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Every morning of our lives we wake up and reach out from unconsciousness to consciousness, from nothingness to being, from dream to reality. And when the full force of reality hits us, we must choose between falling back into nothingness, or grabbing hold of reality. To wake up and get on with life we need energy: both body energy and mind energy. We need body energy to get out of bed, make the tea, run for the bus, beat our competitors, and drag ourselves home again. Whereas mind energy arouses and motivates us, to actually want to get out of bed and do something. This book is about what energy is, how we get it, and how we lose it again. But in discussing these practical things we will also be touching on more fundamental issues. What is life? How does it work? And why do we bother getting out of bed in the morning at all?

But what is this thing – energy – that divides the strong from the weak, the young from the old, the living from the dead? How does energy animate the body and mind? How does it enable a body to grow, a finger to move, a mind to think? Energy is the basic constituent of the Universe, even more fundamental than matter. Energy is the origin of all change. Every event in the Universe, from the collision of atoms to the explosion of stars, uses energy. And our own bodies, even when in dreamless sleep, require large amounts. To be alive is to be a continuous transformer of energy, a machine transmuting the food we eat and the air we breathe into a dancer’s leap and a poet’s dream.

There is abundant evidence that how energetic we feel is a major element of how happy, healthy, productive and creative we are. It may be more important for our overall well-being to track what boosts or drains our energy, than to follow our calorie intake or bank accounts. Energy is a central aspect of our lives. Without it, our personal world shrinks to a few essential tasks, people, and places: for we have no energy to face anything more than an essential minimum. But with an abundance of body and mind energy our world opens up, as we expand our interactions with people, projects and places to fill all the available time.

Vitality, passion, dynamism, confidence, the ability to concentrate and work without rest, to think fast and coherently, to resist fatigue and exhaustion – in short ‘energy’ – are the essential qualities, above all else, required to succeed in life. Top of the Harvard Business Review’s list of vital qualities for business success is ‘a high level of drive and energy’. Everyone looks for that sparkle in friends and lovers to ‘make things happen’. Most of all, everybody is looking for energy within themselves: the motivation and drive to get up and do something; the endurance, stamina and resolve to carry through what we are already doing and need to do; and the courage and will-power to change direction and break out of the old routines, when necessary. We may know how to do something, but without will and energy, it is not going to happen. Without mental energy there can be no joy, excitement or enthusiasm. But physical and mental fatigue seem to have infected almost everyone: the most common symptom reported by patients to their doctors today is lack of energy. Depression and exhaustion appear to be endemic to our society. Everybody wants more energy.

The Energy of Life follows the evolution of our ideas about biological energy, from their origins in the prehistoric concepts of life itself, to the latest research on the body electric and psychological motivation. The story of living energy twists through various manifestations as the vital heat or pneuma concocted in the furnace of the heart in ancient Greece; as chi energy coursing through meridian lines of the Chinese body; as prana convulsing the body of yogis in India; as the vital force sought by the alchemists in their dreams of gold and life everlasting and through, in more modern times, to the discharge of Freudian sexual energy.

The last fifty years have finally enabled us to answer the fundamental questions of what energy is, and how it drives body and mind. But the answers seem, at first, more fantastical than the questions. Our body and minds are powered by electricity. Our cells are energized by huge electric fields driving vast currents through tiny molecular machines: motors, gates, pumps, switches and chemical factories together creating cellular life. It would be possible to imagine a happy electrical hum within the cell were it not for the incredibly frantic pace of activity, the colossal forces, and sparks flying from the life-threatening leakage of electrons. The electric energy is produced by trillions of bugs that invaded the ancestors of our cells billions of years ago, and thousands of which now live in each cell of our body. But these invaders who appear to live peacefully in symbiosis with the cell, may also be the enemy within. Recent research shows they are the silent assassins and executioners of the cell and are implicated in a multitude of devastating diseases and disabilities, and in the processes of ageing itself, leading to an irreversible decline in body and mind energy.

The energy moving and motivating the mind has always been a mystery. But modern technology now enables us to image and visualize changes in energy inside our brains, from moment to moment, as we think and feel. The brain chemicals and pathways controlling arousal, anxiety and motivation have now been found, so that we are finally close to understanding what excitement and depression are, and how to control them with drugs. We now know that obesity and body weight are regulated by a signal released by fat and acting on the brain, to control appetite and energy expenditure. The origin of sexual libido has been traced back into the dark recesses of the brain. We are beginning to understand how the body and the mind communicate in health and disease, why stress and depression cause illness and why illness in turn causes fatigue.

No matter how fast knowledge accumulates, questions remain: Why do we use so much energy? Why is life so short? Is there a relationship between energy and time? Why does time seem to go faster and life get less exciting as we get older? Why do children have so much energy? Why do the body and mind tire, and why do we need sleep? What is chronic fatigue? What is the mind, and what motivates it? There are no solid answers to these questions yet, but there are fascinating possibilities.

Our feelings of energy and tiredness wax and wane during the day, and during the course of life, in predictable cycles. Perhaps you feel tired now. But what is tiredness and fatigue? Are you exhausted at the end of the day because you have run out of energy, or because your brain is trying to put you to sleep? What is this spectacular daily oscillation in energy level for? Do you get tired as you get older because you are running out of energy, or because your genes are trying to put you to sleep – permanently?

Current theories of body and mind energy are split between many different disciplines and conceptual frameworks. This book seeks to bring these ideas together, to show how central energy is to our lives. Literally everything we do uses energy. It ebbs and flows within us every minute of the day, with every burst of adrenaline and every thought swirling through our mind. During dreamless sleep, the body is still, and the mind empty. When awake the body and mind are in ceaseless motion. Whenever motion appears from non-motion, or activity from inactivity, we say that ‘energy’ is involved. This energy produces the motion or activity. The energy may be stored, or it may be supplied from outside. Thus, when a sleeper wakes, the energy to move and think comes from energy stored in the body and mind. But those stores need to be replenished from external sources. This is the everyday concept of energy: something invisible that produces motion or activity, but in producing activity is used up, so it needs to be replenished. When we complain we are short of energy, we mean that our capacity for physical or mental activity is low, and we need this capacity to be recharged.

There are many words expressing a high-energy state: vitality, vigour, vivacity, strength, arousal, ardour, drive, fervour, stamina, gumption, zeal and zest. Just as many words describe the opposite: lethargy, apathy, timidity, weakness, languor, weariness, tiredness, fatigue, and depression. These words cover many shades of meaning, but what they have in common is the idea of a capacity or desire to do things, beyond the technical skill to perform the particular task. The popular concept of energy has extended into many different capacities and fields; so now we have physical energy, mental energy, sexual energy, emotional energy, psychic energy, creative energy, etc. While the meaning of ‘energy’ in physical science is a much more restricted and concrete one, the flexibility of popular concepts of energy captures something crucial to all of our everyday lives.

The Energy of Life takes the popular and ancient concept of biological energy, and looks at it from the perspective of the latest science. In so doing we will cover a vast territory from history to physics, energetics to psychology, through the evolution of life to the origins of cell death. We will look at how and why energy was discovered. How the delicate machinery of our cells makes the miracles of motion and thought possible. And how that same machinery creates fatigue, obesity, disease, ageing and death. We will also examine how energy is related to the perception of time, why we sleep and dream, the connection between energy and sex, and the link between creativity and madness. Then finally we will return to the more practical question of why we, as individuals, sometimes lack energy, and what we can do to get more.