Understanding Energy and Vitality On Several Levels - Then Pulling The Trigger

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Although caffeine is effective in your system for 6 hours, it can do all of it's damage (rather you can acting on the potential it creates for you to use it up) in the first hour. It's damage is not direct but a result of unlocking all the locked liquor cabinets and you're taking advantage of all the free (unregulated) supplies of feel good neurotransmitters.

Someone on caffeine is like a car with the gas pedal down and a board under the breaks- they feel POWERFUL but that power is an illusion. It's really there, but if you use it, you may as well beat yourself up- physically. This power is not "extra" it's just unbridled by your body's breaking system the adenosine molecule, because caffeine has taken a home in the receptor for 6 hours!

It's like if you had a bunch of criminals outside a store they wanted to rob, and you just left the front door wide open with lights pointing to the fact that you can now easily, without effort, enter and rob the store.

Left ungoverned (often due to lack of information), people tend to act irrationally against their better judgment! In that scenario the robbers are your decision to push yourself physically (because you can not necessarily "should") and the "goods" stolen are your feel good chemicals, and like the store owner when they find the mess- you will feel absolutely crappy when you realize what happened!

You can actually generate indigenous chemical releases from the brain that do what those energy drinks do only there is no crash afterward and there is no toxic effects to your body (i.e. caffeine molecules shape being almost identical to adenosine molecules and hijacking the adenosine receptors (so they can't hit the breaks on you!).

You can use natural ingredients that won't rob your body/brain/chemicals, but that rather enhance your body's ability to create more (to use now without withdrawing from the stores already there). You can also generate chi energy through meditation and reprogramming the way you talk to yourself.

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Dopamine Reserves

Amino Acids

Serotonin Reserves

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Your adrenals are also taxed when you indulge in a caffeine fit of physical exertion. When your adrenals are flushed out- lethargy sets in, even painful tired spells and more.

They could make things worse actually without hydration. The body both uses the water to perform complex tasks, but it also needs it to cool systems down when the systems are working overtime!

Water is also a potentiator for brain cell chemical-electrical firing- think of it like the oil in your cars engine- not enough water and the brain can't fire as many neurons when needed to perform a task thus things go slower.

Water alone can generate energy in the form of mental clarity, mental dexterity, powerful congnitive functioning, and more.

One of the things most responsible for energy drain is not just bad health or lack of nutrition. Although eating right and exercising help tremendously, and in and of themselves create energy through synergy, it is your state of mind that governs how your body treats, uses, or replenishes these chemicals.

You could be extremely healthy, get plenty of exercise but if you're stressing out over little things your countering the energetic effects of these things with stress chemicals. (for example)

You could be absolutely chalked full of energy but your body could be countering the benefits by intercepting them with things like stress hormones, adrenalin, and more. You could also have everything you need including water but lacking "salt" the magic "electrolyte" ingredient in Gatorade (yea just table salt). Without salt, drinking water all day won't help as it will not absorb correctly or become useful in the body without salt. Salt helps the body RETAIN more water, without it you will urinate and sweat it all out. BUT Realize there is a lot of salt in everyday foods, so if your eating a diet of modern foods salt may not be your necessity, but if your doing strenuous sports, then you do burn through your salt and gatorade is designed to replace it and using supporting electrolytes manages it. 

When your mind is in the right mental thought stream, you tend to notice things that cause energy drain like negative self talk, and even the foods you're eating.

You will eat something bad for you and actually feel it drain your energy.

Most people are so distracted by their lives that they have no idea what connection is between their energy and the reason they have none!

The first thing you need to get right is your internal dialogue. Once that is squared away, you will start to consciously think in ways that help you to solve this problem rather than being swayed towards a quick fix like an energy drink. You tend to think for yourself more and question things that claim to give you energy. You start to pay more attention to how that apple makes you feel vs. that candy bar.

