Peggy, thank you. This was a very interesting read, and I think I am arriving at a very similar hypothesis with regard to mental health.
My sense is that mental wellbeing also depends on a kind of equilibrium between our internal models and external reality. When change threatens those internal models, resistance arises in an attempt to resolve the stressor. This resistance can be adaptive if it actually helps us respond to what is happening and return to equilibrium.
But if resistance becomes maladaptive, we may keep expending energy trying to resolve something that cannot be resolved in that way. This depletes our reserves, while also deepening the disequilibrium between internal models and external reality. Eventually this may appear as disorder: distress and/or dysfunction. But the misdirected resistance begins well before pathology becomes apparent. By the time pathology is visible, the system may already be depleted.
I wonder whether this partly relates to findings around metabolic factors in mental health. In the example I am describing, metabolic dysfunction may be secondary: the result of prolonged misdirected resistance and energetic expenditure. But it could also be primary in some cases, where the system never had the regulatory capacity available to resolve the stressor and return to equilibrium in the first place.
I would be really fascinated to hear your thoughts.
I have written about this in my essays on “The Thermodynamics of Distress” and “When Suffering Becomes Pathology,” and I think you and the team at Energy Science may be uncovering the physical/biological correlates of what I am trying to describe more conceptually.
I may have more questions than answers right now, but there is one thing I have come to trust: when we stop viewing the mind as separate from the body, and begin to see our bodies within the systems in which they are meant to function, we may come to understand health in a completely different way. I will definitely read your thoughts on this, and I invite you to browse through my Substack archive from time to time.
“Resistance is therefore not merely an obstacle to energy flow, but a necessary condition for biological transformation and organization.
This perspective resonates across physical systems” not to butt in, but I’ve been following you with extreme interest as I work with resistance as a psychoanalyst, and predominantly a drive theorist. I mostly work clinically with presenting resistance, and I’m considering your theories both psychologically/ physiologically as well. I believe your modeling is cutting edge on so many levels, for what it’s worth.
Heather, I really appreciate this. Your insights are always incredibly nuanced. It means a great deal to me that these seemingly abstract concepts align so well with your perspective, especially since they can be quite difficult to discuss in my everyday circles.
I continue to travel in and out of psychic spaces with your ideas. They live in the body—of that there’s no question. But, you also capture the mistaken cognition of our time; a diseased model of thinking that has left both the physical human body, and the planetary body, in a disordered shape, and suffering. What I love about your thinking is the bold interdisciplinary approach—there is a courage that flies in the face of the hubris, hypocrisy, and arrogance that has kept the disciplines apart, rather then invoking, coalescing, and enriching each-other. It’s true, it can be hard to find comrades.
Thank you so much. The way you describe it is exactly how I navigate my everyday life now. With my own awareness, connectedness, and at the same time, deep, deep worry.
How can we understand the body’s functions without understanding the structures everything moves through? In modern healthcare we’ve fragmented it so completely that the idea of one area of function affecting another can sound almost foreign, when it’s the most basic truth there is. The body is one integrated, moving system. Every message, every nutrient, every signal has to be carried, transported, moved along a gradient, and all of it costs energy. 💙
It is fascinating how much Gestalt Therapy Theory overlaps with the described approach.
In Gestalt, change and growth happen at the contact boundary. This is were the novelty can be assimilated as growth.
The boundary (resistance, aka “defences”) have to be there and overcome for the growth to be assimilated. Too rigid and we are psychologically rigidified, too fluid and the ego is not developed.
And the other striking parallel, and perhaps the essence of it all, is the relationship.
As Picard states in the introduction to the article, ‘behaviour emerges from the coordination of its parts’, one cannot but ask what is coordination. To me this is communication, dialogue, founded on the relationship. Our behaviour stems from our relationships within the field. This seems true at human level and at cellular one.
Again in Gestalt, the self construct is a relational process emerging at the contact boundary. We would not have a sense of self if we weren’t relating beings to start with.
That is fascinating! Perhaps this tells us something important: mind and body are inseparable. I think humanity has known this for millennia, but—for whatever reason—we ended up putting them into separate boxes. And my biggest concern is our attempt to confine such dynamic processes to rigid metrics.
Thank you for such a thoughtful essay. I found myself nodding throughout because many of your observations resonated with what my husband John and I experienced during his twenty-two-year journey with young-onset Parkinson’s disease.
Your emphasis on transport, gradients, accessibility, and resistance, rather than simply fuel availability, particularly caught my attention. It aligns with a body of work that I think provides an important physical framework for many of the questions you’re asking.
Over the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of working with physicist Professor Barry Ninham. Reading your essay, I kept thinking that the interstitium and the endothelial surface layer-glycocalyx may be better understood not as separate physiological structures, but as inseparable components of the same interfacial transport architecture.
One of the things John and I observed over many years was that movement often restored function. Moderate cycling could dramatically improve his cognition, movement, and overall sense of well-being. Yet following COVID, there came a point when his system could no longer sustain the same level of endurance exercise that had previously helped him. That became one of many clues suggesting that the issue was not simply energy production, but the physical conditions that make energy, matter, and information accessible throughout the body.
If you haven’t come across Barry’s recent paper, I think you’ll find it fascinating:
The Endothelial Surface Layer-Glycocalyx: Universal Nano Infrastructure is Fundamental to Physiology, Cell Traffic and a Complementary Neural Network
Thank you again for writing this. It sparked a number of connections for me, and I suspect there is an interesting conversation to be had between your transport-centered perspective and Barry’s interfacial physics.
Thank you, Martha, for sharing these documents and your story. My initial thoughts are: yes, I see the glycocalyx/endothelium interface as a necessary barrier, and yes, the fact that energy availability deteriorated after COVID—perhaps because a demand arises that can no longer be met by the transport capacity—aligns very much with my own observations and reflections. Thank you so much for sharing your lived experience and the scientific texts.
Just. Soooooooo. Good. As a caregiver to 2 very complex zebras I have been tracking patterns, following GCM data, voraciously reading and asking questions for years. I feel, down to the tips of my toes, everything you put into words here. Thank you.
Thank you—perhaps this will help you better understand your 'complex zebras' at home. I hope that the future of medicine and the healthcare industry will recognize subjective well-being as a crucial outcome, treating physical symptoms as valid signals rather than dismissing them as background noise. When it comes to measurement, I personally believe a solid set of well-established lab values—and how they relate to one another—is all we really need. My model proposes a principle of 'data ecology.' I hope this will prove to be a valid approach.
My 2 sons are alive today because their brilliant neurologist practiced the art of medicine (drawing on decades of his own experience while gathering input from similarly minded professionals across multiple disciplines). Most of their treatment was guided by what hospital lawyers would clearly define as “subjective” because most standardized hospital tests proved to be useless. For example, invasive tests were botched and also nearly killed my son. EEGs could not get to the area of their brains where the storm was quickly erasing all their abilities, personalities and spirits. So, at home, I systematically and rigorously tracked behaviors and symptoms. A tutoring center (Lindamood Bell) collected formal and informal assessment data daily. OT, PT and neuropsychological services also ran routine assessments. Coaches, teachers, and other providers provided written reports of events when needed. I provided written descriptions and photos of the weird happenings. Alllllllll these things, combined with pump data, immunology lab work, etc provided our team with the information they needed to take proactive measures as well as extraordinarily responsive reactive measures. The result? Much to everyone’s surprise and delight my sons are 20 and 22 and enjoying an amazing quality of life. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. The problem with our success story is that the hospital does not stand to make much money from my family’s data collection model. Furthermore, I bet the hospital lawyers would argue that our family’s subjective data collection model makes the hospital vulnerable to lawsuits. When our neurologist retired, we moved our care to private practice.
Peggy, thank you. This was a very interesting read, and I think I am arriving at a very similar hypothesis with regard to mental health.
My sense is that mental wellbeing also depends on a kind of equilibrium between our internal models and external reality. When change threatens those internal models, resistance arises in an attempt to resolve the stressor. This resistance can be adaptive if it actually helps us respond to what is happening and return to equilibrium.
