Energy Comes First

Why a tired mind loses touch with its own wisdom

An exploration of energy, attention and prāṇa — and of what becomes possible when we begin to care for the inner resources through which we meet our life.

Roberto Sanlorenzo

Scientist and long-time practitioner of meditation and prāṇāyāma, exploring the meeting ground between contemplative traditions, science and everyday life.

The question

There are days when you know exactly what matters to you and act against it anyway. You answer a message in a tone you would rather not have used. You postpone the conversation you meant to have, and when you finally come to rest in the evening, you recognise very little of what you value most in what you actually did.

The usual explanation is a moral one: not enough discipline, not enough will. That explanation is expensive. It arrives as a verdict, and a verdict tends to lower the very resource it is complaining about.

There is a simpler and less moralistic approach, and it is the subject of this article. Most of the time, the limiting factor is energy. Perception, discernment and choice are metabolically costly operations, and they degrade before we notice as our energy levels drop.

Everything draws on the same account

Every activity of the body-mind complex costs energy. Work costs energy. Worry costs energy. Grief costs energy. So do curiosity, laughter, intimacy and a long-awaited holiday — the pleasant ones are easiest to overlook, because we file them under recovery.

One figure makes the scale concrete. The adult brain is roughly 2% of body mass and consumes roughly 20% of the body’s energy at rest (Raichle & Gusnard, 2002). It is the most expensive organ we own, and it runs whether or not we use it well.

This says nothing about anyone’s character. It does mean that the quality of our inner life sits downstream of something quantitative — and overlooking that quantity can leave us experiencing and evaluating the result in moral terms. Recognising it, on the other hand, gives us something concrete and practical we can work with.

What goes first when energy drops

Under fatigue and stress, functions degrade in a particular order, and the order is the interesting part. The prefrontal cortex — perspective, planning, impulse control, the long view — is among the first to lose efficiency, and acute stress has been shown to impair its function measurably (Amy Arnsten, Yale, 2009). The faster, automatic, older circuits keep working. They were built like this to preserve life, also in case of danger.

The experience is recognisable. Attention narrows. The range of options you can see shrinks. You respond with the pattern instead of the choice, and notice afterwards.

Notice what this says. Your capacity for perspective, patience, empathy and discernment does not necessarily disappear when you are tired. It becomes less accessible. The instrument is intact; the current reaching it has dropped.

Where prāṇa comes in

Yoga described this long before anyone measured it, with a map of five sheaths, the pañca kośa from the Taittirīya Upaniṣad: annamaya kośa, the physical body made of food; prāṇamaya kośa, the body of vital energy, prāṇa; manomaya kośa, the mental and emotional body; vijñānamaya kośa, the sheath associated with discernment, deeper knowledge and buddhi (the intellect); ānandamaya kośa, the body of bliss.

The first three give us particularly tangible doorways into practice: posture and movement work directly with the physical body, breath with prāṇa, and attention with the movements of mind. As these dimensions become more balanced and less burdened by accumulated tension and habitual patterns, our sensitivity to subtler dimensions of experience may also deepen — including discernment, inner knowing and ānanda.

Let me say plainly where this sits. The kośa map belongs to a tradition refined over a very long time by people who practised it, and to a different order of evidence from the many scientific studies. Beatrice and I had the good fortune of being introduced to this knowledge and the related practices by a living master of the tradition.

What the research actually shows

Rigorous, and narrower than the enthusiasm around it.

Slow breathing is associated with increased heart-rate variability, shifts in EEG activity, and reports of greater comfort and alertness (Zaccaro et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2018).

Breathing rhythm appears coupled to attention through the locus coeruleus, the brainstem’s noradrenaline source, which places the breath upstream of how attention is regulated (Melnychuk et al., Psychophysiology, 2018).

Nasal breathing entrains oscillations in the piriform cortex, amygdala and hippocampus; in humans, emotion recognition and memory recall varied with the phase of the breath (Zelano et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2016).

Five minutes a day of cyclic sighing, over one month, improved mood and lowered resting respiratory rate more than an equivalent mindfulness protocol (Balban et al., Cell Reports Medicine, Stanford, 2023).

Even if the scientific literature about breath and prāṇāyāma is huge and vast, we choose to mention studies limited to a narrower perimeter: they show that breathing is one of the few physiological processes we can consciously influence that also interacts directly with the autonomic nervous system and attentional regulation.

We work with the subtle to influence how we inhabit the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of ourselves. The measurements say the lever exists. The tradition says where it leads.

The blade

Stephen Covey placed it as the seventh and last of his habits and called it sharpen the saw: the deliberate renewal of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions, which produces nothing on the day you do it and determines everything you produce afterwards.

The woodcutter with the blunt blade is busy all day. He cuts from morning to evening and has no time to stop and sharpen, precisely because the blade is blunt and every cut takes longer. Each hour he keeps going makes stopping less affordable.

This is the loop most people are in with their own energy: no time to tend to prāṇa because there is no energy, and no energy because there is no time. On any single day the cost stays invisible. Across a year it shows — perception coarser, choices more reactive, a life gradually drifting away from the values more relevant for the person living it, and effects on the people nearby that nobody chose.

What seven days are for

Soulful Living Sadhana – Clearing the Veils from 9 to 15 October repeats one sixty-minute practice for seven consecutive mornings, The repetition is the method that day after day begins to show you yourself: the novelty has worn off, and what remains is your own pattern. The structure around it stays light: the practice each morning, a short daily inquiry, one small embodied action carried through all seven days, and a closing reflection.

Beatrice describes the intention in her own words: “to notice what has accumulated through living, to clear some of what may be obscuring our sensitivity, and through practice, to create the conditions for prāṇa and Life to move more freely again.”

Seven mornings can be enough to begin noticing two things: what a deliberate hour does to the rest of the day, and whether this kind of practice can hold a place in your life. Expect the first changes in the quality of attention rather than in your circumstances — most people notice them in something ordinary, like how they respond to an interruption or to someone who usually irritates them

“And when some of those layers begin to lift, we may find ourselves a little more available. Available to Life, to our deeper nature, and to that quiet sense of connection and belonging that can so easily become veiled.”

That is the argument in Beatrice’s language. In mine: energy sits upstream of everything we would call a choice. Tend to it, and the same day gives you more to work with — more of what you perceive, more of what you can weigh, more of what you can do about it: more freedom and presence, more capacity to live according to your values and vision.

The blade cuts better because someone stopped and sharpened it.