Everybody's Tired and Everybody Wants Energy. What Is It, Really?

The word sits dead center in everything we chase, and nobody can pin it down.

Energy: What Is It, Really?

The most-used word in wellness might also be the least understood.

We chase it, sell it, build entire industries on it, and almost no one can tell you what it actually means.

“More energy” is the real thing people want from health, under all the bloodwork and the supplement stacks. So it’s strange that the word sits dead center in everything we’re chasing and nobody can define it.

I have spent my life inside both definitions, and for most of that time I kept them in separate rooms.

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Two rooms, one word

Acupuncture was normal in my house before I knew it was controversial anywhere else. My mother talked about energy healing the way other mothers talked about vitamins, and there was a whole Eastern European and Eastern-medicine lineage behind her, the kind of inherited knowledge that doesn’t ask permission from a journal. Years later I got Reiki certified myself. I have felt something on those tables. Whether it was real or whether it was in my head I genuinely cannot tell you, and I’ve made a kind of peace with not knowing.

Then I spent the rest of my life in the other room. The hyperscience one. Biomarkers, bloodwork, the quantified everything. For years the two rooms had no door between them. Energy-the-mystical on one side, energy-the-measurable on the other. Same word, two religions, no diplomatic relations.

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What Martin Picard actually did

A paper by Martin Picard reopened the border. Picard runs a mitochondrial psychobiology lab at Columbia, and his model does something quietly radical. It takes the most woo-adjacent word in wellness and gives it a hard mechanism. His Energetic Model of Allostatic Load argues that chronic stress carries a literal metabolic cost, and that aging happens partly because the body runs an energy budget like any household.

When too much of that budget goes to handling stress, the body stops paying for repair. Growth, maintenance, repair: first to get cut when the books don’t balance.

We have spent a decade measuring the body as a pile of biological readouts, this marker, that level, the number on the ring. Picard points somewhere else.

Measure the body as an energy system, as expenditure and allocation.

That’s not a tweak, it’s a different lens on the whole thing. And it sent me back to the other room, the one with my mother in it.

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The danger zone keeps becoming the standard of care

The smug position is that Picard’s energy is real and my mother’s energy is nonsense. I held that position for years. I’m less sure now, and not because I’ve gone soft. I’m less sure because I’ve watched the danger zone become the standard of care more than once.

👉 Acupuncture is the cleanest example. For years you could only find it in a basement, from the one practitioner someone’s aunt swore by. It looked exactly like the thing a sensible person dismisses. Except acupuncture has real schools, four and five years of training, a body of practice older than every institution currently dismissing it. Argue with the theory of meridians and qi all you want, and I’ll argue alongside you. But “I don’t understand the mechanism” was never the same sentence as “there is no effect.”

👉 Meditation made the identical journey inside my lifetime, from Eastern fringe to the thing your cardiologist now recommends with a straight face.

This is where the rigor crowd gets sloppy.

Sometimes there’s no science because the science is hard. Sometimes there’s no science because nobody bothered to look.

Absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence, and those are not the same thing.

The gap between them is exactly where thousands of years of Eastern and ancient medicine has been sitting, waiting. Ayurveda. Saunas. Cold. Chinese herbs. It is genuinely hard to look at practices that survived across millennia and whole civilizations and conclude they’re all placebo. Persistence isn’t proof. But it isn’t nothing.

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The grift problem, which is real

The same unmeasurability that protects ancient practice from dismissal also protects every charlatan with a certificate from a thirty-minute online course. Energy is hard to measure. So is the quality of the person selling it to you.

Supplements spent decades in exactly this spot, a few real products floating in an ocean of garbage, until the category started to grow up. The SuppCo and Function-style consolidation is the tell: third-party testing, real data, the beginnings of a framework for telling good from bad. That’s the part energy is still missing. The absence of a measuring stick doesn’t make a field worthless. It makes it unpoliced. And unpoliced is a stage, not a verdict.

So I’ve built a layman’s test, and it’s embarrassingly simple: has this been around a lot longer than I’ve been alive? Not as proof, as a filter. Things that persist for thousands of years are, at minimum, usually not acutely dangerous and usually not a fad. It’s a low bar. But it sorts the 5,000-year-old practice from the post-COVID manifestation content flooding everyone’s feed, and most days that’s a useful sort.

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The edge of the map

Then there’s the territory where I genuinely don’t know what I’m looking at.

A doctor told me recently that we might eventually move toward frequency and sound as forms of healing, which is the kind of sentence that lands you squarely in quantum-flavored territory, and I want to be careful, because this is where credibility goes to die. But. There was a study in Mexico City that used light, specifically a light-activated compound, to clear HPV and precancerous cervical lesions in a small group of women. That’s photodynamic therapy. It’s real, and while it’s light plus a drug rather than light alone, it points at something: light doing biological work. There’s early preclinical work out of MD Anderson probing whether biofield therapy affects pancreatic cancer cells in a dish and in mice.

I am not telling you energy healing cures cancer.

I’m telling you serious institutions are starting to point instruments at questions they wouldn’t have touched ten years ago, and I’m old enough to have watched what happens to the things we’re certain are nonsense, right up until they aren’t.

This field is emerging and merging with the scientific community at the same time, and the science is not there yet. Both true. Holding both without collapsing into the true-believer or the smug-skeptic is, I think, the only intellectually honest place to stand.

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Back to the two rooms

Which brings me to my mother, and to a word that means the fuel in my cells and the thing she said she could feel moving through her hands. Maybe they never meet. Maybe Picard’s energy and my mother’s energy are two unrelated things wearing the same name, a coincidence of language. Or maybe the reason the word survived in both rooms for so long is that some part of us always knew they were pointing at the same thing, and we’re only now building the instruments to find out.

What is energy, really? I don’t know yet. But I’ve stopped being embarrassed by the question.

If this gave you something to think about, pass it on. Restack it for someone who’d argue with you, reply and tell me where you land, or subscribe if you’re new here. I read everything.

In Search Of is where I chase the questions the wellness industry is too sure about.