1. The Mighty, Mighty Mitochondria: Start Here
I’ve Been Studying These for a Year and They Keep Getting Deeper
We all remember it from school: the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
That is the understatement of your entire education.
Read on.
I have spent the better part of the last year inside one of the most clarifying and disorienting experiences a human body can go through — active cancer treatment, with all the pharmacological weight that comes with it. And somewhere in the middle of chemotherapy, cardiovascular monitoring, integrative naturopathic care, HRV tracking, sleep staging, and a supplement protocol that would make most pharmacists blink twice, I kept arriving at the same address.
The mitochondria.
Every single time.
Ask me about cortisol. Mitochondria. Hormonal disruption from treatment. Mitochondria. Why the morning walk matters more than almost anything else I do, why TM isn’t just meditation but something measurably cellular, why melatonin at therapeutic doses is doing something entirely different than helping you sleep.
Mitochondria. Always the mitochondria.
They are not the powerhouse of the cell. They are the command centre, the hormone factory, the stress sensor, the immune coordinator, the circadian timekeeper, and the final arbiter of whether a cell lives or dies. Calling them a powerhouse is like calling the conductor of an orchestra “the person who waves the stick.”
You know the Cadbury secret? The one guarded so closely only a handful of people alive are allowed to know the recipe? The mitochondria have one too. Except this one is guarded much, much more.
Every time I think I’ve finally understood them, there’s another layer underneath. That’s what this series is. A year of going deeper, and a honest account of what I found.
Two scenarios. One of them probably sounds like you.
The first person wakes up before their alarm. Not jolted — surfaced. There’s a moment before full consciousness where the body feels settled. Energy isn’t something they’re performing. They actually have it.
The morning doesn’t require negotiating. The walk happens because the body wants it. Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark something shifts — a biochemical ease, a loosening of whatever the night held. Thinking is clear. Not caffeinated-clear, which is borrowed clarity with a bill attached — actually clear. Problems that felt large yesterday have edges today.
Here’s what thriving mitochondria don’t look like, because the wellness world gets this almost universally wrong: they don’t look like stillness. They don’t look like slow.
In the last sixty seconds while writing this, I moved through a business idea, a science question, an editorial decision, a travel logistics problem, and a calendar issue — and landed on each one cleanly before moving to the next. That’s not scattered. That’s executive function running at capacity. The five things felt like options. I’m also practicing havening as I write — a technique that induces a delta brainwave state through specific touch sequences, almost certainly doing something mitochondrial via cortisol suppression. That’s the fifth thing happening in the same minute. Not zen. Capacious.
Recovery from the walk is fast. By the time they’ve showered they’re not tired from the exertion — they’re energized by it. Not a personality trait. Mitochondrial biogenesis — the body creating more engines in response to the demand you placed on it. Mood is stable without maintenance. Sleep comes easily that night, deep sleep follows, and the cycle begins again.
The second person wakes to the alarm after what technically counts as eight hours and doesn’t feel like it. There’s a specific kind of fatigue that has nothing to do with sleep quantity. Cellular flatness. The body is present but not available.
The morning is a negotiation. Coffee first, obviously. Then maybe movement — or maybe not, because when you actually run the numbers, they don’t resolve in movement’s favour. You tell yourself you’ll do it later. You know you probably won’t.
Thinking is wading. Ordinary decisions cost more than they should. The same five things that felt like options for the first person feel like a pile-on — not because there are more of them, but because each one costs more to hold.
Recovery doesn’t come. If they pushed through the walk, they’re paying for it hours later, maybe into tomorrow. The exertion didn’t build anything. It drew down a reserve that wasn’t full. Mood needs managing all day. Sleep comes late or comes broken. The alarm goes off again the next morning, and the cycle continues — pointing the other direction.
Same person. Same morning. Same life.
The only variable is what’s happening inside the cell.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s the mechanism. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it — in yourself, in the people around you, in every conversation about energy and health that spends all its time talking about everything except the thing actually doing the work.
So this is where we start. There’s another layer. There’s always another layer.
Next: what these things actually do — and why “powerhouse” was the understatement.
This is the first part of a six part series - the intent is to help explain what we should actually be focused on if we want to be healthy - not skinny, not strong, not nutritionally disciplined by our diets, but healthy from the inside out. I’ve also built an assessment tool for my paid subscribers as a thank you for your support, so please watch your inbox for that.
And thank you all for your support, I hope this helps you on your health journeys!