Chapter 3: You Are Energy — The Mitochondrial Key

I want to introduce you to the idea that reorganized my entire understanding of what had happened to me. It arrived late in my journey, and I have come to believe it is the missing scientific center of this whole story. It is this:

You are not your body. You are the energy flowing through it.

That sounds like something printed on a yoga studio wall. It is, in fact, one of the more rigorous statements in modern biology, and I first encountered it through the work of Dr. Martin Picard, an associate professor at Columbia University who studies what he named mitochondrial psychobiology — the science of how our inner experience and our cellular energy shape each other. The difference between a living, thinking person and a body that has just died is not the atoms. All the molecules are still there in the moment after death. What has stopped is the flow of energy. We are, as Picard puts it, an energetic process.

The moment I read that, the Hawaiian phrase I had named my company after — Huna Makia, energy flows where attention goes — stopped being a metaphor and became a description of machinery. Because if I am energy, then brain fog is not a mood or a character flaw. It is what it feels like when energy stops flowing properly to the brain.

Let me build the picture from the ground up.

The 5,000 trillion power plants inside you

Inside almost every one of your cells are tiny structures called mitochondria — on average about a thousand per cell, adding up to something like 5,000 trillion in your body. They are the reason you are warm; the reason you can think.

📖 DEFINITION: Mitochondria — the power plants of your cells. They take the food you eat and the oxygen you breathe, strip electrons from that food, and flow them like a tiny electrical circuit toward oxygen — releasing energy that the cell captures as ATP, its universal energy currency. When mitochondria falter, every process they fuel, including thought, runs short of power.

Here is the part most of us were never taught. Mitochondria do far more than make ATP. They behave like a distributed nervous system inside you — covered in receptors, constantly sensing the environment (Is there enough fuel? Is there a stress hormone here? Is there danger?) and signaling to one another. Picard calls them little antennas inside the cell. Your trillions of power plants are also, collectively, a kind of intelligence — one that is exquisitely sensitive to how you live.

And your brain is their single hungriest customer. It is about 2% of your body weight and burns roughly 20% of your energy. No organ is more dependent on a steady, clean supply of power. No organ suffers faster when that supply is disrupted.

The fixed energy budget

The second idea is the one that finally explained my fog. You have a finite energy budget, and your body spends it according to a strict hierarchy of priorities.

Think of it like Maslow’s hierarchy, but for cells. When resources are plentiful, the body funds everything — including the low-priority luxuries of growth, maintenance, and repair. These are the anti-aging processes: clearing damaged proteins from the brain, repairing DNA, replacing worn-out mitochondria, keeping the immune system’s housekeeping current. They matter enormously over a lifetime. But they are not urgent. And when a genuine threat shows up — a lion, a deadline, or a virus — the body does exactly what a business does in a cash crisis: it defunds the long-term projects and pours everything into survival.

Now hold that idea against what a serious infection does.

Why illness feels the way it does

When your immune system is fighting a pathogen, it is one of the most energy-expensive things your body ever does. Your metabolic rate objectively rises — and yet you feel utterly drained. That paradox used to puzzle me until I understood the budget. The energy isn’t gone; it has been reassigned. Your immune system has commandeered it, and it is being pulled away from your brain.

Picard describes catching a flu on a New Year’s Eve — resting heart rate at 110 instead of 60, metabolism roaring — and finding that although he is a scientist who loves thinking about energy, he could not muster the will to open his laptop and write a single line about the very experience he was having. I just didn’t care about anything, he recalls. I was just trying to survive. He compares the mind in that state to the difference between a laser and a bare light bulb: same quantity of energy, but scattered and incoherent instead of focused. His mind had become a diffuse bulb.

Read that description again, because it is the best account of Long COVID brain fog I have ever encountered — and it came from a healthy man with a two-day flu. Everything the biologists call sickness behavior — the exhaustion, the social withdrawal, the loss of motivation, the sense that nothing matters, the wanting to lie under the covers — is not weakness. It is a coordinated energy-conservation strategy, ancient and adaptive, run by your body to free up power for the fight.

The fixed energy budget: when the body fights a chronic illness, energy is rerouted from thinking and repair to defense — and that reroute is what brain fog feels like.

🔑 KEY INSIGHT: Long COVID is sickness behavior that never switched off. If your own antibodies keep triggering low-grade inflammation (Chapter 2), your body keeps the emergency budget in force — permanently defunding the brain and the repair systems. The fog, the fatigue, the flattened motivation, even the depression, are what chronic energy diversion feels like from the inside. You are not lazy. Your power is being spent elsewhere.

This was the reframe that changed how I fought. I stopped trying to push through the fog with willpower — which only demanded more energy from a system already in deficit — and started asking a completely different question: How do I lower the drain, and how do I rebuild the supply? Every protocol in the second half of this book is one answer or the other.