Energy, and How to Get It

For months, during the main pandemic stretch, I’d get inexplicably tired in the afternoon, as though vital organs and muscles had turned to Styrofoam. Just sitting in front of a computer screen, in sweatpants and socks, left me drained. It seemed ridiculous to be grumbling about fatigue when so many people were suffering through so much more. But we feel how we feel.

Nuke a cup of cold coffee, take a walk around the block: the standard tactics usually did the trick. But one advantage, or disadvantage, of working from home is the proximity of a bed. Now and then, you surrender. These midafternoon doldrums weren’t entirely unfamiliar. Even back in the office years, with editors on the prowl, I learned to sneak the occasional catnap under my desk, alert as a zebra to the telltale footfall of a consequential approach. At home, though, you could power all the way down.

Still, the ebb, lately, had become acute, and hard to account for. By the standards of my younger years, I was burning the candle at neither end. Could one attribute it to the wine the night before, the cookies, the fitful and abbreviated sleep, the boomerang effect of the morning’s caffeine and carbs, a sedentary profession, middle age? That will be a yes. And yet the mind roamed: Covid? Lyme? Diabetes? Cancer? It’s no HIPAA violation to reveal that, as various checkups determined, none of those pertained. So, embrace it. A recent headline in the Guardian: “Extravagant eye bags: How extreme exhaustion became this year’s hottest look.”

It was just a question of energy. The endurance athlete, running perilously low on fuel, is said to hit the wall, or bonk. Cyclists call this feeling “the man with the hammer.” Applying the parlance to the Sitzfleisch life, I told myself that I was bonking. At hour five in the desk chair, the document onscreen looked like a winding road toward a mountain pass. The man in the sweatpants had met the man with the mattress.

All of us, except for the superheroes and the ultra-sloths, know people who have more energy than we do, and plenty who have less. We may admire or envy or even pity the tireless project jugglers, the ravenous multidisciplinarians, the serial circulators of rooms, the conference hoppers, the calendar maximizers, the predawn cross-trainers and kickboxers. How does she do it? On the flip side, there are the oversleepers, the homebodies, the spurners of invitations and opportunities, the dispensers of excuses. Come on, man! It’s hard to measure success, if you want to avoid making it about money or power or credentials, but, as one stumbles through the landscape of careers and outputs and reputations, one sees, again and again, that the standouts tend to be the people who possess seemingly boundless reserves of mental and physical fuel. Entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, politicians: it can seem that energy, more than talent or luck, results in extraordinary outcomes. Why do some people have it and others not? What does one have to do to get more?

Energy is both biochemical and psychophysical, vaguely delineated, widely misunderstood, elusive as grace. You know it when you got it, and even more when you don’t. This is the enthusiasm and vigor you feel inside yourself, the kind you might call chi, after the ancient Chinese life force or the pronouncements of the storefront acupuncturist. The kind you seek to instill by drinking Red Bull or Monster, plunging into an ice bath, or taking psychostimulants, like Ritalin or Adderall or Provigil. Nootropics. Smart pills. CDP-choline, L-theanine, creatine monohydrate, Bacopa monnieri, huperzine A, vinpocetine. Acetyl-CoA, lipoic acid, arginine, ashwagandha, B complex, carnitine, CoQ10, iodine, iron, magnesium, niacin, riboflavin, ribose, thiamin, Vitamins C, E, and K. Biohackers microdose psychedelics, stick ozone tubes up their butts, or pay fifteen hundred dollars for a seven-hundred-and-fifty-milligram dose of NAD IV. Energy is why we’ve made a virtual religion of 1, 3, 7-trimethylxanthine, otherwise known as caffeine.

“Society has progressively increased its demands on us, and with that, therefore, our expectations of what we can or should do,” Maurizio Fava, the chief of the department of psychiatry at Mass General, told me. “This has led to a quest for greater ‘energy.’ ‘How can I do more? Doctor, what can you give me?’ ”

“Energy,” though, is a misnomer, or at least an elision. What we commonly call energy is actually our perception of the body metabolizing carbohydrates or fat as energy. Energy isn’t energy. It’s our experience of burning energy, converting it to work. It’s a metabolic mood. As Richard Maurer, a doctor in Maine who specializes in metabolic recovery, and who encountered me one day last summer as I mumbled about a shortage of it, told me, “ ‘Energy’ is a useless term. It is not the perception of stimulation. It is just the capacity to generate work. I think of it as only relating to potential. If a patient says, ‘I want more energy,’ maybe the doctor should just write a scrip for methamphetamine. But that’s false chi.”

The precise workings of the metabolic system, its nuances and contingencies, are, in many respects, an enduring mystery. You’d think we’d have figured out by now how our cells go about their business, this being the most fundamental element of our existence, but they may as well be in deep space or the Mariana Trench.

One and a half billion years ago, the planet’s only life-forms were single-celled. Fermentation ruled the earth. Then an anaerobic bacterium engulfed an aerobic bacterium. In time, the ingested bacterium’s capacity for feeding on oxygen managed to increase, by an order of magnitude, the amount of energy available to its anaerobic host. This accidental collaboration made possible the proliferation of multicellular life-forms and, eventually, tool-wielding hominids who would come to complain that they feel tired all the time.

According to what is known as the endosymbiotic theory of biological complexity, this chocolate-meets-peanut-butter moment, this big mush, is the reason we exist. That aerobic bacterium evolved into what we call mitochondria, the organelles that fuel living creatures: the powerhouses of the cell, as every schoolkid learns. (It’s about all I retain from high-school bio, anyway, save for Mr. Burns’s relishing his coinage of the phrase “a smidgen of lipids.”) Each of us has hundreds—if not thousands—of trillions of mitochondria. They convert glucose and oxygen into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, the primary cellular fuel. They also help produce the essential hormones—among them estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol—and regulate cellular proliferation and death.

It’s not inconceivable that the rest of the body (brain, hands, heart, lungs, digestive tract) is merely an elaborate and sometimes clumsy apparatus for the nourishment of the mitochondria—that it is the mitochondria, and not Homo sapiens, who rule and foul the earth. Our cardiovascular system, that fantastic and vulnerable machine, is essentially a delivery system for the oxygen they require. The mitochondrion is the creature and we are merely its husk, its fleshy chrysalis. A newborn’s first breath? That’s the mitochondria, calling the shots.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3EyI3jH