The Weight That Never Leaves — Introducing Allostatic Load

Hey humans, welcome to the HX podcast. This is Stacey Baird and how ironic we're one day late dropping this episode. And when you hear the content of this short episode, introducing a concept that I came across a few weeks ago and started diving into a more detail, the delay and the irony will make more sense to you. If you're new to the HX podcast, this show is where we stop treating women's health as a personal problem. And we start treating it as something that has everything to do with workplace design and leadership. I want to introduce you to a new concept today, maybe new for you may not be new to you, but it's two words that I believe are going to change the way you understand your work. And if you're a leader or an HR leader, your workforce. And it certainly changed how I thought about soldiering through all of the moving pieces I have in my life. Allostatic load. Now, most of us are familiar with the idea of a heavy workload, too many tasks, not enough time. I talked to women about this all day, every day, and we have frameworks for that. But allostatic load is different. Allostatic load is the weight that doesn't change. It doesn't spike during a hard week or recover on Friday. That's why you don't feel recovered on Monday It just sits constant unrelenting background noise that never goes quiet Think of it this way Allostatic load is the scientific term for the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress The body can adapt to stress in short term, but when stress becomes a baseline state, there's really no real recovery. And that adaptive capacity to recover erodes. The body starts breaking down under the weight that it was never designed to carry indefinitely. That's exactly what's happening in the bodies of millions of working women right now. Here's what research tells us. Science and evidence back to y'all. Here we go. Women carry a disproportionate share of invisible labor at home. Yes, but also at work. The emotional labor, the social glue, the anticipatory thinking, the caretaking, the hypervigilance about getting things in the, getting things right in the right environment. and it wasn't designed necessarily for women in mind again we've talked about this on this podcast series this is not a judgment this is just a fact that the workplace was historically built and historically worked by men and so the workplace and the the way the day is set up is typically run on a cycle that is more adept for men so our bodies as women keep a running tab of all of those aspects as we go through our days. Study after study shows that women carry a higher allostatic load than men at comparable life stages, higher inflammatory markers, higher cortisol dysregulation, higher rates of sleep disruption and the cumulative psychological cost is measurable and it compounds over time I want us to understand allesthetic load as a workplace and leadership issue and not just biology and science. Here is what I learned about this process and where it gets important for every leader listening. Allesthetic load doesn't just affect individual well-being. It shows up in your organization. It shows up as absenteeism, disengagement, what looks like a performance problem but isn't. It shows up as your highest performing women quietly stepping back or staying and slowly burning themselves out from the inside. And here's the fact that's really under-discussed, that allostatic load is a major driver of autoimmune disease. That's where I tripped and fell on this research. it's also a major driver of hormonal disruption of the conditions that are massively overrepresented in women conditions that are also chronically underdiagnosed and undertreated we're going to unpack all of this and we're going to do a couple of episodes here on this topic in our next episode we're going to go deep into exactly how allostatic load intersects with autoimmune disease with hormone health with ADHD, which we've been talking about, and what all that means on how we lead and how we design the workplace and how we stop mistaking a health crisis for a capability gap, y'all. I mean, again, as a chief people officer, part of my job is to understand capability and capacity. If we miss this part, we miss a lot. If you're a leader, if you're in HR, or you're a woman who's ever been told you just need to manage your stress better tune in So my other ask is subscribe so so you don miss the next episodes here And if it resonated with you share this with someone else I think if you in the HR community this is something that we don't talk about that we should. So with that, y'all, this is just the intro episode. I wanted to sort of whet your appetite here on a day late drop of allostatic load. I have had a lot going on over the last few weeks and it caught up with me. So ironically, that's why this episode is late and I don't feel bad for it y'all because I had surgery I had a birthday which was fantastic but it also was one more thing and I'm in a new job and I've got kid stuff going on still so sometimes sometimes I have to demonstrate what I've talked about here on this podcast which is self-compassion and here we are but we're going to dive deep on this episode and on this topic. And I hope you stay tuned. If you know a lot about allesthetic loader, you're an expert in this field, please reach out. We're developing this as we go and I'd love to hear from you. Or if you know somebody who's an expert in this, please reach out to me as well. And I'd be happy to reach out to whomever you know that knows this topic well. With that, y'all, I'm going to wrap this episode of the HX Podcast. Always sending you light, love, joy, and maybe a little bit of rest this week. as you think about moving through the rest of your week. See you soon.