How to embrace change using allostasis and rugged flexibility

Executive overview

Most people treat change as an interruption to normal life — something to resist or recover from. The real model of healthy systems is allostasis: stability is not a fixed point you return to, but a new point you move toward. The goal is not to get back to where you were; it's to find new stability that still reflects your core values.

Rugged flexibility — stable through change by holding values constant while adapting everything else — is the core skill for thriving in a life of inevitable disruption.

The problem with homeostasis

• Homeostasis (1850s model): disorder → return to previous stable state.
• Allostasis (1980s–90s model): disorder → new stable state somewhere different.
• Homeostasis accurately describes only narrow body systems (e.g., core temperature regulation).
• Muscle repair, brain rewiring, immune response — all return to stability somewhere new.
• Treating change as an acute abnormality prolongs distress; it delays finding the new stable point.
• Average adult goes through 36 major life transitions — roughly one every two years.
• Eastern cultures without the homeostasis framework show much better relationships with change.

Allostasis and the brain

• The brain is a prediction machine: we feel good when predictions are confirmed, alarmed when they fail.
• Stability means having reliable predictions about what comes next — not rigidity.
• Rigidity: inability to update predictions when circumstances change.
• Chronic alarm states (too many failed predictions) are cognitively exhausting and unsustainable.
• The immune system is a direct parallel: no prior exposure = disorder; recovery = new stability with antibodies.

Rugged flexibility

• Rugged = the core identity, values, and qualities that define who you are.
• Flexible = how you pursue and express those values as circumstances change.
• Species that survive: hold a core identity, adapt everything else (the finch's beak lengthens, but it's still a finch).
• Organizations: core properties stay constant; application shifts with conditions.
• Athletes: style changes with age, trademark qualities remain (e.g., Jordan's fadeaway).
• River metaphor: water is fluid, but the banks (values) give it shape and direction.

Responding well to change

• Do not try to recreate the old stability or compare new reality to old reality.
• Accept disorder as a normal phase, not a failure state.
• Take small actions immediately — the brain's seeking pathway and fear/rage pathway compete for resources; activating seeking turns off fear.
• Lean into areas of life currently going well to pull the brain out of despair mode.
• Draw on community and social support as the system borrows capacity during reorganization.

Diversifying identity

• Workism (identity entirely from one domain) creates fragility — one disruption destabilises everything.
• Having multiple identity domains (work, health, parenting, creative pursuits) allows borrowing stability from one when another is disrupted.
• When disorder hits one domain, actively lean into functioning domains while reorganizing.
• Disorder events are also opportunities to add a new identity domain — a new hat.

Applied examples

• Injury: losing the ability to run → values were health and athleticism, not running specifically → pivot to powerlifting without dwelling on the loss.
• Relocation: moving from Oakland to Asheville → instead of recreating Oakland, find what the new place offers that the old didn't (mountain trails, different community).
• Pandemic: teams that handled it best stopped asking "when do we get back to normal?" and started building new configurations.
• Remote work: pure zoom replication of office work failed; natively remote structures (different collaboration norms, regional in-person gatherings) represent a genuine new stable configuration.

On AI and disruption

• AI is genuinely disruptive — unlike crypto, which replicated existing functions with a different philosophy.
• Best comparison: the internet's impact on knowledge work, not industrialisation's restructuring of the economy.
• Marbles analogy: AI disperses them; they reassemble differently on the same table. Industrialisation knocked the table over.
• Writing use case: AI handles iterative, pattern-heavy tasks well; generating novel, book-length thinking still requires the human doing the hard work of getting the outline wrong nine times.