Scientifically, energy is defined as your capacity for work, but let’s expand that to include energy for physical and mental action at work or play, and your feelings of vitality and enthusiasm for life. Your level of energy is obviously important, the more energy you have the better you feel, the more you can do and the faster you can do it.  The more productive you are at work and the more you can devote to life outside of work. 

So how do we increase our energy?  I’m going to start with an analogy. The human body can be likened to a light bulb.  Take a standard light bulb, a light bulb converts electricity into light.  In the same way our body converts the food we eat into physical energy and heat. 

However light bulbs are not totally efficient.  Not all of the electricity goes into producing light some also goes into producing heat which is an unwanted effect.  In the same way not all of the energy we use is useful energy, some of it is unwanted.  So where does this unwanted energy go?  It’s not wasted as heat in our case as we need a warm body temperature to live.  It gets lost as stress and tension. 

For example, when you sit at a desk in an uncomfortable position, you are wasting energy using muscles in your shoulders and back.  Your body tenses muscles which don’t need to be used; the result is tension or even pain. 

With a light bulb the efficiency loss is due to the resistance of the heating element, if you lower the resistance of the heating element you have more energy for light.  For the human body if we lower the resistance which is stress we increase our efficiency.  This leads us to the energy equation for the body:

Energy =Peak Energy-Stress

 

Peak physical energy – the energy we have available due to our physical body

Stress – the resistance to that energy flowing or being utilized.  This is stress or tension

Therefore the ways to increase our energy is to increase our Peak physical energy and reduce our Stress.

Peak physical energy is influenced by a variety of factors most of which you’ll know and are common sense advice primarily Exercise, Food and Rest. 

I’ll post some tips in the next post