It took me two years to write this.

Breaking homeostasis, accessing your creative drive, and building the life you want.

About 15 years ago I was feeling stuck. On the surface nothing was wrong - I had just graduated college and was working full-time in a fairly typical office job - but things weren’t right either. It was a bit early for a quarter-life crisis (let alone a midlife one), but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had become a kind of spectator to my own life. I was riding shotgun as the miles passed by.

I asked my dad about this feeling, and he shared a line I still think about, "Sounds like you're stuck in a lukewarm bath.” Staying in the water feels better than braving the cold air, but it's getting worse by the second. At some point you've got to stand up. 

If you’re here, you probably listen to Being Well, support me on Patreon, or attended the Life After COVID online summit. Over 15,000 people signed up for that summit, which meant I suddenly had a mailing list of roughly that size. Since then, I’ve sent exactly 0 emails to that list.

That summit was in the summer of 2021, more than two years ago.

I run a personal growth podcast. I’m self-employed. I don’t have kids. If anyone has the time and resources to write an email and capture some business value from an incredible windfall like that, it should be me. So, why didn’t I?

Homeostasis and You

Whether it's building a new habit, changing how we think about ourselves, or just writing a newsletter like this one, it's usually more comfortable to not do the thing. Most of us experience that intuitively, and there’s plenty of science to back it up. In the six years of hosting Being Well, the concept that’s probably had the greatest impact on how I think about the world is homeostasis: the desire of systems to return to “normal.”

Homeostasis is a state of equilibrium where the system is “at rest.” For example, your body is at its homeostatic base when your heart is beating normally, your breathing is more-or-less calm, and your body is performing all these tiny adjustments to keep your temperature right around 98.6°. We have to leave this comfortable home base from time to time in order to adapt and respond to various challenges. We experience the short-term demands placed upon the body in order to do this as stress.

When the stress response kicks in the hypothalamus (a gland in the brain) activates the adrenal glands (located on top of the kidneys), releasing a flood of hormones, including adrenaline (epinephrine), noradrenaline (norepinephrine), and cortisol. This release is what we experience as the “fight or flight” response. Adrenaline increases your heart rate, elevates your blood pressure and boosts energy supplies. Noradrenaline produces vasoconstriction (a technical way of saying that your blood vessels get narrower), increasing your blood pressure. It also boosts the strength of your heart’s contractions, bumping up heart rate and blood flow. Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars in the bloodstream, the availability of various substances that repair tissues, and your brain's use of glucose.

Making this a bit more real, think about the feeling of stress: your heart rate increases, breath quickens, throat tightens. Maybe you get a buzz of energy. Maybe your mind gets a bit foggy, or goes blank entirely. Maybe you have the opposite response, and everything gets cast into sharp relief. Whatever your unique experience, these bodily functions are all very useful when we’re under threat, but come with costs when sustained over a long period of time. This is why a healthy, well-regulated system doesn’t like hanging out in the stress response.

The key point here is your body likes homeostasis. It’s what you know and have become accustomed to, and in the above example your homeostatic base is a healthy one. But the the push of systems to rapidly return to what they know is value neutral. All change, whether for good or ill, is experienced as stress.

So, what happens when familiar isn’t good for you?

Normal Isn’t Normal

When our system is exposed to dysfunctional situations (or substances that dysregulate its normal functioning) for long periods of time, it’s possible for the homeostatic base itself to shift through a process known as allostasis. These chronic stressors create a new set point that we then begin to experience as “normal.” For example, if someone struggles with addiction to a substance, their body has adapted to far more of that substance being present than would be typical. Over a long enough period of time, the consumption of addictive substances alters the function of the brain, including by dulling our ability to experience normal-range pleasures: if you’re downing a gallon of soda a day, water tastes pretty weird.

Even though this new homeostatic base is objectively unhealthy, the body and mind will still defend it, and attempts to move toward a healthier state are experienced as stress. Similar adaptations occur in people who are chronically exposed to unsafe or threatening environments, which is why even positive emotions can feel threatening or uncomfortable to people who grew up in a situation where they had to be on high alert. The response to warmth or kindness isn’t, “Oh how nice,” but rather, “Why is this person trying to get me to drop my guard?”

Just as our body has a homeostatic base, so too do the social systems we’re a part of. Social groups rely on complex structures of relationship and hierarchy that keep them relatively balanced and stable. Everyone knows their role and reads from a familiar social script that’s developed over time. When systems use this rigidity to punish freeloaders, enforce prosocial norms, and otherwise check antisocial behavior, it’s all well and good. But social systems resist healthy forms of change just as our physical system does. If a member of the group changes in meaningful ways – becoming a little bigger, a little stronger, a little more themselves – it threatens the homeostasis of the group as a whole. They’re no longer reading from the old script, which forces other people into new and unfamiliar roles. This disruption often leads to pushback from other members of the group, which is one of the reasons why feelings of shame - an emotion that exists in large part to keep people in line with social norms - are such a common accompaniment to the change process.

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Activating

If this all felt like a long-winded excuse for not just firing up my laptop one day and blasting off a cursory welcome email, well…okay, you’re not wrong. But I think it’s helpful to highlight the things we’re working against when we try to activate: to break out of what we’ve become accustomed to and establish some new normal. Change is hard even when we know it would be good for us, and understanding how our system is built to amp up the challenges associated with changing rather than make things easier can create the space for a little self-compassion.