But if resistance becomes maladaptive, we may keep expending energy trying to resolve something that cannot be resolved in that way. This depletes our reserves, while also deepening the disequilibrium between internal models and external reality. Eventually this may appear as disorder: distress and/or dysfunction. But the misdirected resistance begins well before pathology becomes apparent. By the time pathology is visible, the system may already be depleted.
I wonder whether this partly relates to findings around metabolic factors in mental health. In the example I am describing, metabolic dysfunction may be secondary: the result of prolonged misdirected resistance and energetic expenditure. But it could also be primary in some cases, where the system never had the regulatory capacity available to resolve the stressor and return to equilibrium in the first place.
I would be really fascinated to hear your thoughts.
I have written about this in my essays on “The Thermodynamics of Distress” and “When Suffering Becomes Pathology,” and I think you and the team at Energy Science may be uncovering the physical/biological correlates of what I am trying to describe more conceptually.
Thank you so much for your feedback!
I may have more questions than answers right now, but there is one thing I have come to trust: when we stop viewing the mind as separate from the body, and begin to see our bodies within the systems in which they are meant to function, we may come to understand health in a completely different way. I will definitely read your thoughts on this, and I invite you to browse through my Substack archive from time to time.
“Resistance is therefore not merely an obstacle to energy flow, but a necessary condition for biological transformation and organization.
This perspective resonates across physical systems” not to butt in, but I’ve been following you with extreme interest as I work with resistance as a psychoanalyst, and predominantly a drive theorist. I mostly work clinically with presenting resistance, and I’m considering your theories both psychologically/ physiologically as well. I believe your modeling is cutting edge on so many levels, for what it’s worth.
Heather, I really appreciate this. Your insights are always incredibly nuanced. It means a great deal to me that these seemingly abstract concepts align so well with your perspective, especially since they can be quite difficult to discuss in my everyday circles.
I continue to travel in and out of psychic spaces with your ideas. They live in the body—of that there’s no question. But, you also capture the mistaken cognition of our time; a diseased model of thinking that has left both the physical human body, and the planetary body, in a disordered shape, and suffering. What I love about your thinking is the bold interdisciplinary approach—there is a courage that flies in the face of the hubris, hypocrisy, and arrogance that has kept the disciplines apart, rather then invoking, coalescing, and enriching each-other. It’s true, it can be hard to find comrades.
Thank you so much. The way you describe it is exactly how I navigate my everyday life now. With my own awareness, connectedness, and at the same time, deep, deep worry.
How can we understand the body’s functions without understanding the structures everything moves through? In modern healthcare we’ve fragmented it so completely that the idea of one area of function affecting another can sound almost foreign, when it’s the most basic truth there is. The body is one integrated, moving system. Every message, every nutrient, every signal has to be carried, transported, moved along a gradient, and all of it costs energy. 💙
Thank you for the article.
It is fascinating how much Gestalt Therapy Theory overlaps with the described approach.
In Gestalt, change and growth happen at the contact boundary. This is were the novelty can be assimilated as growth.
The boundary (resistance, aka “defences”) have to be there and overcome for the growth to be assimilated. Too rigid and we are psychologically rigidified, too fluid and the ego is not developed.
And the other striking parallel, and perhaps the essence of it all, is the relationship.
As Picard states in the introduction to the article, ‘behaviour emerges from the coordination of its parts’, one cannot but ask what is coordination. To me this is communication, dialogue, founded on the relationship. Our behaviour stems from our relationships within the field. This seems true at human level and at cellular one.
Again in Gestalt, the self construct is a relational process emerging at the contact boundary. We would not have a sense of self if we weren’t relating beings to start with.
That is fascinating! Perhaps this tells us something important: mind and body are inseparable. I think humanity has known this for millennia, but—for whatever reason—we ended up putting them into separate boxes. And my biggest concern is our attempt to confine such dynamic processes to rigid metrics.
Yes indeed, science (as necessary and useful) has been playing catch up with the millennial wisdom :-)
Tai Chi is one of the ancient modalities that addresses the flow within ourselves and in connection with our environment.
