Homeostasis

Keywords

Homeostasis, balance, regulation, conditions, body, temperature, water content, blood sugars, insulin, metabolism, hormones, mood, negative feedback, anaerobic, respiration.

Homeostasis is the continual process where your body is completely balanced. A series of glands and organs work together to maintain this balance, and they maintain everything about your body.

Components of Homeostasis

Homeostasis maintains, regulates and controls almost all of your body, including:

Let's take a closer look at it all.

Body Temperature

Our body needs to be at an ideal temperature of 37°C. This is so the enzymes in our body can work at their optimum levels to create energy.

Blood Sugar Level

Your body needs a constant source of glucose for respiration. This is controlled by homeostasis, and it controlled by insulin, a hormone that controls the release and storage of the sugar.

Water Content

Your body is naturally 80% water-based. The controls that maintain this do so to make sure that you have enough and not too much water in your body at any one time. There are conditions where you will realise you do not have enough water, because your mouth will be dry. We constantly lose water from:

How Does Homeostasis Work?

All of these controls sounds like a lot of rules to follow, which is fine, but how does our body do it?

Interesting fact: homeostasis works on all levels of an organism, the cells, tissues, organs, systems and the organism itself.

There are a few mechanisms that help, and they are all called negative feedback. They work by a simple balance scale. Let's imagine an actual old-school style set of scales. They need equal weights on either side to maintain balance. If one of the sides of the scales goes up, you need to place something on it to bring it down. Likewise on the other side.

Negative feedback works by the same method. If a level of something increases, the control systems in your body reduce it to the acceptable level. If the level of something decreases, the control systems in your body increase it.

So for example, if we are cold, generally we will go and put a jumper on. But naturally, when we feel cold, and you shiver, your muscles are contracting quickly. To combat this, your body releases energy from your reserves through respiration, more specifically anaerobic respiration.

When we are too hot, generally, you will remove clothing to help cool down, but our body uses the sweat glands to produce sweat, and this evaporates from our body to remove heat from the skin.

Why is Homeostasis Important?

Well, many reasons really.

If you're walking down a road, and you faint, it cold be because your homeostasis is not working properly. This could be due to a lack of water content in your body (you've not drunk enough water in the day!) and can then mean you feel light-headed. Or, you might feel really sleepy as you have no energy. This is the result of low blood-sugar levels (go eat a banana!).

Other reasons include your long term health. Without certain aspects being looked after, you could end up in hospital as a result of homeostasis not working properly. It can also mean that organs around your body may stop working.