Dissipative Structures

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After 25 years in medicine, I've stopped seeing the body as a set of compartments and started seeing it as a system. Much like the heart, kidneys, and brain aren’t isolated structures that thrive or diminish in isolation, stress, recovery, metabolism, sleep, inflammation, load, and emotion are all connected. And the same stressors that build someone up can break someone else down. The same stressors that built you up one day might start to break you down the next — the difference isn’t the stress, it’s the state of the system receiving it. Adaptive capacity is like a bank account. Stress makes withdrawals. Recovery makes deposits. You grow when you have enough reserves to remodel. You break when withdrawals exceed deposits for too long. The early signals can look identical: fatigue, soreness, irritability, disrupted sleep... which is why so many people get confused. Adaptation has a rhythm: challenge, fatigue, recovery, stronger. Breakdown has no rhythm: effort, exhaustion, incomplete recovery, deeper exhaustion. I see this in runners who see their pace decrease while their heart rate increases, and they think they should push harder. This pattern doesn’t end well. Biomarkers help, but the pattern tells the story. Chronically low heart rate variability (HRV), rising resting heart rate, persistent inflammation, poor sleep, stubborn pain, declining performance — those are signs of a system losing resilience. Like many instances of midlife joint pain… it often isn’t “just the joint.” It’s the downstream expression of poor metabolic health and inactivity. Fix the system, and the symptoms change. This is the Law of Dissipative Structures (LoDS) in real life: stress + energy drives adaptation; stress without recovery drives disorder. Muscles, tendons, bones, mitochondria — even the healthcare industry itself — follow this rule. Our job isn’t to eliminate stress. It’s to calibrate it. Enough to stimulate growth, not so much that it overwhelms the system. If you want to age well or perform well, you need to pay attention to the balance. https://x.com/hjluks/status/1993001909049868634
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