Finding Balance: Lessons from Nature’s Feedback Loops

Early in my career at Peak XV, I met an accomplished founder who told me “You can only pick two of the three things in life: work, health and family. You can never get all three.” That comment stayed with me, rather uncomfortably. We all aspire to be successful but most of us also seek balance. 

The world seems to celebrate only those heroes with great achievements who appear to have gone all-in and sacrificed a lot to get the level of success they have attained. But balance is also rarely effortless. And if balance is so hard to find, then why is a life with balance not celebrated as a successful life? The story of an ordinary person with a good job, a happy family, and good health feels like a dull one. Excitement, it seems, only comes from extremity—whether triumph or tragedy. 

Maybe that’s because humanity loves stories and those stories inspire, teach, and move civilizations forward. And stories often demand imbalance – the obsessive artist, the tireless founder, the relentless explorer. Perhaps that’s why balance isn’t celebrated: it doesn’t make for dramatic arcs or grand climaxes. 

But if one leaves the story value behind, finding balance seems like a perfectly legitimate – even wise – goal to pursue, at least for some of us. 

When it comes to complicated questions with no obvious answers, I’ve learned to look to nature for clues. After all, where better than hundreds of millions of years of evolution can we find nearly perfectly crafted systems to learn from? 

How nature keeps balance

The first insight came to me rather quickly: in nature, balance is not a static outcome. It’s not a destination you get to. It’s a dynamic equilibrium achieved through a process of continuous correction. Every biological system is full of push and pull, of forces that drive and forces that restrain. 

Take for example how our body constantly regulates itself to keep us functioning optimally. We are not always at a temperature of exactly 37 degrees centigrade. Think about what happens when you go for a run. The moment you start moving, your muscles fire, your heart rate rises, your body temperature increases. Soon, the body senses the shift. Sweat glands activate, blood vessels widen, and you begin to cool down – a self-regulating response that brings you back toward equilibrium.

Scientists describe these pairs of forces as actuators and inhibitors – one triggers change, the other restrains it. The pattern repeats everywhere. You eat a large meal (actuator); your pancreas releases insulin to absorb sugar (inhibitor). You get stressed (actuator); cortisol spikes, and then other hormones step in to calm the system (inhibitor). Together, they keep complex systems in equilibrium. 

Nature has been running this playbook for billions of years, and it’s one we can borrow to find balance in our own lives.

Building our feedback loops

If nature relies on actuators and inhibitors to sustain order, what might our human equivalents be?

Every domain of our lives – work, health, relationships – runs on its own set of feedback loops. When we push too hard, systems strain. When we withdraw too long, they stagnate. The trick is to design both the accelerator and the brake.

Let’s first take the easier problem of creating feedback loops within each bucket – work, relationships, and health. 

At work, our actuators are curiosity, ambition, and drive. They get us started, keep us learning, and help us grow. But without inhibitors—rest, reflection and learning to say no—we risk burning out.

With health, training, discipline, and challenge are the actuators. They strengthen us. Yet the real growth happens when the inhibitors step in – when we rest, recover, and repair. The best athletes know how to use rest as an amplifier of performance.

And in relationships, engagement, communication, and kindness are the actuators that build connection. But healthy relationships also need space, solitude, and boundaries – inhibitors that prevent dependence or exhaustion.

Nothing here is unfamiliar. But most often, we don’t install the sensors needed for feedback loops to kick in. 

Most of us haven’t learned to listen to our bodies. We are too busy to read the signals in our relationships, too late to address them through communication, and too afraid to set boundaries with work, carrying it all around. 

At work, feedback comes to you structurally – so may be a bit easier even without your own sensors. For the other areas, a few minutes of journaling or silent meditation can help us tune into our body and our life.

Sometimes, simply respecting the structures society has given us can help. We have weekends to recover from work, holidays to refresh ourselves to prevent burning out. Similarly, we have festivals we celebrate together, birthdays and anniversaries that act as reminders to celebrate friendships and relationships. Let’s respect these structures as much as we can, especially when they exist for our benefit.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t work hard or pursue achievement. Rather, it’s to suggest that we can use some of the inhibitors to become even more effective when the actuators get to work. 

Balancing across buckets

The founder who told me “you can only pick two of the three” was pointing to a truth about time.

Work, health, and family don’t exist in isolation. They’re interconnected systems drawing from a single pool of time and attention. When one accelerates, the others inevitably feel the strain. This seems like the harder problem of balance.

The mistake we often make is treating these domains as competitors instead of collaborators. In reality, each can play the role of an actuator or an inhibitor for the others – an automatic feedback network rather than a zero-sum game.

• When work heats up, family and health can act as natural inhibitors as long as we have the sensors in place. They can provide the recovery, reflection, and even the sense of purpose needed to sustain the next sprint.
• When health improves, it becomes an actuator for everything else – boosting energy, mood, and performance. Or if work is intense, health could become an inhibitor and a natural reason for us to slow down temporarily. 
• When family thrives, it becomes both anchor and amplifier – stabilizing emotion and amplifying meaning in what we do.

