This animation shows how a simple system evolves to cope with loading. The red indicates low strain and the blue indicates high strain, loading is in the vertical direction and the number in the bottom corner of the animation indicates the time-step. As you can see, the system quickly evolves so as to reduce the strains where they are greatest. You will notice that as time progresses, the rate of change of the strain decreases, this is because the rate of growth decreases as the strain decreases, implying that the equilibrium state would take a very long time to reach (if indeed it ever did!).