This is how to get more energy
Social media is a wild, wild west of health advice. Some of it is very high quality. A lot of it is not. One of the things that makes it hard to tell the difference is the growing number of folks who are speaking scientific language without applying scientific evidence to the tools and techniques they recommend.
Recently, I’ve seen content from a kinesiologist on how emotions have different “frequencies” (they don’t); from a psychiatrist on how there are three drives whose balance “determines our wellbeing” (there aren’t); and from a meditation instructor on how to heal by connecting with “quantum fields” (you can’t).
You could argue that in the grand scheme of health misinformation, the Freudian pseudoscience of drives or the new-age pseudoscience of emotional frequencies are relatively harmless. At least they’re not telling us to drink borax. But less harmful isn’t actually helpful, and when we give up on the latter, it’s a sure bet we’re going to be wasting time, money, and energy - and who’s got any of those to spare?
did somebody say “energy”?
In the wide, murky demilitarised zone between science and pseudoscience, the most hotly disputed territory might be the idea that we can boost, build, or otherwise improve our energy.
In the quantum fields camp, energy is a mysterious, unquantifiable force that we must channel to stay healthy and get what we want. Sometimes we also need to clear this energy - using crystals or incense perhaps - if events or people with bad energy have contaminated it.
In the hard science camp, energy doesn’t really apply to people at all. It’s best understood via the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy. It can’t be improved or increased, only converted from one form to another.
That leaves anyone who’s looking for evidence-based ways to feel a bit less zapped in something of a quandary. We know what it feels like to be full of energy, even if those days are few and far between, and we know we’d like more of those days. If not frequencies and drives and quantum fields, then what?
cell husbandry
The field of bioenergetics is starting to propose some useful answers. Bioenergetics is the study of energy systems in plants and animals. It looks at how living things convert chemical energy from food and oxygen into the kinetic or other energy required to do biological work - to grow a new cell, say, or create a sugar molecule, or move a muscle.
At the most basic level, our ability to get things done in the world depends on this kind of energy. The unit of energy currency for cells is a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. It gets constructed inside cells by organelles called mitochondria, and it gets broken down to release energy when the cell needs to do other kinds of work. This process makes life possible, but it also produces by-products like radical oxygen species (ROS or free radicals) that can cause harm. If cells aren’t given the time and fresh fuel to clean them up, they can cause genetic damage and cell death. Mitochondria play a key role in that clean-up, too.
To feel better - to have more energy - we really need to be thinking at this cellular level. Scientists now believe that mitochondria were originally a species of bacteria that our single-celled ancestors domesticated to provide them with more energy, a strategy so successful that it enabled multicellular life to evolve. If we want our own multicellular lives to flourish, it might help to think less about self-care and more about cell care.
what do cells want?
If you think about mitochondria as a herd of microscopic livestock, it becomes easier to see why they need healthy food, some exercise, and time to rest and recover between periods of effort. It’s also less surprising that psychosocial stress can put just as much load on them as physical stress can - so much so that it can alter their function permanently, across generations. Responding to any load, physical or social, means doing work, and work takes energy.
Your cells aren’t asking for much. They’re not asking for crystals or incense (though if those make you happy, I bet they won’t judge). Treat them gently and they’ll repay you with the kind of energy even a physicist could love.