, but I don't really know why."
What strikes me is how rarely people connect that feeling to their nervous system.
It's not their fault. Nervous system regulation isn't something we're taught about in school, and the symptoms often don't feel serious enough to bring to a healthcare professional.
So when something feels off, most people don't know where to look for answers. And they end up tolerating a low-grade version of themselves for months, sometimes years, before joining the dots.
So before we get into this further, let’s do a simple check-in to see if your nervous system might be a little out of sorts.
A few questions to ask yourself
Sit with these for a moment. There's no scoring system, and this isn’t a diagnosis. Just be really honest about whether any of these describe you right now, and if there’s a pattern across more than one area.
- Do you find it hard to fall asleep even when you're exhausted? Do you wake at 2 or 3 am with a busy mind? Or, do you get a full night’s sleep yet wake unrested?
- Do you feel "tired but wired", too depleted to do much and too revved up to rest? Do you crash in the afternoons, then get a second wind late at night?
- Is your concentration patchier than it used to be? Are you losing words mid-sentence, walking into rooms and forgetting why, or finding tasks that used to be easy harder?
- Are you more reactive than usual — tearful, snappy, anxious — over things that wouldn't normally land that hard? Or the opposite: flat, numb, a little disconnected from yourself and the people around you?
- Is your jaw tight? Shoulders up by your ears? Heart occasionally racing for no clear reason? Has your digestion become unpredictable? Do bloating, reflux, irregular bowels, sensitivities seem to be multiplying?
- When something stressful happens, how long does it take you to genuinely come back down? Hours? Days? Or does it feel like you never quite return to baseline at all?
If you're nodding along to several of these — particularly across more than one category — it's worth taking seriously. This is what a dysregulated nervous system tends to look like in real life. Not dramatic. Not always alarming. Just a steady accumulation of small signals.
Why this happens — even when you're coping
Here's the part that often lands hardest with my clients: you can be coping and be dysregulated at the same time. In fact, that's the most common presentation I see.
You're still showing up, still hitting deadlines, still being a good parent, a reliable friend, a strong performer. From the outside — and often from the inside too — it looks like things are working. And they are, but your body is keeping score. And it's beginning to show you, in quiet ways, that the system needs some help.
To understand why, it helps to know a little about how your autonomic nervous system works.
Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches, the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest). A balanced system switches fluidly between the two throughout the day. You ramp up for a meeting, then come back down. You handle a stressful conversation, then return to baseline. That movement between states is what we mean by regulation.
Dysregulation isn't about being stressed. It's about losing the ability to come back down. When the body lives in a state of low-grade activation for long enough — from demanding work, caring responsibilities, illness, unresolved emotional load, or simply years of pushing through — the system stops returning to baseline between stressors.
Your sleep gets lighter. Your digestion gets touchier. Your mood gets thinner. Your thinking gets foggier. None of it is dramatic in isolation. All of it points to the same underlying issue.
The symptoms above, while seemingly random and tied to character flaws, are just your physiology responding to you running hot for too long without a proper reset.
Where to go from here
The first piece of work is recognition, which is what this article has really been about. And it is what asking yourself those questions at the top will help ignite. And if they have helped you identify something worth addressing, there is good news.
Your nervous system can relearn any flexibility it may have lost.
Quitting your job, ditching your caring responsibilities, or running away to a tropical island won’t help you rebalance your nervous system long-term. Teaching your system that it's safe to come down will. Consistently engaging in small daily rituals that activate your rest-and-digest response helps your body to learn how to switch back into this mode more easily and fast-track you back to feeling more like yourself.
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Article
August 7, 2026
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Dr. André Boezaart’s Perspectives on nVNS
yōjō Chief Medical Officer, André Boezaart, reflects on stress, the senses, and the vagus nerve.
By André P. Boezaart, MD, PhD, FASRA
It helps to think of the human nervous system as four connected parts, each with its own job.
The central nervous system (CNS) is the brain and spinal cord. It is the command center. It handles thoughts, feelings, and decisions.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs the jobs you never think about but can't live without: your heartbeat, your breathing, digestion, and blood flow.
