Exploring how our bodies produce, use, and prioritize energy—and how our experiences, relationships, and patterns of response influence the way we participate in life.
Have you ever noticed how some days you feel energized, available, and ready to engage with life, while other days even the simplest activities seem to require more effort? Sometimes we know why. We haven't slept well, we've been physically active, or we've been carrying significant responsibilities. Other times, the explanation is less obvious. We may have spent much of the day sitting, yet feel exhausted. A difficult conversation can leave us feeling depleted, while a meaningful connection with someone can bring a renewed sense of vitality.
We often describe these experiences in terms of energy. We say we have plenty of energy, that something has drained us, or that certain people and environments leave us feeling renewed. Yet the word energy can mean different things depending on whether we're speaking about biology, physical vitality, emotional experience, or the felt quality of being alive.
Throughout my years in the healing arts, I've become increasingly curious about these different expressions of energy and how they might relate to one another. What is happening in our bodies when we experience stress, connection, anticipation, or relief? How much of our daily activity takes place outside our conscious awareness? And what might become possible when we begin paying attention not only to how much energy we have, but also to how our living systems organize and use it?
These questions are part of my ongoing exploration of the relationships between biology, consciousness, and the conditions that support healing.
Energy Is Fundamental to Life
Everything our bodies do depends on energy. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, our brains process information, and our muscles contract through biological processes requiring a continuous supply of usable energy. Even when we are resting, our bodies remain active, maintaining cellular functions, regulating internal conditions, repairing tissues, and responding to information from within and around us.
At the cellular level, mitochondria play an important role in this process. Often described as the energy-producing structures within our cells, mitochondria help transform nutrients into ATP, a molecule that cells use to support many of their activities. But their functions extend beyond energy production. Mitochondria are also involved in cellular communication, metabolism, and responses to physiological stress. They participate in complex networks of biological processes that help living organisms adapt to changing demands.
Researchers are increasingly investigating how mitochondrial function interacts with the nervous system, immune system, hormonal activity, and other processes involved in maintaining health. These systems do not operate independently. They communicate and influence one another as the body responds to internal needs and external conditions.
What interests me about this research is the recognition that the body is not a collection of isolated parts. It is a living, responsive system in which countless processes are occurring simultaneously. Energy supports our ability to move, think, respond, recover, and participate in life, even when we are unaware of the remarkable activity taking place within us.
The Energy of Our Everyday Experiences
Consider what happens when we're concerned about something important. Perhaps we're experiencing financial uncertainty, caring for a loved one, dealing with tension in a relationship, or waiting for news that may affect our future. Even when we're physically still, our bodies may be actively responding. Our breathing may change, certain muscles may remain contracted, sleep may become disrupted, and our attention may repeatedly return to the situation.
These experiences involve more than our conscious thoughts. Our nervous, hormonal, immune, and metabolic systems participate in responding to perceived demands. Depending on the circumstances, some responses may continue well beyond the moment that first activated them. We may notice ourselves replaying conversations, anticipating possible outcomes, preparing for difficulties, or remaining alert even when nothing immediately requires our attention.
I've often thought about how this resembles a computer with multiple programs running in the background. We may be focused on one activity, yet many other processes continue operating without our immediate attention. In a similar way, we can carry ongoing patterns of anticipation, protection, and response that influence how we experience our bodies and daily lives.
Some of these patterns develop through repeated experiences. A person who learned early in life to anticipate the needs of others may continue monitoring how everyone around them is feeling. Someone who experienced prolonged uncertainty may remain alert to what could go wrong, even during relatively peaceful moments. These responses may have once served an important protective purpose, but they can continue operating long after circumstances have changed.
This doesn't mean that every repetitive thought directly drains our cellular energy, or that all fatigue results from unresolved experiences. Biological energy metabolism is far more complex than that. Yet the analogy invites us to consider the demands we carry, especially those that have become so familiar that we rarely notice them.
It also raises a question that continues to interest me: How much of our attention and effort is responding to what is happening now, and how much is being influenced by experiences and patterns established in the past?
Stress and the Body's Energy Priorities
Stress is a natural part of life. Our bodies have remarkable capacities to respond to challenges, mobilize resources, and adapt to changing circumstances. These responses help us navigate situations that require attention and action. When a demand passes, our systems often have opportunities to recover and return to other activities.