Peggy,
Thank you for such a thoughtful essay. I found myself nodding throughout because many of your observations resonated with what my husband John and I experienced during his twenty-two-year journey with young-onset Parkinson’s disease.
Your emphasis on transport, gradients, accessibility, and resistance, rather than simply fuel availability, particularly caught my attention. It aligns with a body of work that I think provides an important physical framework for many of the questions you’re asking.
Over the past several years, I’ve had the privilege of working with physicist Professor Barry Ninham. Reading your essay, I kept thinking that the interstitium and the endothelial surface layer-glycocalyx may be better understood not as separate physiological structures, but as inseparable components of the same interfacial transport architecture.
One of the things John and I observed over many years was that movement often restored function. Moderate cycling could dramatically improve his cognition, movement, and overall sense of well-being. Yet following COVID, there came a point when his system could no longer sustain the same level of endurance exercise that had previously helped him. That became one of many clues suggesting that the issue was not simply energy production, but the physical conditions that make energy, matter, and information accessible throughout the body.
If you haven’t come across Barry’s recent paper, I think you’ll find it fascinating:
The Endothelial Surface Layer-Glycocalyx: Universal Nano Infrastructure is Fundamental to Physiology, Cell Traffic and a Complementary Neural Network
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001868625000120
You may also find our recent paper of interest:
Gut, Brain and the Glycocalyx: A Portrait of Parkinson’s Disease
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41895098/
Thank you again for writing this. It sparked a number of connections for me, and I suspect there is an interesting conversation to be had between your transport-centered perspective and Barry’s interfacial physics.
Thank you, Martha, for sharing these documents and your story. My initial thoughts are: yes, I see the glycocalyx/endothelium interface as a necessary barrier, and yes, the fact that energy availability deteriorated after COVID—perhaps because a demand arises that can no longer be met by the transport capacity—aligns very much with my own observations and reflections. Thank you so much for sharing your lived experience and the scientific texts.
Just. Soooooooo. Good. As a caregiver to 2 very complex zebras I have been tracking patterns, following GCM data, voraciously reading and asking questions for years. I feel, down to the tips of my toes, everything you put into words here. Thank you.
Thank you—perhaps this will help you better understand your 'complex zebras' at home. I hope that the future of medicine and the healthcare industry will recognize subjective well-being as a crucial outcome, treating physical symptoms as valid signals rather than dismissing them as background noise. When it comes to measurement, I personally believe a solid set of well-established lab values—and how they relate to one another—is all we really need. My model proposes a principle of 'data ecology.' I hope this will prove to be a valid approach.
My 2 sons are alive today because their brilliant neurologist practiced the art of medicine (drawing on decades of his own experience while gathering input from similarly minded professionals across multiple disciplines). Most of their treatment was guided by what hospital lawyers would clearly define as “subjective” because most standardized hospital tests proved to be useless. For example, invasive tests were botched and also nearly killed my son. EEGs could not get to the area of their brains where the storm was quickly erasing all their abilities, personalities and spirits. So, at home, I systematically and rigorously tracked behaviors and symptoms. A tutoring center (Lindamood Bell) collected formal and informal assessment data daily. OT, PT and neuropsychological services also ran routine assessments. Coaches, teachers, and other providers provided written reports of events when needed. I provided written descriptions and photos of the weird happenings. Alllllllll these things, combined with pump data, immunology lab work, etc provided our team with the information they needed to take proactive measures as well as extraordinarily responsive reactive measures. The result? Much to everyone’s surprise and delight my sons are 20 and 22 and enjoying an amazing quality of life. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. The problem with our success story is that the hospital does not stand to make much money from my family’s data collection model. Furthermore, I bet the hospital lawyers would argue that our family’s subjective data collection model makes the hospital vulnerable to lawsuits. When our neurologist retired, we moved our care to private practice.
Whenever I see the word “passive” applied to biological systems, I’m reminded of how much we still need to understand about our own physiology.
Nothing is passive. Nothing is junk.
Junk DNA? We are only now scratching the surface of the universe peptideins.
Is T4 inert? Is it really? Does only T3 actually work?
Is the interstitial space passive? I highly doubt it.
And amazing how many comments relating your article to psychology :-)