Nature rarely shuts one system off to keep another alive; it allows each to oscillate in rhythm. The same applies to life. The goal isn’t equal time for all three – its rhythmic harmony, where each domain takes turns leading and following.

Jeff Bezos said, “I prefer the word harmony to balance because balance implies a strict trade-off. In reality, if I’m happy at home, I come into the office with more energy, and if I’m happy at work, I come home with more energy.”

Bezos reframes the idea: instead of separate buckets, think of feedback between them. This is precisely the actuator–inhibitor loop, with energy flowing dynamically across domains.

Getting out of the zero-sum game

While our time is finite, and using it in one domain takes away from the other, the real currency of life may be energy. This energy may be consumed in some domains and generated in others, a dynamic that beats the zero-sum-game situation we all seem to be stuck in. Time is limited, but energy is renewable. 

As we pursue becoming more self-aware, we will know our own sources (actuators) and drains of energy. By smartly allocating time to energy-generating activities (reading a book, walking with family, meeting close friends, or spending time in nature), we may be able to generate enough energy in a shorter period, which can then help us be more effective at work. Then, by consciously investing in energy-generating activities, we create positive feedback loops: we replenish faster, think more clearly, and perform better at work. Over time, this rhythmic exchange across domains beats the zero-sum trap.

The beauty of seeing energy as the currency of balance is that it allows us to keep our achievement orientation while maintaining sustainability. We can go all in with all our energy – just not all the time and not with all our time.

Redefining success metrics

Our culture often mistakes balance for lack of passion or drive. But nature would disagree. Systems that don’t regulate eventually collapse.

Perhaps the founder who told me “you can’t have all three” was right – if success is defined as maximizing short-term output. But if success means endurance, joy, and compounding impact, then balance is a prerequisite.

A life designed around actuators and inhibitors doesn’t flatten ambition. Balance doesn’t have to mean mediocrity. 

In 1952, Alan Turing, the mathematician famous for cracking the Enigma code, wrote a paper called The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. In it, he explained how patterns in nature – leopard spots, zebra stripes, seashell swirls – emerge when two substances interact: one an activator that promotes pigment, the other an inhibitor that diffuses faster and restrains it.

When the balance between them is tuned just right, order arises out of chaos. That’s why a leopard has spots, not blotches. 

It’s a reminder that balance isn’t dull or lifeless. It’s creative. The interplay of forces doesn’t have to flatten the edge. Instead, it can give rise to form, rhythm, and beauty. It may not lead to a story to tell generations, but it can still earn you new stripes on your back!

If we can design our own actuators and inhibitors and find our energy sources – our personal systems of drive and rest, effort and renewal – we can build lives that are both productive and harmonious. That harmony, that rhythm is also success.

Recommended Reads

Three articles I found interesting: 

• Anyone who’s used ChatGPT knows the drill—answers that sound solid but include made-up bits: a fake citation, quote, feature, or claim. This article takes a look at why this happens.These “lies” aren’t intentional; they stem from training limits and data gaps. As AI grows more transparent, staying curious and critical remains our best safeguard.

• How many people do you know well? Our brains seem built to handle only so many meaningful relationships—around 150. Psychologist Robin Dunbar explains that the inner circle of deepest trust is just about five, while the rest are broader connections we see occasionally. True connection, though, shines brightest in person. It’s marvelous how our brains manage so much detail, and it serves as a gentle reminder to cherish our meaningful connections.

• In this deeply moving essay, neuroscientist David Linden reflects on his terminal cancer diagnosis and the insights it brings into the human mind. A self-described “science nerd,” he explores how preparing for death has revealed the coexistence of anger and gratitude, challenging the idea that the brain feels only one emotion at a time. He also observes that there is no truly “objective experience.” Our perceptions and feelings are always shaped by expectation, comparison, and circumstance, reminding us how beautifully complex and subjective our minds truly are.

If you have time for longer reads:

Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life by John Gribbin 

Recommended to me by another fund manager, this one is a really good read for anyone who isn’t afraid of science. From natural disasters and oscillating stock markets to, sometimes, just people, the world can be a perplexing place. John Gribbin’s Deep Simplicity delves into this fascinating world of chaos and complexity, offering insights into how order emerges from disorder. He discusses principles of chaos theory, such as sensitivity to initial conditions and feedback loops, and applies them across various scientific fields. 

The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life
by Steven Bartlett

Many of you may know him as a popular podcast host. From school dropout to millionaire by 23, Steven Bartlett’s meteoric rise is remarkable. Through his entrepreneurial journey and thousands of podcast interviews, he has distilled 33 principles rooted in psychology and behavioral science. I found these principles not to be new, but still quite practical.

Do write in at gv@peakxv.com if my interests intersect with yours! Click here to read more articles on Peak XV’s blog. For more editions of Connecting the Dots, click here. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter.