Dr. Martin Picard

You need to be detoxifying, clearing the blood and all of your vital organs.

That's vital cost.

Second is stress cost.

If your sympathetic nervous system is activated because you're worrying about the future or worrying about the past or you're stressing yourself out, this costs energy.

And then your blood pressure increases, that costs energy.

Heart rate increases, costs energy.

You're sweating a little bit, costs energy.

Your hair rises.

Anything that you're doing will cost energy and then steal that energy, we think, from a third bucket, which is what we call growth, maintenance, and repair.

GMR.

And those GMR processes happen at the level of organs.

When you have an organ that gets bigger and stronger, for example, after weightlifting, it can happen at the level of a cell.

If the cell needs to repair its membrane, needs to repair its DNA, this would be growth, maintenance, and repairing.

If you make more mitochondria, mitochondrial biogenesis after a workout, that would be growth, maintenance, and repair.

And because there's a finite energy budget, there's an economy of energy.

How much energy you have needs to be distributed between those vital costs, the stress costs, and the GMR, growth, maintenance, repair costs.

So if you're stressing out all the time, we suspect this actually steals energy away from GMR.

And then you're not healing.

You're not growing.

You're not learning, maybe.