Homeostasis refers to a system’s capacity to maintain its internal balance despite outside disturbances.

The concept comes from biology. The French physiologist Claude Bernard first hinted at it in the nineteenth century, speaking of the “stability of the internal milieu”; Walter B. Cannon formalised it in 1932 and coined the term homeostasis. Etymologically, from the Greek hómoios (similar) and stásis (stable position): remaining similar in a changing world.

In practice, a warm-blooded organism keeps its body temperature constant, and our bodies continually regulate blood sugar. This stability rests on negative feedback loops: like a thermostat, a sensor detects a change in a parameter and triggers corrective action to return to the reference value.

In systems thinking, homeostasis describes a human group’s tendency to preserve its habits and its way of functioning. Every family, couple, team or institution holds an implicit balance made of rules, roles and routines. Within a family, each person may occupy a well-defined role — the mediator, the rebel, the protector — and interact according to tacit rules that maintain the group’s coherence. That coherence is reassuring: it offers members a sense of safety and predictability.

Organisations show homeostasis too. Faced with a change of procedure or the arrival of a new manager, a company may display informal resistance. Employees quietly keep applying the old habits, or wait for it to blow over, until the organisation returns to its familiar way of working.

The same holds for individuals. Our psychological habits, even unhealthy ones, serve an internal balancing function: they maintain a known comfort zone. This is why changing an ingrained behaviour can produce a diffuse unease, as though something abnormal were happening inside us. The system that is our mind seeks to return to its known point of equilibrium, sometimes at the expense of our conscious well-being. We may sabotage a project we care about simply because stepping outside our usual frame generates too much anxiety.

Homeostasis is at once a valuable ally and a stubborn opponent of change.

It makes continuity possible. Think of a tightrope walker constantly adjusting their centre of gravity to stay on the wire: each micro-correction prevents a fall.

But a family that has always communicated avoidantly — never speaking about problems — will react with discomfort if one member starts expressing their emotions honestly. Others will immediately minimise, make a joke, or change the subject. All of it aimed at restoring the original climate of avoidance.

Homeostasis therefore acts as a brake on change as soon as change is perceived as a threat to the existing balance. The paradox is that every member of the system may say they want things to get better, while involuntarily contributing to maintaining the problematic situation, simply because it is the functioning they know.

Family therapists have identified this phenomenon since Don Jackson’s work in 1957, which described family homeostasis as what accounts for resistance to change in families. The more a system feels threatened, the more it clings to what it knows: better the devil you know.

Faced with a system’s homeostasis, the instinct might be to break it at all costs. If it maintains a problem, why not confront it head-on? Experience shows that a brutal approach risks reinforcing fear, leading the system to grip its old way of functioning even tighter. It amounts to pulling too hard on an elastic band: it comes back in your face.

A therapist who violently confronted a family by listing all its dysfunctions from the outset risks watching it close up and break off therapy, overwhelmed by the perceived threat.

The paradoxical approach defuses the power struggle with homeostasis: instead of a lose-lose tug of war, the system is given permission to stay stable, which can lead it to alter its functioning of its own accord.

The aim, of course, is not to leave the system frozen in a problematic status quo. It is to co-construct a new and more satisfying balance.