The somatic nervous system (SNS) controls the movements you choose to make and facilitates your senses. It is your link to the outside world.
The enteric or "gut" nervous system (GUT) lives in your digestive tract. It has more nerve cells than your spinal cord, and it acts like a mind of its own, talking to the brain all day through nerve and chemical signals.
Together, these four systems work like a piece of music. Each part matters. Harmony is the goal. When one section plays too loudly, the whole piece falls out of tune.
When the stress system gets stuck
Inside the autonomic nervous system are two branches that keep each other in check.
The sympathetic system is the accelerator (fight-or-flight). The parasympathetic system is the brake (rest-and-digest).
In modern life, the accelerator often gets stuck. Alerts, deadlines, and worry keep the sympathetic system running hard, all the time.
What was meant for short bursts of alertness becomes prolonged hypervigilance. What was meant to be a useful alarm turns into slow harm.
A gland called the adrenal medulla releases catecholamines (stress hormones like adrenaline) and doesn’t stop. And another system, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, releases cortisol, and doesn’t stop.
The immune system slips into a low, simmering, inflamed state. Inflammatory signals called cytokines rise, blood vessel linings work less well, and the gut wall becomes leakier and weaker.
The nervous and immune systems, which are meant to be partners, start working against each other.
Calming the body through the senses
You wouldn’t think it, but your senses play a role in spreading calm throughout your nervous system. Each of the five senses offers a direct path to the parasympathetic system. These paths evolved to tell the body one thing: you are safe.
Sight. When your eyes rest on something wide and open, like mountains or the ocean, the visual part of the brain sends calming signals inwards. This lowers activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm center. A soft, wide gaze actually slows your heart.
Hearing. Gentle, patterned sounds calm us. Think of a mother's sing-song voice to a baby, a soft hum, ocean waves, or soothing music. These sounds work the tiny muscles in the middle ear and activate the vagus nerve. Your body tunes toward connection instead of defense.
Smell. Scent has a direct line to the brain's emotion centers. Aromas like lavender, bergamot, and frankincense lower stress activity and lift vagal tone (the strength of the calming vagus nerve).
Taste. Eating mindfully wakes up taste nerves that run along cranial nerves VII, IX, and X. This releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins and gets digestion moving, which is part of the vagus nerve's territory.
Touch. Massage, firm pressure, and gentle skin contact switch on special nerve fibers called C-tactile afferents. These signal safety and belonging. They raise oxytocin (a bonding hormone) and boost the calming system.
Put together, these signals tell the body you are safe and free to heal.
The vagus nerve: the body's anti-inflammation highway
At the center of all this calming is the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve. It is a two-way highway linking the brain, the organs, and the immune system.
About 80% of its fibers are afferent, meaning they carry information up to the brain. They send sensory signals from the organs and body, including from parts of the outer ear called the cymba and cavum conchae, back to the brainstem.
Its efferent fibers carry signals the other way, down from the brain. They switch on the cholinergic anti-inflammatory reflex.
Here's how that works: the vagus nerve releases a chemical called acetylcholine. It attaches to receptors on immune cells called macrophages. This lowers inflammatory signaling.
This link between the nervous and immune system is what allows thought, emotion, and inflammation to "talk" to each other in real time.
Bundling the senses at the ear
When we stimulate the part of the vagus nerve in the outer ear, in the cymba and cavum conchae, we tap straight into those calming afferent (sensory) pathways.
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) sends gentle electrical pulses to the very same circuits that music, touch, scent, and beauty stir up on their own.
It's as if all five senses were bundled into a single clear signal, all arriving together at a hub in the brainstem called the nucleus tractus solitarius.
Then, using the vagus nerve, the brain sends calming signals back down into the body. It steadies the heart, settles the gut, and quiets inflammation through that same acetylcholine pathway.
taVNS does not replace the senses. It amplifies their message. It reminds the nervous system what safety feels like.
Closing thought
At its heart, the path from stress to healing is a shift from sympathetic noise to parasympathetic calm.
Beautiful views, gentle sounds, soothing scents, delicious meals shared with loved ones, and a caring touch all send the same message the vagus nerve carries in every heartbeat: Be still.