Allostatic Load: Why Musicians Burn Out (and Why Recovery Is a Skill)
Performing at your best is, against traditional wisdom, not so much about your ability to do “the thing”.
It’s more about the physiological and psychological systems that allow the thing to happen in the first place.
Train those systems properly and, assuming your technical skill is there, performance becomes more consistent without forcing it.
But training isn’t just about adding stress.
It’s about learning how to recover intelligently.
And to do that, you need to understand allostatic load.
Allostatic Load: The Leading Indicator of Burnout
Every time you perform, train, or deal with anything that triggers your fight-or-flight response, nervous system load increases.
Bright lights. Loud environments. Constant notifications. Pressure to deliver.
All of this counts, and the body does not distinguish between different stressors.
The slow accumulation of this load is what’s known as allostatic load.
It’s the biological storage of stress.
Over time, this stored stress starts to distort the body’s internal balance. Sleep quality drops. Mood becomes less stable. Energy dips. Focus suffers. Small issues start to linger.
Common signs include:
Poor sleep
Irritability
Brain fog
Digestive issues
Low motivation
Headaches
For musicians, this directly affects performance. Sometimes subtly. Sometimes enough to cause injury, illness, chronic fatigue, or burnout.
Allostatic load sits underneath most stress-related breakdowns.
And in the music industry, baseline stress is already high before training even enters the picture.
(Not so) fun fact: When the nervous system is lying fight/flight dominant, it prioritises blood flow to the large muscle groups. That means the muscles responsible for fine motor tasks (like playing an instrument) are underserved. This mechanism is a big reason why many musicians end up with RSI-like injuries. These are the result of months and years of fighting your physiology, rather than being aligned to it.
Recovery Is A Trainable Skill. And A Non-Negotiable
This is why recovery isn’t something you bolt on when things fall apart.
It’s a skill.
If you want to recover well, two things matter:
You need to identify what actually needs recovering
You need the right input to match that need
At best, most people apply generic recovery to specific problems and hope it works. At worst, recovery is entirely passive… Think “I’ll just take a day off”.
That’s rarely effective in the long run.
Interoception: The Skill That Makes Recovery Work
“You can’t recover what you can’t feel.”
Interoception is your ability to sense what’s happening inside your body.
It’s noticing tension, overload, or fatigue before it spills over into something bigger.
Allostatic load is often described as one global stress level, but in reality, it’s built from layers of localised stress. Tight areas. Overworked systems. Under-recovered regions.
Your job isn’t to guess.
It’s to identify those micro-stresses and apply the right stimulus to clear them before they add to the total load.
Do that consistently, and your global stress levels drop. The nervous system starts to regulate itself. Training, performance, and recovery begin to support each other instead of competing.
