If you think that being healthy is synonymous with stability, then you are going to have to think again. “Allostasis” is the medical term used to describe your body’s adaptation process. It comes from the root words “stasis”, meaning “stability”, but it combines it with the prefix “allo” meaning “variability”. The idea here is that through change and mutability, stability is achieved. Even that stability though is not permanently fixed, it is just a functional state that exists for a given moment in time. Your body might seem solid enough to you, but that appearance is an illusion of your focus because your physical body is built on change. Right now, as you read this, you are exhaling atoms of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that a moment before were locked inside solid matter.
Every part of your body is in a constant state of turnover and regeneration. What, for example, might be the most solid, unchanging and stable part of your body? Your bones? At this very moment, your bones are in a process of turnover. Cells called osteoclasts are digging up old bone and cells called osteoblasts are laying down new bone. Even your bones are in a state of constant change. Your skeleton is replaced every three months. Every other organ is also in a state of simultaneous renewal and destruction. In one month, your entire skin is renewed, and every five days the lining of your stomach is renewed.
Change is inevitable, it is a deep part of you. And, yet, we fear it. In many ways, we are educated to be constant, and change is often seen as a negative thing. How many times have people said to you in a critical way, “You’ve changed!” Similarly, “changing your mind” is seen as a sign of weakness, although it could more properly be seen as evidence of strength. In fact, the ability to change your mind is essential if you want to live a life of vitality and health. Your brain likes change, and it values newness.
In one study on how the mind operates, people were given drops of water and fruit juice sometimes in a predictable sequence and at other times in a varied pattern. The researchers measured brain stimulation and found that preference for water or juice had no effect. However, at times of unpredictable drop delivery, there was a stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centres for most subjects. It was concluded that the brain is primed to note unpredictable events. Maybe at a deep level, your primitive brain knows that change is the only constant and it actually enjoys it. It’s just the darned newcomer (in evolutionary terms), the conscious cortex, that gets in the way and demands stability.
Yet, even as we fear change, the absolute necessity of it has been recognised by philosophers for centuries.
New dogs
The Roman Seneca, who worked for some time as a tutor of the notorious Emperor Nero and lived from 4BCE to around 65CE, said, “What will surprise you is not that you must learn how to live but that you must learn how to die.” Seneca is not talking about the end of life here, instead he is saying that to live well, you must be able to allow parts of yourself to die. Attitudes, prejudices and ways of thinking must be surrendered. You must allow them, a part of you, to die. If you allow this death, a birth of something else can occur. Life itself is change. Stasis is true death.
So, paradoxically, death must be part of your life. The good news is that you can change, and you are never too old to change. While the rest of your body stops growing long beforehand, your brain keeps developing into middle age. Your brain’s white matter continues to increase in volume until your late 40s. The parts of the brain that keep growing are the temporal and frontal lobes — the parts that make you human. Not only that, but the connections between neurons that result from