I used to think energy came from the brain. You know, push harder, think harder, work harder, and somehow that would fuel me. but real life didn’t play along. I would sit at my desk, power through emails, push my brain like it was some old car engine, and by the end of the day, I was completely fried. No energy left. My brain felt like mashed potatoes. If you’ve ever dragged yourself home after a long day wondering why you feel dead inside even though you didn’t run a marathon, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Then I stumbled across something shocking. The brain isn’t the main power source. It’s the heart. And once I started practicing what I now know, it felt like plugging into a hidden charging station that had been sitting in my chest all along.
The brain drains, the heart expands
The brain is an energy consumer. It eats up about 20% of the body’s energy just running its daily operations. And when we’re stuck in worry, fear, or self-criticism, the brain is like a phone with ten apps open, Wi-Fi on, screen brightness at full blast. It drains fast.
The heart, on the other hand, is an energy generator. When it shifts into a state of coherence, when its rhythm becomes smooth and ordered, it actually gives back energy to the body and brain. That’s why moments of gratitude, kindness or love can feel so alive, so light, so powerful. Your biology literally switches gears.
This isn’t just philosophy. HeartMath Institute has shown in their research that the heart produces an electromagnetic field that is 5,000 times stronger electrically and 100 times stronger magnetically than the brain’s field. To make that less abstract: if your brain is like a desk lamp, your heart is like the entire room’s lighting system. Sensitive instruments can pick up that heart field up to about ten feet outside your body. what you feel in your chest doesn’t stay hidden inside, it radiates outward, touching the environment and even the people around you.
Stress: the silent energy thief
Think about the last time you were stressed. Maybe a fight happened between you and your partner, a co-worker made a comment that burned, or your mom dropped one of those passive-aggressive lines that left you fuming. What happened in your body? Heart racing, chest tight, brain spinning. That’s incoherence. It’s like trying to drive with the brakes on. The heart sends jagged, chaotic signals to the brain, which then makes thinking even more scattered. And those moments of stress dump cortisol and adrenaline into your system. Useful if a lion is chasing you or you are in a life/death situation. Not so useful if it’s just a bad email.
Stay in that loop long enough and the body can’t repair itself. The immune system weakens, hormones go haywire, and you live in survival mode. No wonder so many of us feel tired even after “resting.”
Elevated emotions fuel you differently
Now think about the last time you felt a deep moment of gratitude, maybe when someone did something unexpectedly kind, or you just sat in silence with someone you love. In that moment, your heart rhythm becomes ordered, almost like waves flowing in harmony. This state is called heart coherence. And here’s what happens when you hit it:
- Cortisol drops, DHEA (a hormone of repair and regeneration) rises.
- Your immune system boosts, T-cells, the ones fighting off infections, actually become more active.
- Brain waves fall into sync with the heart’s rhythm, making thinking clearer and sharper.
One study by McCraty and colleagues at HeartMath showed that just five minutes of focusing on elevated emotions increased IgA, an antibody that’s your first line of defense against colds and flu. Five minutes of gratitude literally gave people a stronger shield against illness.
That’s when I stopped thinking of gratitude as some fluffy spiritual thing and started treating it like a biological tool.
A personal shift I can’t ignore
When I started meditating with elevated emotions, what Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches as heart coherence practices, I noticed something so small yet so huge: my immunity started improving right away. I used to be the person who caught cold after every second month, but as soon as I began this practice I stopped getting sick. It’s been two years now since I last had a cold or flu, and along the way my other health issues also began to heal. The most surprising part of opening your heart is that the worst thing that happens is, you heal.
And you don’t need to meditate on a mountaintop for this. Even pausing between tasks, closing your eyes for three minutes, and breathing into your chest while calling up gratitude, that can reset your entire system.
How to practice heart coherence
Here’s a simple way to try it today:
- Put your attention on the area of your heart. Place your hand there if it helps.
- Slow your breathing to about 5–6 breaths per minute, by exhaling long.
- Call up a genuine elevated emotion, gratitude, love, appreciation, compassion. If it feels fake, think of a memory or person that stirs it.
- Let that feeling grow and imagine it radiating out, filling the space around you.
Do this for even three minutes, and your biology shifts. Do it daily, and you’re literally training your body to run on a new energy system. because even for doing it for three minutes, the effect lasts for six hours.
The real choice
most of us ignore that energy doesn’t come from coffee, endless hustle, or sheer willpower. Those are short-term hacks that keep us locked in the same cycle of depletion. Real energy, the kind that heals, restores, and expands, comes from coherence. And coherence starts in your heart.
If you’re exhausted, anxious, or feel like you’re always pushing against life, maybe it’s time to stop squeezing the brain like a lemon and start tuning into the intelligence sitting right in your chest.
Final thoughts
I don’t write this as theory. I write it as someone who has lived in burnout, lived in stress, lived in survival mode, and slowly rebuilt energy from the inside out. Heart intelligence isn’t just science on paper. It’s something you can feel in your body, something that changes how you show up in every conversation, every challenge, every dream you’re chasing. And this is only the beginning, I’ll be sharing more blogs on this topic soon, diving deeper into the shocking yet empowering science of the heart, so stay tuned.
If you’re ready to stop running on empty and actually learn how to expand your energy in a way that heals and creates, this is where the journey starts: with your heart.
And if you want guidance, I work with people one-on-one to help them apply these practices deeply to their lives. You can book a session with me directly on my homepage. And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for more insights like this, and follow me on Threads where I share the raw, real parts of this journey every day.
