Your exhaustion may be aging you

Imagine having a low phone battery and no charger while driving in an unfamiliar place. You're soon looking at a dead battery, an angry spouse, and a lot of anxiety. We often think of energy as how we feel—whether that’s joyful vitality or fatigue and exhaustion (the metaphorical dead battery).

But rather than view energy as a feeling alone, researchers at the Buck Institute of Aging and the Healthspan Horizons conference propose that the biology of energy is measurable and significant to our understanding of aging. This new concept is called “energy span,” and it could be revolutionary in understanding how to live healthier and longer.

The “Energy Span” framework is described by Longevity. Technology as “the entire, integrated machinery of our vitality.’ More specifically, author and Buck researcher Noa Rappaport, PhD, suggests that it is this important biological ability to regulate, sustain, and generate energy throughout a lifetime…. or:

The main argument is that energy, or a lack thereof (somewhat dramatically referred to as the “erosion of energy”), can be an early warning sign of physical or mental decline.

And notice the ‘span.’ Like all the popular spans in the longevity space — whether it's health span, lifespan, or joy span — energy span examines health across a lifetime. 

Still, a lifetime of health through the lens of energetics is just one piece of the bigger health span puzzle. The hope is that finding more ways to measure energy, track changes, and intervene early could create greater vitality and health span.

If energy is a feeling, then it's also biology. Energy powers our core biological functions, including metabolism, movement, and breathing.

With increased energetic stamina comes more possibility to transform thoughts, hopes, and goals into healthy habits, actions, and dreams, and to age in a way that is consistent with your physical, emotional, and mental needs.

Measuring energy is largely conceptual, but scientists believe we can use ‘energy proxies’ (such as heart rate, sleep stages, and glucose response) to track it indirectly and objectively, as described by Longevity. Technology. 

Energy proxies might include:

Since energy isn’t a single number, there isn’t a single test to measure it. Right now, we can only measure changes in energy over time and the possible links between these changes and disease.

Researchers are now dialing in on the possible repercussions of these energetic changes.

It’s natural for energy to wane as we age. But, as with aging patterns themselves, this general decline is dotted with periods of more rapid decline. 

Rappaport introduces these patterns as ‘drifts’ and "cliff events."

Energy drifts, and cliffs can be traced to reduced mitochondrial function, with mitochondria being the powerhouses of our cells that provide the energy to sustain life. 

When Mitochondria are damaged, they can recover… but not always. It can take months or years “if recovery occurs at all," Rappaport writes.

But catch natural drifts early enough, and there's an opportunity to rebalance the systems that regulate energy and aging before dysfunction snowballs into major periods of energy decline— and thus, increased risk of disease, aging, and decline.

This is all great in theory, but we don’t have many tools to legitimately measure energy. Instead, Rappaport proposes that measuring — and improving — energy capacity is accessible via indirect and science-backed tools:

It’s one big, happy cycle. Exercise improves sleep, which improves metabolism, which supports energy for exercise that reduces stress, and so on so forth, Rappaport writes.

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Energy is more than a feeling, and scientists are just starting to uncover ways to translate this biology into hard, actionable data to slow aging processes and preserve health span.

If health span is about avoiding disease, energy span might be about preserving the spark that allows us to truly live.

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