But what happens when the demands continue?
A person experiencing ongoing financial pressure may repeatedly think about meeting their responsibilities. Someone caring for a family member may remain attentive throughout the day and night. Another person may have learned to anticipate conflict, rejection, or disappointment and find it difficult to relax, even when their immediate environment appears safe.
These experiences can influence attention, emotional responses, sleep, muscle tension, and other aspects of physiology. When demands remain high or opportunities for recovery are limited, the body's adaptive systems may experience prolonged strain.
An important emerging idea in scientific research is that stress affects not only how much energy the body needs, but potentially how energetic resources are prioritized.
Our bodies do not have unlimited resources available for every function at every moment. They continuously adjust to changing demands, directing resources toward activities that are most immediately necessary.
During a short-term challenge, prioritizing an immediate response can be useful. But when stress continues, the consequences may extend beyond the initial situation.
This invites us to consider that the experience of exhaustion, reduced flexibility, or difficulty engaging with life may sometimes involve more than a simple lack of motivation. Many interacting physiological and psychological processes may be influencing what feels possible.
A New Scientific Perspective: The Allostatic Triage Model
One recent scientific development that particularly interests me is the Allostatic Triage Model of Psychopathology, introduced in a 2025 paper by D. Parker Kelley, Martin Picard, and colleagues.
The researchers propose that stress places energetic demands on biological systems and that, when these demands become difficult to meet, the body may alter how resources are distributed.
They call this process allostatic triage.
Allostasis refers to the body's capacity to anticipate changing demands and adjust its functioning accordingly. Rather than simply reacting after something changes, our physiological systems are continually preparing and adapting.
The researchers propose that when stress becomes chronic, the brain may increasingly prioritize networks involved in immediate survival and protection, potentially at the expense of functions supporting complex thinking, long-term planning, adaptation, and well-being.
In other words, the body may be organizing resources around what it perceives as most urgent.
This is especially interesting when we consider how stress can affect our ability to think clearly, remain motivated, make decisions, or imagine possibilities beyond our immediate concerns.
Imagine someone who has been living with prolonged uncertainty. Their attention repeatedly returns to what needs to be managed, prevented, or resolved. Even during moments when they would like to relax or engage creatively, their mind may continue anticipating the next problem.
The Allostatic Triage Model offers a possible biological framework for understanding how prolonged stress could contribute to changes in cognitive and emotional functioning through the prioritization of energetic resources.
The model also proposes that emotional states may participate in how the brain evaluates and allocates resources. In this framework, feelings may reflect the brain's predictions about the organism's capacity to meet additional demands.
These ideas are still being investigated. They do not establish that particular emotions directly reveal how much cellular energy we have, or that every protective response produces a measurable energy deficit.
Nevertheless, I find this direction of research meaningful because it brings biological energy, stress, emotion, and behavior into the same conversation.
It also invites us to look at familiar human experiences through a broader biological perspective.
When Protective Responses Become Familiar Patterns
Another aspect of this research that interests me is the relationship between repeated responses and neuroplasticity.
Our brains change through experience. Repeated patterns of activity can become increasingly established, influencing how we perceive situations and respond to them.
A response that developed to help us navigate a difficult circumstance may gradually become familiar and automatic. We may find ourselves anticipating problems, interpreting situations through earlier experiences, or reacting before we have fully recognized what is happening in the present.
The Allostatic Triage Model proposes that stress-related changes in brain activity and resource allocation may contribute to certain patterns becoming more entrenched over time. The authors describe this possibility using the concept of canalization, where repeated patterns become increasingly established and less flexible.
This proposed process is particularly relevant to the questions that have emerged through my work.
When we encounter a situation, are we responding to what is actually happening, or are familiar expectations influencing what we perceive? Are we recognizing the possibilities available now, or are our responses being organized around what we learned to anticipate in the past?
These questions are not about blaming ourselves for our reactions. Our protective patterns often develop for understandable reasons. They reflect ways we have adapted to the circumstances of our lives.
The possibility that interests me is that these patterns are not necessarily permanent. Through new experiences, learning, supportive relationships, and changing circumstances, some responses may become more flexible.
The scientific mechanisms involved are complex, and the Allostatic Triage Model does not establish that recognizing an old pattern automatically changes cellular energy allocation.
