The Edge of Change

A Personal Phase Transition

Our experience of the world is embedded in a sea of complexity that, at first glance—or better yet, first felt—can seem like utter chaos. For most of human history, what happened in our bodies and minds went unmeasured, leading to fallacies about the origins of biological change. Heuristics formed into esoteric mythologies—like the four humors of Renaissance medicine—in an attempt to ease the burden of analysis and improve behavioral outcomes.

Today, we live in a golden age of accessible technology. Not only has it streamlined travel and entertainment, but it has also democratized access to vast amounts of personal health data. Wearable devices now provide a constant stream of information about what’s happening beneath the surface.

Used well, this data can help us calibrate our perceptions and make informed decisions about health and performance. But without a framework to understand the complexity of human biology, the same data can be overwhelming or even misleading. Our modern digital heuristics are more advanced than balancing humors of phlegm and bile, but they still require context to be useful.

Understanding health data begins with understanding the complexity of biology. That doesn’t mean we all need to become statisticians to use our smartwatches effectively. In fact, the opposite may be true. By zooming out and examining the principles that govern complex systems like the human body, we can avoid the tedious hell of doing math to be healthy. One principle I’ve recently found invaluable is the concept of phase transitions in dynamical systems.

In the sections ahead, we’ll explore these ideas—but more importantly, I’ll share a personal experience where a phase transition in my health markers unfolded before my eyes. In doing so, I hope to offer a useful lens for tuning your own health and performance.

Going Through Changes: Dynamical Systems & Human Biology

Terms like phase transitions and dynamical systems can sound pretentious, but they’re actually useful for understanding ourselves. I’ll do my best to keep the jargon minimal and focus on clarity.

Human biology is a complex dynamical system. That means our bodies involve many interacting parts, all constantly changing. It’s difficult to predict how these changes will play out over time. A dynamical system is simply a way of understanding how things evolve based on certain rules—like how your body reacts to stress, training, or rest.

These systems operate through feedback loops. Positive feedback amplifies change, while negative feedback stabilizes things. Over time, systems settle into patterns called attractors—stable, cyclical, or chaotic depending on conditions. Because they’re nonlinear, small inputs can cause big changes—or none at all—depending on timing and system state.

Occasionally, these systems undergo phase transitions: sudden shifts from one stable pattern to another, like a breakthrough in performance or a burnout crash. This concept highlights the value of adaptation over optimization and emphasizes variability as a sign of long-term resilience.

When a system hits a critical threshold (a bifurcation point), it reorganizes into a new stable state. Your body can go from one pattern of functioning, through a volatile phase, and then into another pattern—better or worse. Whether that outcome supports your goals depends on a mix of resources and timing.

A familiar example is strength training. As training intensity increases, fatigue builds. In the final weeks of a cycle, performance may dip due to accumulated fatigue (volatility). If recovery resources—sleep, nutrition—are sufficient, the athlete rebounds into a new performance level (supercompensation). If not, they crash.

This capacity for abrupt reorganization is what makes biological systems fascinating and frustrating. You can do the same thing for weeks, only to find yourself in a completely different state with no clear trigger. But with awareness, you can begin to sense when change is near. Sometimes, you can even catch the transition as it happens.

A Personal Phase Shift: I'm Different Now

Earlier this year, I experienced one of the clearest physiological phase transitions I’ve ever seen in myself.

Over the winter, I was under heavy load—work, travel, illness, and stress. My heart rate variability (HRV), which usually sat between 35–42, began to trend downward. A bad day might drop me into the 20s, but I’d bounce back with rest. Resting heart rate (RHR) hovered around 44–48. Decent, for a jiu jitsu hobbyist in his forties.

As the months passed, my HRV dropped steadily. I hit teens on bad days. RHR rose into the 50s. A dense two-week work trip to Europe compounded everything. I got sick, which further locked in the low recovery state. My metrics flatlined: high RHR, low HRV. I felt it.

To intervene, I cut caffeine completely and started daily walks. These changes helped, but didn’t spark major improvement. Then, while recovering from a sinus infection, I flew from Virginia Beach to New York City. During the flight, pressure changes messed with my ears. After painful congestion and muffled hearing, I saw an ENT who diagnosed a non-moving eardrum and prescribed a steroid—prednisone.

That’s when things got weird.

Within days of starting prednisone, my HRV skyrocketed to 73. My RHR dropped to 42. I wasn’t sleeping well—waking up wired at 3:30 a.m. thanks to the steroid—but my numbers held. Even more surprising: I felt significantly better. I’d removed caffeine, increased movement, and tried to manage stress, but nothing explained the dramatic turnaround. The phase shift had happened.

Maybe the cumulative inputs finally tipped the system. Maybe prednisone cleared underlying inflammation that had suppressed my autonomic tone. I don’t know. But it happened.

This Ain’t Over

If I'm completely honest, I've never seen this happen before. Neither with a client nor myself. I had systematic volatility followed by a complete shift in my physiology. On top of the numbers-I feel different too. Much better in fact.

I'm not sure what to make of this yet. Or if it's repeatable to any degree of certainty. What I do know is that being aware of these signs can help keep us both humble and alert to the effects of our own behavior.

Ultimately, deepening understanding of the complex and dynamic nature or our own physiology can help use technologies at our disposal not to deliver answers, but to ask better and better questions so we can be better stewards of health and performance.

While I'm not totally certain if I'm going to be in this new phase with any real degree of permanence I do know one thing - this ain't over yet.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

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