Have you ever been beat down tired at work, bored out of your skull, and want nothing more than to go home and go to bed, then someone you haven’t seen in years, someone you absolutely are head over heals in love with comes into the office or you bump into them in the street and instantly you fee energetic, happy, and no longer want to go home and pass out, rather you want to go out and have a good time with them! This proves my point. The mind controls the energy by controlling perceptions, defining how you feel by visualizing actually feeling it!

We spend most of our day telling ourselves how tired we are, but we don’t spend any time saying how energetic we are. We are quick to think negative and affirm what we think we feel which may very well be simply auto responses from seeing OTHER people who are tired, watching someone yawn and then you yawn and “think” you’re tired because you yawned. The reality is that most people are not tired or worn out; they are simply HIGHLY SUSCEPTIBLE TO SUGGESTION!

What may be making you so tired is not reality, but what you actualize from your environment. If you’re not in control of your internal dialogue you are in auto pilot, and in autopilot you’re a reactive creature. If you’re simply reacting to everything you’re like a pinball machine and everyone else is playing you!

How would you like to escape this self created prison of reactive thinking and start living YOUR life, feeling energetic, thinking in energetic and optimistic ways, and not being affected by everyone else’s “bad programming”? The book mentioned below "Life Strategies" (I know I know but Dr. Phil Does know his stuff, this book literally changed my life around- it's incredibly powerful and a brilliant read. I've passed my copy around so much (and it's been stolen so much) that I've probably bought it again over 20 times and I feel the money is WELL worth it. I'd rather buy a new copy than have a friend I loaned mine to not like it or read it- them keeping it means it's helping them right? There are audio versions too- just click throgh the amazon ad to see more choices)

The batteries of the body are literally the Mitochondria. This is the single most important thing in the body next to carbon itself. Every cell has several to several thousand in there converting fat into ATP which drives the cells energy like an electrical company. Together all the cells powered by this ancient bacteria with its own DNA, network and build your body. Everything alive has Mitochondria powering it's cellular network directly and this is good news.

In an unhealthy, complacent body, the Mitochondria is not being used to its potential. This causes problems because like our body, you use it or lose it. The Mitochondria like us, get lazy, lax, and fall apart. When the mitochondria fall apart they are more like a bad water hose that leaks or contaminates the water coming out of the hose with bacteria that crawled into the hose through the holes!

The Mitochondria produces Oxygen species or o1 where breathable stable oxygen is o2 or two oxygen molecules connected together tightly. Oxygen by itself is a lot like a single person vs. a couple, the single person isn't bound to a lot of the same moralities or moves as a couple living together and thus they are less responsible on average before coupling. The single person isn't necessarily bad, but just more energetic and could cause more problems than someone fortified into a relationship- which changes everything about your individual behaviors. 

The oxygen species the Mitochondria create as a biproduct is usually dealt with by the cell, but when it starts to produce it consistently it can cause all kinds of damage inside the cell creating a corrosion effect. 

The bad news is if your complacent and never have energy even with coffee or an energy drink and it's not your adrenals depleted, the culprit is likely the batteries, the Mitochondria being destroyed maybe even from other mitochondria oxygen species being released. When you don't use the body to exercise, don't push yourself including thinking (yea, mitochondria are also in your brain cells themselves!), don't challenge your body against the world, don't fortify it with this push and exercise, this makes the mitochondria less useful in the cells, it makes them act like they are between jobs and didn't shave or bathe, and this creates too much toxic oxygen species and not enough real raw power from atp. 

The good news is that cardio and exercise like running, weight lifting, and anything that gets your heart pumping and your body sharpening from pure exertion will actually, science has just discovered, force the cells to clean house. They will remove the bad Mitochondria and ingest them (break them apart atomically) and use the resources to birth new ones, healthy ones. 

As you push your body, including thinking strategically, you are forcing the body to produce energy for all the features and functions. It's grueling at first but when you get past that hard part (months) the body like an immune system will start to clean house and reorganize to generate that needed energy. So when your exercising and it's very tiring realize that your pushing your body PAST the normalized energetic states it's "used to". So doing this traumatizes the cells like waking a sleepwalker, and it's this trauma that invokes the fight or flight of the cells. The body can reorganize things to survive, and to the body every move is a survival instinct.