When I think back over the times I’ve had to get out of a rut (and I have plenty of experience because I’ve been in plenty of ruts), there are a few things that consistently helped me access the spark of energy I needed to fight inertia and access my generativity.

Focus on These Key Needs. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a theory of motivation that focuses on the choices people make when their behavior isn’t subject to external influences. In other words, how do we act when it’s all up to us? SDT argues that we have an innate drive towards growth, exploration, and self-actualization. We’re naturally intrinsically motivated, a fact that’s evident in children, who exhibit curiosity, playfulness, and a psychological drive known as mastery motivation even when they’re not offered specific rewards. The problem is that unsupportive environments, relationships, and social structures get in the way of our ability to access that natural motivation. SDT identifies three fundamental psychological needs that tend to lead to intrinsic motivation (and are therefore natural precursors to generativity):

• Competence: The need to feel effective and capable in one's actions and endeavors.

• Autonomy: The need for individual agency, self-direction, and the freedom to make choices aligned with one's values and interests.

• Relatedness: The need for connection, belonging, and supportive relationships with others.

If you’re having a hard time flipping the switch there’s a good chance it’s because you don’t feel competent, autonomous, or connected to others. What do you think’s missing these days, and how could you find more of it?

Put the “Locus of Failure” in the Right Place. As we move through the world we go through an internal and external process of learning what we can and can’t influence. There are parts of our psychology that probably just aren’t going to change right now, and there are systems and situations out in the world that aren’t likely to bend for us. We’re going to bump into a lot of things we can’t change on the way to figuring out what we can, so expressing our agency inherently means braving experiences of failure.

A huge variable in our ability to be creative, productive, and consistent is how we interpret, understand, and integrate “failure” experiences. There’s a lot of advice out there for dealing with failure, and one of the most useful tools is also one of the most obvious: put the blame in the right place.

If you watch a toddler playing with their toys, they don’t seem to get mad at themselves when they can’t put the square peg in the round hole. They try a couple of times, look puzzled, and then try to put the block somewhere else. If they’re having a tough day they might get mad at the peg, or frustrated with the whole enterprise of existence and have a nice ‘lil meltdown. But they don’t seem to interpret and internalize the “failure” as being about them. They understand that the blocks are the problem. If they become a bit more patient and skillful with the blocks, the blocks will do what they want them to do. This gets around the need for self-compassion entirely.

Along the way, pay attention to the words you use to describe failure, and the feelings associated with different kinds of language. For example:

• I failed.

• I am a failure.

Vs:

• I made a mistake.

• I couldn’t do it this time.

• I need to learn ____ to do this.

• Wow, this system really resists change.

This isn’t just new-age “put a positive spin on it” mumbo jumbo. The words we use to frame our experiences have a major impact on how we think and feel, and these sorts of reframes are part of the cognitive restructuring process taught in cognitive behavioral therapy.

Comfort with Aggression. Freud thought human behavior was primarily driven by two basic instincts, which he called the life instinct (Eros, or the “pleasure drive”) and the death instinct (Thanatos, or the “aggression drive”). Eros included the desire to meet our basic biological needs (hunger, thirst, and sex), as well as more complex desires for love, creativity, and self-expression. Thanatos included the desire to enact violence on those we disagreed with, seek out danger, and take risks.

Freud is, let’s just say, “a bit of a complex figure” in psychology, and thankfully we’ve gotten more nuanced in how we think about our drives in general and the role of aggression in particular. For example, Jaak Panksepp was a neuroscientist and psychobiologist who did key research on the neural mechanisms of emotion, and one of his notable contributions was the study of cats and their instinctual behaviors. Panksepp discovered that cats have separate brain circuits for rage and “seeking,” or predatory pursuit. Predatory pursuit refers to the instinctive behavior cats display when hunting prey, characterized by focused attention, stalking, and pouncing. On the other hand, rage is triggered by threats or obstacles and results in defensive or attacking behaviors.

If you’re the kind of person who listens to a podcast like Being Well, you’re probably more likely than average to recoil at the notion of being “an aggressive person.” Aggression gets an understandably bad rap because the costs associated with misplaced anger are so high, but it’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The ability to pursue our goals, lean into short-term discomfort, and push back against the status quo has a lot in common with the seeking drive state, itself part of the “aggression” family of drives.

Drives aren’t good or bad. They’re just a part of us, and can be applied toward useful or problematic ends. If you’ve had a hard time martialing the energy required to get out of some tepid water, it might be helpful to take a look at how comfortable you are with predatory pursuit.

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What to Expect

As with anything new, we’re going to discover what this together. Here are a few things I’m thinking of sharing in this space:

• Long-form writing like this.

• Short-form writing focused on specific topics and psychological tools.

• Transcripts of episodes of Being Well.

• Community building content, like Q&As, chats, and conversations.

• More informal audio and video content.

If there’s something else you’d like to see, please let me know.

More than anything, I’d like to use this as a place where I can connect with readers and listeners more directly and personally, and foster a real sense of community.

If you haven’t already, and would like to support my work, please consider joining as a paid subscriber. I really appreciate it.