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Energizing Your Brain

You need energy to rewire your brain. And because your energy is not immaculately conceived, you must learn to make it efficiently. This chapter explains how energy is indispensable to life and the functioning of your brain. Since your brain depends on energy to function, I will describe how you can ensure that you make enough of it to keep your brain healthy and your mind sharp.

Without energy you can't turn on and off your genes. That's right, your genes are not always on. In fact, your DNA does not rigidly determine your destiny. The emerging science of epigenetics has shown that your self-care plays a major role in determining which genes are turned on or off. We will also explore how energy, gene expression, and your immune system combine their effects in your brain functioning. When your energy is in short supply or misused your immune system can work against your brain. These malfunctions happen when you don't take care of yourself and can trigger chronic inflammation that results in depressive moods and brain fog.

The differences between people based on their lifestyles could not be more dramatic than between two brothers who shared the same DNA. Sam and Tyler are identical twins, but they diverge dramatically in their lifestyles. Sam describes himself as a homebody. He rarely ventures out into the community other than to go to the supermarket to buy steaks and burgers to barbecue. He enjoys sitting in his den where he watches sports most days and evenings. During the winter it was football, spring basketball, and summer baseball. He even watches games that he recorded.

Tyler is anything but a homebody. Instead of watching sports all day, he is an active member of various community groups. He, too, enjoys sports. But instead of being a passive spectator, he is an active participant in various city leagues, baseball, and tennis. At age 48, he looks 10 years younger, in contrast to his twin brother, who looks 10 years older. Tyler is also 40 pounds lighter than Sam and describes his condition as quite fit. Sam describes himself as looking like he lived the good life. Yet Sam is plagued by high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

Tyler is always taking classes in subjects ranging from geology to art at the community college. For his part, Sam says that he is retired. When Tyler asks him what he means by retired, Sam replies by saying, "It means that I can watch the grass grow."

In their ongoing playful and often whimsical and teasing banter Tyler once asked, "Do you mow that grass?" Sam laughed and answered, "I told you I was retired!"

Once Tyler made a deal with the teenager next door to Sam not to mow his lawn that week as scheduled. The teenager agreed to come to Sam's with his mower and accept money for not mowing. Sam became irate. Tyler said, "Not to worry. I will do the job," as a tease. After he finished mowing the lawn, he paid the teenager in front of Sam. The teenager and Sam exchanged a glance with a shoulder shrug and then shook their heads that Tyler needed psychological help. Playing along, Tyler laughed, then thanked Sam "for the opportunity for some exercise. The gym was closed." Sam's wife was watching the entire scene and turned to Tyler with her eyes rolled. She knew quite well that Tyler's teasing joke was on her husband.

"Where's all this crazy energy coming from?" Sam asked his brother.

"What happened to yours? You aren't the same brother I grew up with."

Though these brothers started out with the same DNA, they became dramatically different in attitudes, activity levels, and overall health. The obvious difference was their lifestyle. Tyler plants and cultivates the five healthy factors encoded in the mnemonic SEEDS (which stand for Social, Exercise, Education, Diet, and Sleep) on a daily basis. Sam seemed resigned to the belief that his energy was retired and rarely engaged in any of the SEEDS factors.

Mitos-Your Energy Generators

Where did Tyler's energy come from? Is it prana or chi? Is it some kind of spiritual energy that we can never totally understand? When producing and harnessing the energy to rewire your brain, we don't need to get lost in those philosophical debates. The answer is right in front of us. Your brain is a biological organ, and it runs on biological energy. So, if you hope to rewire your brain, you should understand how to make and keep energy working efficiently in your brain.

The first thing to appreciate is where and how energy is made. Like all your cells, brain cells contain energy factories called mitochondria. Cells contain from 1000 to 2500 mitochondria. To make them simple to remember we will call them mitos because they are mighty! See Figure 2.1 for an image of a cell and its mitos. They produce your energy, called adenosine triphosphate, better known as ATP. To make ATP simple, think of it as All The Power. ATP plays an indispensable role in determining whether you live or die. Consider that the poison called cyanide will kill you because it immediately kills your mitos. Without your mitos-no ATP, and you die.

Mito health and their product, ATP, determine whether you can read this sentence, rewire your brain, and maintain mental health. While Tyler generates a lot of it, Sam is retiring his mitos.

Figure 2.1 A cell and mitochondria

Every day your mitos make two hundred trillion trillion ATP molecules. Another way to grasp the volume and importance of your mitos is to consider that you produce and recycle your body weight in ATP. The greater your energy needs and the greater the demand on your mitos. This also means that there are adverse consequences when ATP is in short supply. One of the first places you feel loss of ATP is in your brain.

Though it weighs a mere three and a half pounds, your brain is among the highest energy consumers in your body. So it is no coincidence that your brain cells contain among the greatest number of mitos. There are approximately 10 million billion mitos in your brain. To put this astounding number in perspective, consider that your brain uses 20% of your body's energy, and your synapses use 80% of that energy. This means that much of that energy is devoted to fueling synapses for neuroplasticity. In other words, without enough energy you can't rewire your brain.

Mobile Mitos

Neuroplasticity is facilitated by mobile mitos. They travel on miniature tracks, called microtubules, which are like small tubes within your neurons. This mobility allows your mitos to get energy delivered to where the rewiring action is, at your synapses. In other words, mobile mitos provide the energy to rewire your brain.

You may wonder why you have so little energy, cannot think clearly, or cannot maintain a positive mood. If you are already in poor health, you may be accelerating the death of your mitos within your brain cells. You need to maintain your health to give your mitos a chance to help your brain have the capacity to think clearly and produce positive moods.

Just as it is senseless to drive a car without fuel, it's even more senseless to hop in the driver's seat without enough brain energy to drive carefully. Like the engine for your car that needs the right fuel for combustion, to generate energy your mitos must take in the right balance of raw materials to produce ATP. For your car it is refined gasoline, and for your mitos it is oxygen from breathing and glucose, which is derived from the food you eat. Those raw materials travels through your bloodstream to all your cells, at which point the hormone insulin helps get the glucose into your cells so that your mitos can begin to generate ATP. Without this energy your brain cells black out.

Not only do you need the right balance of raw materials for your mitos to produce ATP, but you need to use up the ATP to keep your mitos healthy. Unlike your car that you leave in your garage for a month before driving it again, your brain cannot take a break for one month. Your body needs to use the energy to make more. This is a use-it-or-lose-it must. You must use the energy that you make so that you can make more of it. In other words, exercise is also critical for the health of your mitos. These two self-care factors of exercise and diet will be explained in more detail in Chapters 6 and 8.

Unhealthy mitos don't just produce less energy. They cause ill health. Consider that if you eat mostly junk food and fail to exercise, your mitos will generate excess free radicals, which damage your cells. Like a nuclear meltdown that leaks out radiation and destroys the power plant, free radical damage can kill your mitos from which they leak. In other words, eating junk food and failing to exercise blow out your mitos and destroy the cells they inhabit. This damage to your mitos and cells means you lose energy, feel lethargic, can't think clearly, and may even become depressed. This is one of the reasons that Sam looked 10 years older than Tyler and had much less energy and motivation.

Leaky Mitos-Free Radical Toxicity

One way to understand how energy is produced is to think of mitos as following the principles of a hydroelectric dam. As water fills a reservoir within the dam, pressure builds up so that the water is forced out through a channel to drive turbines to create...