It's the consistency of it like weight training, that forces the cells to fix the mitochondria as if it's (mitochondria) life depended on it- because it does at this point. When you do cardio, you're forcing the cells to replace old broken, toxic, mitochondria and this is akin to replacing your 3 year old cell phone battery that only charged half way and took 8 hours with a brand new battery, with the new Mitochondria your body's batteries have been defragged, and updated. The pure energy you feel after 6 months of just a light 30 minute work out every morning maybe a run around the block, is likely the sign your looking for that the exercise is working.

Even the muscles and brain cells contain mitochondria- it's in your eyeballs, skin cells, every single cell. If you work hard to restore your health and vitality- you will not need energy- ever, it will always be there. The older you get though, the more consistently you will need to exercise to maintain that fight with the grim reaper, but it is very possible to keep this system healthy and by proxy every other system.

The mitochondria are like your body- use it or it will deteriorate, so you can't just exercise, get there, and stop cardio- but you can build it and maintain it much simpler than fixing health from disaster, so the good news is your habits will love exercise more than for energy- but it will become who you are, and in many ways your energy is responsible for what part of your surfaces in the world, so at the energy level- it IS who you are.

The other cool thing to think about is the reason running is so powerful, besides the muscle and mitochondria activity. I'm no expert in biological systems but I saw a video that explained this next part. Basically as you run your pounding on your legs bones with every drop/step to the pavement, this sends a signal to the kidney's which check with the lungs, and as your running your breathing gets harder, deeper, more. The lungs want to capitalize on the inflow of oxygen so the signal gets sent to the bones ultimately where blood is created, to send more blood (create brand new cells) to the lungs. This blood captures the oxygen coming in and adds more flow and blood pressure to the system like more employees coming in to deal with a busy shift. This oxygen gets distributed to every cell in the body that needs oxygen and is a great deal of help. This is why after a run you get a second wind- it's literally fueled by the air you breathed in and filtered oxygen from- and it gives you a boost. This is a temporary boost due to more oxygen stored, but the mitochondrial boost is an all the time kind of boost. It's why you can, being healthy and vibrant in your mitochondria just lift yourself off the sofa without feeling like you put in an effort- that's the power inherent in those new mitochondria. It takes time, like muscles with a lot of work that feels like it's for nothing, no visible effects for a long time, just as tired the next day after day one, but 3 months of consistent powerful effort and discipline is a whole different feeling and texture to your energy supply.

Before I end this article (for fear of it being too long) I want to bring up one more area of mental health and well being that affects us more than anything else- relationships.

Energy is also a result of stimulating conversations, debates, feeling appreciated through conversations that feel two way, and more.

What's ironic is people accused me of having way too much energy, but what they don't realize is my energy is a direct result of the excitement I'm feeling interacting with these amazing writers here! (not exactly mitochondrial energy but mixed with a great well oiled biological health system, you will start to see just how to USE those mitochondria energy reserves through the powerful mind body connection. Thoughts are part of the chemistry moving the body and systems, in fact thoughts are the very steering wheel and transmission before the body gets ahold of it and expends energy to follow it's instructions physically, even thinking is a physical movement of chemistry and energy through a physical network.

The relationships we forge tell the world and ourselves who we are, how we see ourselves. One bad relationship i.e. a friend that's always stirring up drama, can create multiple relationships like this through association- this will inevitably wear you down and your energy with it. We depend on our thoughts to produce energy as much as our body, in fact the thoughts alone can take over the system.

It's important to realize and fully comprehend how relationships are nuclear sources of energy or incredible sources that drain it from you, robbing you of your vitality, focus, and even well being.

Anthony Robbins has an amazing take on this phenomenon I think you'll like, called Personal Power: How to increase your energy; the power of successful relationships. Dr Phil's book relationship rescue is amazing for thinking in ways that generate cooperation and energy- not by trying to fix your partner, but your own thinking!

Have A Powerful Day!