Dr. Martin Picard

creating that environment, and then it allows you to relax.

What relaxing means basically is you decrease the energetic cost of sustaining your organism, then lowering heart rate, lowering cortisol in your blood, norepinephrine, catecholamines, and the things that cost a lot of energy.

We've done experiments in cells in a dish.

You give cells glucocorticoids, like a cortisol mimetic or norepinephrine,

And then we wanted to know how much energy does it cost to mount a stress response?

Those hormones are not damaging by themselves.

But if you give them to cells, those cells go into a whole choreographed, evolutionary, ingrained response that prepares them for the future.

It's called allostasis.

And that costs a bunch of energy.

And we found it was about 60%.

So this doesn't happen in human beings, but if your energetic metabolic rate increased by 60% with glucocorticoids, you'd be in big trouble.

So it might not be as much in the whole body, but we know now that just a stress hormone on cells in a dish, human cells, is able to increase the energetic cost of life.

So it costs energy to worry about stuff.

So if you can decrease the level of those hormones and decrease the level of cytokines in your blood, inflammation,

that's going to save energy.

And then, yes, maybe sleep is more restorative.

And the sleep study we did, there are people whose sleep energy expenditure drops significantly, like 20%.

Other people doesn't drop almost at all.

In particular, people whose mitochondria don't work very well.

So we've been so fortunate to work with patients, and I'm not a physician, but