We’ve all had those days where one tiny thing – like someone leaving a dish in the sink, a last-minute email, the dog barking – feels like the last straw. It’s not that the dish is inherently offensive. It’s that our capacity is already full, and, like an overstuffed backpack, that small stress bursts the seams.
This invisible backpack that we carry is one way I like to think about allostatic load.
What is Allostatic Load?
Allostasis is your body’s ability to adapt and maintain stability through change. It’s the process of your nervous system, hormones, and body systems adjusting to stressors, big or small, proactively. This might involve your heart rate rising before a meeting, or adrenaline kicking in when the dog darts toward the street.
Allostatic load is a measure of how much your system is carrying, and impacts your body, emotions, and thoughts. Think of it like the weight of your stress backpack – if you carry a heavy bag for too long (i.e. if your stress response stays switched on), your body gets tired, stuck in a cycle of adaptation that drains your reserves everywhere.
In other words, allostatic load is your loaded backpack of stressors, and allostasis is your body coping with that backpack – ideally keeping your stride steady, whether the bag is full or empty.
What Does This Have to Do With Capacity?
Capacity is your body’s bandwidth to be with what life brings. It’s not about being endlessly calm or unshakable. It’s about your energy reserves – how much stress, complexity, or even joy you can handle without tipping into survival mode.
Capacity and allostasis go hand in hand. The first has more to do with the resources you have available, and the second with what your body does with those resources, physiologically. Allostatic load, meanwhile, measures the drain on these two systems.
When your capacity is wide, your allostatic load is low; your body is making good use of your resources as you get through your day. You can handle challenges without losing yourself. You can stay present, flexible, and aligned with what matters most, even when stress shows up.
By contrast, when the allostatic load is high, your capacity narrows. Your reserves are depleted, and recovery from stress takes more energy. The burdens feel heavy, and even small stressors can feel like too much. You may feel easily overwhelmed by little things – like a look, a noise, or an item out of place.
If capacity is the size of your bag, your allostatic load can either ‘fit in’ easily, with room to maneuver, or your load strains the boundaries, ready to burst.
Allostatic Load and Resiliency
This is where our lovely backpack comparison breaks down – because the build up of stressors and how it affects your capacity is not, unfortunately, some burden you can just take off. It also isn’t a trade off or an easy math problem, like “taking stress away = having more capacity = being happier/more relaxed.”
No, allostatic load is more nuanced than that. And, as a newer concept in the somatic space, as well as being new to my learning, it’s not always clear how it impacts us. I’m still surprised how it shows up for me!
A large variable that plays into this nuance is our resiliency. If capacity is our resources, and allostasis is how they’re used, and allostatic load is the drain or drag on resources, then resiliency is how our system resets the balance of these three. We want to have days (or moments) we can carry a high load, and days (or moments) we can rebuild capacity with recovery.
All of these distinctions are literally a part of our bodies; they live in the tissues, hormones, and emotions that we juggle. They make up – and impact – our entire system. As they interact over time, they can have cumulative effects. If your allostatic load is high for a prolonged period, some functions take more energy than they would if the load were low. You literally have a bigger drain than your system can recover from.
How Do You Assess Your Load?
Most of us don’t wake up thinking, “My allostatic load is high today.” Instead, we notice it in how we feel, react, and recover.
Here’s the tricky part: for many of us, carrying a high load feels normal. If you’ve lived with tension in your shoulders, restless sleep, or always being “on,” it might not even register as stress anymore.
A few clues that your load might be high:
- Baseline tension: Your shoulders or jaw never really soften, even when you’re “relaxed.”
- Short fuse: Little things set you off—traffic, dishes, someone’s tone of voice.
- Low recovery: After stress, your body and mood stay charged long after the moment has passed.
- Sleep struggles: Trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking rested.
- Flatness or numbness: It’s harder to feel joy, excitement, or connection, even in moments that “should” feel good.
- Always on: You feel like you can’t stop or slow down—your nervous system keeps you scanning for what’s next.
I can’t say this enough: for many of us, chronic overload feels normal. If you’ve lived this way for years, you might not realize there’s another possibility.
Think about the last time you went on vacation, took a walk deep into nature, or gave yourself an afternoon with no plans. Remember how your body felt when it finally started to unwind. That’s often the first glimpse people get of what it feels like to live with a lighter allostatic load. For many of us, the only time we notice the difference is when we step out of our normal routine.
Allostatic Load Shrinks Capacity
When your system is carrying too much stress over time, your capacity narrows. You might notice:
- Irritability or quick reactivity.
- Difficulty recovering after conflict or a hard day.
- A sense of being “on edge,” even when nothing’s wrong.
- Less ability to take in pleasure or rest.
It’s not that you’re weak. It’s that your body is already at its threshold. Functioning and adapting with a high load take a higher percentage of remaining energy, and this is cumulative. Recovery becomes more and more difficult, and one more demand – even something small like an unemptied dishwasher – can tip you into overwhelm.
Expanding Capacity: A Somatic Approach
The hopeful part? Capacity isn’t fixed. Just as muscles grow with training, your nervous system can learn to carry more without overloading you. Somatic practice offers a way to gently lower allostatic load and increase resilience.
You can train it, gently, through practice. Here are a few starting points:
Centering – Stand or sit tall, breathe, feel your feet. This signals safety.
Tracking sensation – Notice what’s happening below the neck. Warmth, tightness, fluttering.
Pendulation – Let your attention move between something activating (tight chest) and something resourcing (steady feet).
Containment – Create boundaries that support you: saying no, downtime, less stimulation.
Micro-resilience – Take a deep exhale, give a shake, step outside, laugh. Small resets add up.
These aren’t “fixes.” They’re ways to lower your load little by little, like taking bricks out of that backpack you didn’t realize you were carrying.
A Quick Self-Check
Try this right now:
- Pause and take a full breath.
- Notice your breath: shallow, rushed, or easy?
- Scan your body, what won’t let go? Jaw? Belly? Shoulders?
- Ask yourself: If one more thing was added right now, would I feel resourced or overwhelmed?
That’s your load speaking.
Other Truths About What You Carry
- It’s not just about big stress. Your “load” builds from poor sleep, overthinking, relationship tension, background noise, even systemic pressures.
- Recovery matters. Stress itself isn’t the issue, it’s whether your body gets to return to baseline.
- We’re not all carrying the same load. Early life experiences, support systems, and resources shape how much weight each of us already has in our backpack.
- Pleasure is medicine. Joy, nature, creativity, and connection all lighten the load.
- It’s relational. Families, workplaces, and communities carry load together. Healing happens in relationship, too.
Why This Matters
Understanding capacity and allostatic load shifts the story from “I should be handling this better” to “my body is telling me the truth of its limits.”
When you understand the link between capacity and allostatic load, you start to see that overwhelm isn’t a personal failing, it’s biology. Your body isn’t against you. It’s showing you the truth of its limits. And those limits are workable.
With practice, we can widen our capacity window and increase resilience; not by pushing harder, but by softening, recovering, and resourcing. Over time, life stops being about barely managing and starts being about inhabiting ourselves fully…even when the dishwasher is still full.
