Allostasis
Allostasis describes adjustment to meet environmental demands and maintain stable function. Our Chinese edition uses a reader-friendly term alongside the original English; this is not a claim to standardise Chinese academic terminology.
Updated 2026-09-14 · Archived
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At a glance
Maintaining stability through change.
Allostasis describes adjustment to meet environmental demands and maintain stable function. Our Chinese edition uses a reader-friendly term alongside the original English; this is not a claim to standardise Chinese academic terminology.
Whether a response is appropriate depends on the environment and the body's needs at that moment.
Stability through adjustment
Allostasis offers a way to understand changing regulation as demands change. Sterling's account emphasises anticipation and allocation of resources, rather than treating every change as a failure of regulation.[1]
What distinguishes a regulatory explanation?
Modern homeostasis is not simply a picture of an unchanging body. Ramsay and Woods examine how multiple regulatory loops interact, and why changing a measured value alone does not settle whether a response should be called homeostatic or allostatic. Reading this alongside Sterling makes the conceptual distinction more precise.[3][1]
An adjustment and its cost are different questions
Allostatic load concerns costs associated with repeated or prolonged adaptation. The adaptive process and its possible cumulative costs should be distinguished.[2]
A note on language
The Chinese edition uses a term emphasising dynamic adaptation as an explanatory label and retains Allostasis. It is not a claim that Chinese terminology is standardised, or that allostasis and homeostasis are interchangeable.
References
- Peter Sterling (2012). Allostasis: a model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.06.004
- Bruce S. McEwen, Eliot Stellar (1993). Stress and the individual. Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.1993.00410180039004
- Ramsay DS, Woods SC (2014). Clarifying the roles of homeostasis and allostasis in physiological regulation. Psychological review. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035942
Publication record
TAP-CON-0002 · v0.2 · English
Scientific review has not been completed for this edition.
The Allostasis Project is founded and supported by Resilio.
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