But it offers another reason to remain curious about the relationship between adaptation, awareness, and our capacity for change.
Presence, Awareness, and New Possibilities
In my own work, presence begins with noticing what is happening here and now. We may become aware of our breathing, a sensation in the body, an emotional response, or a familiar thought that continues repeating itself. This awareness doesn't necessarily change the experience immediately, and it doesn't need to.
Sometimes simply recognizing what is present begins to change our relationship with it.
When we pause, we may notice how much attention is going toward anticipating an outcome, resisting an uncomfortable experience, or maintaining a familiar response. We might recognize that we've been holding our breath, tightening certain muscles, or carrying a concern throughout the day without fully acknowledging it.
At other times, awareness reveals something practical. Perhaps we need rest, nourishment, help with a responsibility, an important conversation, or greater clarity about a situation. Sometimes we recognize that we've been putting considerable effort into something we cannot control while overlooking choices that remain available.
This is where I see an interesting meeting place between scientific inquiry and embodied experience.
If some of our habitual responses are shaped by earlier experiences, what happens when we begin recognizing them in the present? Can awareness create enough space for a different response? And as we develop new ways of responding through practice and experience, what might change in our attention, physiological activity, or patterns of adaptation?
These remain questions rather than conclusions.
Awareness does not automatically release biological energy, and integration does not guarantee that a stress response will disappear. Yet awareness may contribute to recognizing patterns, considering alternatives, and participating more consciously in how we respond.
For me, presence is not about controlling our energy or eliminating every protective response. It is about developing a more conscious relationship with our experience so that different possibilities may become visible.
Sometimes this involves action. Sometimes it involves allowing an emotion to be felt, acknowledging a need, changing a circumstance, or remaining with an experience long enough to understand it more clearly.
What matters is not achieving a perfect internal state, but developing greater capacity to respond to life as it unfolds.
Relationships and the Experience of Vitality
Our experiences of energy and well-being also unfold within relationships. We are social beings, continually influencing and responding to one another through communication, emotional expression, physical presence, and shared environments.
Think about the difference between having a conversation in which you feel judged, dismissed, or pressured and one in which you feel genuinely listened to. You may notice changes in breathing, muscle tension, emotional state, or willingness to express yourself. The circumstances have changed, and your experience may change with them.
A supportive conversation does not necessarily resolve the challenges we face, yet it may help us feel less alone in carrying them. Sometimes being heard allows us to recognize something we hadn't fully acknowledged. At other times, the simple experience of human connection offers relief, reassurance, or a renewed sense of possibility.
Research on social relationships and health has long recognized that the quality of our relationships can influence how we experience and manage stress. This doesn't mean that other people are responsible for maintaining our well-being. Rather, it reminds us that connection is part of the environment in which our biological and emotional experiences unfold.
This is one reason I continue exploring healing as both an individual and relational experience. We each participate in how we respond to life, but we are not separate from the people, communities, and conditions that surround us.
Our biological systems respond within the realities of our lives, and those realities include access to safety, adequate resources, healthcare, rest, and supportive relationships. Sometimes the conditions creating stress remain present and require practical action or collective change.
A broader understanding of healing must include these realities rather than placing the entire responsibility for well-being on the individual.
Movement, Rest, and Integration
Another aspect of energy that interests me is the natural rhythm of living systems. Throughout nature, we observe cycles of activity and recovery, growth and dormancy, movement and stillness. Our own bodies participate in rhythms of sleeping and waking, exertion and recovery, nourishment and metabolism.
Yet many of us live within environments that encourage nearly continuous activity. There is always another responsibility, message, project, conversation, or problem requiring attention. Even practices intended to support well-being can become another item to accomplish.
Over time, I've become increasingly interested in what happens when we give greater value to the spaces between our activities. What changes when we allow time to reflect on an experience before immediately moving to the next one? What happens when we recognize that rest and integration are not obstacles to growth, but meaningful parts of living?
I often think of a natural rhythm that moves through movement, pause, digestion, integration, and emergence. We engage with life, encounter new experiences, and receive information. Then we need opportunities to pause, make sense of what has happened, and allow what we've learned to become part of how we live. From this process, new understanding or possibilities may emerge, leading us into another movement.
