30/05/2017
THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: HOW TO USE ENERGY WISELY?
DR SANJEEV SHARMA addresses one of the most common causes of illness today. And it looks like we are closer to having the solution.
People are experiencing burnout like never before. It’s easy to see why. Between cell phones, pagers and instance messaging – not to mention job demands, family responsibilities and a nonstop flow of obligations and commitments – we can sometimes be on call 24/7. No matter how many tasks we cross off our ‘to do’ lists, they keep getting longer. Then there are the additional threats from terrorism, SARS, West Nile virus and other newly-minted infectious diseases that fuel our anxiety levels.
Just thinking about it can make us worry, compromising the sleep we so desperately need to replenish our dwindling energy reserves. We yawn and stumble through our days, feeling simultaneously tired and wired. Does this sound familiar? If so, you may be one of the millions of world citizens who chronically expend more energy than they have. This imbalance puts an enormous stress on both body and mind. It is also a leading cause of illness in today’s developed world, where an estimated 80 percent of health problems stem from stress.
To get a clearer picture of how overspending your energy reserves affects your health, imagine your body as a car battery, constantly using energy without ever fully recharging. In other words more energy is expended than replaced, so less and less juice is available over time. Eventually, the battery wears down, and the engine won’t turn over.
WE ARE ENERGY
We tend to think of our bodies as solid structures – bone, muscle, organs, and the arteries and veins through which our blood circulates. In reality, we can condense the solid matter in the human body to the size of a thimble. The rest is space – space within cells, space between cells, and space between organs. Connecting and enlivening all these parts is the energy that our cells produce. That’s what keeps us going. Without an adequate energy supply, our health suffers.
Ancient Chinese healers recognized this thousands of years ago. They devised acupuncture, the healing discipline that acts directly on the body’s energy centres. So did the ancient Indian scientists and spiritual teachers who created Yoga techniques to elevate prana, the Vedic word for life force. They understood that energy is our most precious human resource, and just like the energy that heats our homes and fuels our automobiles, the energy in our bodies is finite.
