Suddenly, the oldest health advice begins to make much more sense. Exercise doesn’t simply boost muscle mass, it bulks up the hippocampus – a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory. It also encourages mitochondria to become more numerous and more efficient. We often imagine we’re training our bodies; we’re also strengthening the ancient energy system that allows our brains to work.
Sleep performs a different kind of maintenance. While we’re unconscious, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are consolidated and worn-out cellular components – including mitochondria – are repaired or replaced. So rather than thinking of sleep as simply rest, we can conceive of it, at least partly, as a mitochondrial maintenance shift, aimed at preparing the brain for another day of active learning, adapting and imagining.
Then there’s food. Mitochondria rely entirely on what we eat to perform their remarkable chemistry. The quality of that fuel matters. Diets rich in minimally processed foods provide the ingredients for efficient energy transformation, while diets that continually overwhelm the system appear to make that process less efficient over time.
Seen through this lens, sleep, exercise and diet stop looking like three separate pieces of lifestyle advice and become different ways of caring for the same biological inheritance. What fascinates me most is that this new understanding reaches far beyond physical health. Scientists are uncovering intriguing links between mitochondrial function and resilience, mood, personality traits, and even our social lives.
For centuries we’ve tended to separate mind from body, as though thoughts somehow floated free of the flesh that produced them. The reality is that thoughts emerge from living tissue that must constantly capture, transform and use energy simply to exist.
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