This rhythm is not a rigid formula, nor a scientifically established sequence of healing. It is a way I have come to understand the relationship between experience and integration in my own life and work.
I am interested in whether these opportunities for rest, reflection, learning, and new experiences may also influence how our systems adapt over time. Not because pausing necessarily restores a particular amount of energy, but because the conditions of our lives influence the demands we face and the opportunities available for recovery and change.
Sometimes the most supportive action is to move forward. Sometimes it is to rest. And sometimes it is to remain with an experience long enough to recognize what is becoming visible.
An Invitation to Notice
As I continue exploring the relationship between biological energy and lived experience, I find myself returning to a few questions.
What is asking for my attention today? What activities or relationships leave me feeling supported and connected? Where might I be carrying effort that I have not fully recognized? Are there familiar patterns influencing how I respond to the present? And what conditions would help me experience greater ease, vitality, or freedom to respond?
These questions are not intended to make us responsible for every change in our health or energy. Fatigue, pain, and changes in vitality can arise from many causes, including medical conditions that deserve appropriate assessment and care. Nor should we assume that every experience of exhaustion contains a hidden emotional message.
Instead, they invite curiosity about the many dimensions of our lives. They encourage us to notice patterns without immediately judging them, recognize our needs without dismissing them, and consider how our relationships and environments contribute to well-being.
Perhaps we can begin to approach energy not simply as something we need more of, but as an essential part of being alive—something our bodies continuously produce, organize, and use in response to life.
The Living Body as an Ongoing Conversation
The more I explore these questions, the more I appreciate the remarkable complexity of the human organism. We are continually transforming energy, exchanging information, adapting to changing conditions, and participating in relationships. Much of this activity takes place beyond our conscious awareness, yet it contributes to our ongoing experience of being alive.
Biology offers one perspective on these processes. Our felt experience offers another. Scientific research can help us understand mechanisms and relationships, while our direct experience can bring attention to questions that matter in everyday life. Each perspective has value, and each has limitations.
For me, the Ecology of Healing is an invitation to explore these relationships with curiosity, humility, and care. It reminds us that healing and well-being do not exist separately from the conditions of our lives. Our bodies, experiences, relationships, and environments are continually interacting within larger living systems.
The emerging science of biological energy allocation adds another dimension to this inquiry. It raises the possibility that how our systems prioritize resources may influence not only our physiological functioning, but also how we experience and respond to the world.
And it leaves me with an important question: As familiar protective responses become more flexible through awareness, learning, supportive relationships, and new experiences, what changes within the living system? Is it our attention, our expectations, physiological activity, energy demands, or some combination of these?
These are questions worth exploring rather than assuming we already have the answers.
Perhaps supporting vitality is not only about finding ways to have more energy. Perhaps it also involves becoming more aware of how we live, what we carry, how we relate, and the conditions that shape our capacity to respond, recover, and participate fully in life.
What might become possible when we begin paying attention to the living relationship between our energy, our awareness, and the world in which we belong?
That is where this exploration continues.
Research Informing This Exploration
The following research informs the scientific questions presented in this article. Some findings are well established, while the broader explanations connecting stress, energy allocation, and psychological functioning remain under investigation.
Kelley, D. P., et al. (2025). The Allostatic Triage Model of Psychopathology: How Reallocation of Brain Energetic Resources Under Stress Elicits Psychiatric Symptoms. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 179, 106419.
This paper proposes a framework for understanding how stress-related energetic demands and changes in biological resource allocation may contribute to psychological symptoms. The model integrates established research with hypotheses that require further testing.
Picard, M., & McEwen, B. S. (2018). Psychological Stress and Mitochondria: A Systematic Review. Psychosomatic Medicine.
A review examining relationships between psychological stress and mitochondrial biology.
Picard, M., et al. (2018). A Mitochondrial Health Index Sensitive to Mood and Caregiving Stress. Biological Psychiatry.
A study exploring associations between measures of mitochondrial function and psychological experiences, including caregiving stress.
Together, these publications contribute to an evolving scientific conversation. They do not establish that emotions directly measure cellular energy, that every unresolved experience causes an energetic deficit, or that awareness alone changes mitochondrial function.
Madelin Semper is an Embodied Healing Facilitator & Educator with more than three decades of experience in the healing arts. Her work explores presence, awareness, human relationships, and the conditions that support healing and wholeness.
