Definition
Allostasis: Achieving stability through change; the ability to adapt successfully to the challenges of daily life by feedforward mechanisms to maintain viability, emphasizing the biological imperative that “an organism must vary all the parameters of its internal milieu and match them appropriately to environmental demands” (Sterling & Eyer, 1988). This is an extension of homeostasis, i.e., stability through constancy, maintaining constancy of a vital variable by sensing its deviation from a set point and providing feedback to correct the error. Allostasis describes mechanisms that change the variable by predicting what level will be needed and then overriding local feedback to meet anticipated demand (Sterling, 2004). As such mechanisms require higher brain functions, in most cases, the allostasis deals with cephalic involvement in systemic physiological regulation, including behavioral and/or psychosocial impact. Feedforward mechanisms associated with fear, anxiety,...
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Yamamoto, Y. (2013). Allostasis, Allostatic Load. In: Gellman, M.D., Turner, J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1005-9_1627
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