Renewable energy is the goose that lays the golden egg – those who seek to find a way to halt climate change in its tracks and sever our ties to dangerous, dirty fossil fuels are all looking for the big, one-size-fits-all solution.
Will it be solar power? After all, the sun is the source of all power for all living things. Harnessing its rays doesn’t reduce the availability of rays to be harnessed, and we’ve definitely got a while left with our favorite life-giving star.
What about wind? Wind occurs naturally, and plenty of studies are showing that the more wind turbines we build, the cheaper it gets to store and use energy derived from wind. For coastal towns especially, this type of energy makes a lot of sense.
Maybe eventually we’ll land on hydroelectricity, or geothermal energy, or biomass energy, or any of the many brilliant ways this generation of thinkers has come up with to replace fossil fuels.
But you see, renewable energy isn’t only a concern for the environment.
It’s also a huge concern for ourselves.
Human beings are designed to not have to think about our energy.
Societal developments like stimulants, caffeine, energy drinks, drugs, or other sources of external energy have appeared relatively recently on the world stage.
And oftentimes, their rise to popularity tends to coincide with other major events – the agricultural revolution, mass migration and colonization, the industrial revolution, slave trade, etc.
Why is that?
It’s simple: With every “advancement” of humanity, we’ve changed our habits, even just a little bit. We introduce new foods, new pesticides, new work schedules, new air quality, new forms to fill out, new germs, new rules, new bacteria.
We’ve been evolving for a long time – the oldest dated homosapien remains are about 300,000 years old.
More or less, our bodies are the same.
But we’ve added so much to our environments and changed how we eat and drink and move and live.
We don’t eat food from out of the ground anymore. We’re so far removed from that process that the preservatives used to keep the food “safe” to eat from the time it’s grown or killed to the time we eat it have to be listed as another factor in our evolving chemical make-up.
What was once a self-sustaining system of energy now has to contend with unnatural additions to our bodies.
On top of the external changes to the physical world we inhabit, altering what we absorb and consume, we’ve added much more to our plates than we used to have to deal with.
We know cavemen and early farmers certainly didn’t have to stress about health insurance providers and deductibles and car payments and repairs and bus schedules and homeowner’s associations and the rising cost of rent.
Humans three hundred years ago didn’t have to deal with any of that either.
Granted, they certainly had problems of their own – stress has always been a factor in human life, from the Romans and their wars to famines in African cities to tidal waves in Japan and so on.
We’ve got built-in mechanisms for dealing with stress – thank your adrenal glands for giving you adrenaline and cortisol when you need it.
The difference is, we’re not built to deal with stress all the time.
We’re messing with our hormone production by calling for constant engagement, forcing downtime to become a time for side hustles and productivity, filling our waking hours with extracurriculars and activities, disconnecting from the art of meditation and movement in favor of bursts of activity at the gym followed by extended sedentary periods…
You get the idea.
This isn’t normal.
And we can all tell something is wrong.
Our internal energy systems are meant to be renewable. We have a method for obtaining nutrition from food, absorbing and properly distributing those nutrients, storing and transferring and using energy, and winding down when it’s time to rest.
But we’ve tried to change our natures and control the means of production through outside sources that don’t jive with the way we’re supposed to operate.
And just like we’re ravaging the Earth and its atmosphere by digging for oil and burning dirty fuel, we’re ravaging our internal turbines.
Renewable energy exists within us – but we don’t know enough about how it works to identify where a breakdown is happening.
Energy isn’t just the will to get out of bed in the morning. Energy affects our bodies’ abilities to fight off diseases, run our brains efficiently, create memories, repair traumatic neural pathways, enjoy a healthy sex life, and pursue our dreams.
Without it, we’re nothing but exhausted.
Which is why my friend and fellow natural-healing filmmaker, Nick Polizzi, and I developed this brand-new docu-series, Exhausted!
In nine episodes – cut down from thousands of hours of interviews with the best medical minds in the functional, ancient, and integrative healing space – we take you through your entire body’s journey to create energy.
It debuts today at 9 p.m. Eastern, and we’re releasing it at no cost to you.
We got ourselves into this mess…
And the only true way out is to know what doesn’t work, what’s hurting us more, and why.
Click here to make sure you get the email to tune in, and we’ll take the first step to returning to renewable internal energy together.