These days, we’re all familiar with the concepts of renewable and non-renewable energy.  And the renewable kind is always better, right?  Actually, no.  When it comes to energy out there, renewable is good.  But when it comes to your human energy, renewable energy has actually been causing a lot of misery and difficulty.

In recent posts, I’ve talked about the laws of energy that govern how your human energy develops and how your brain uses that energy to generate each moment of your life.  Now, we’ll explore how your human energy renews itself according to the Law of Conservation of Energy.   It’s the third law that Quanta Change founder Mimi Herrmann found so vital in understanding the behavior of human energy: “Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed into renewable or non-renewable energy.”

While you’re awake, your sensory brain uses its stored energy – a combination of Learned Distress and natural well-being – to generate each moment.  Through her research, Mimi realized that the purpose of sleep is to recharge or renew the energy stored in your battery-like sense of self.  Physical and mental rejuvenation and repair happen in the two slower levels of sleep-time brainwave activity, and your sensory brain is recharging during the fastest level – REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when you are dreaming.

You recharge your phone or laptop battery with electricity.  Your sensory brain recharges itself with the feelings you experienced in the day you just lived.  The purpose of your dreams (whether you remember them or not) is to use how you felt during the day to recharge how you feel about being human.  Dreams are “pictures of feelings” that your brain generates automatically to do this recharging work.

Since your awake-time moments were generated, in part or even mostly, from Learned Distress, your sense of self is recharging each night with the sense that “there’s something wrong with me.” So, in this cycle, Learned Distress is renewable energy. Not only that, this renewal causes the intensity of Learned Distress to rise over time, so you feel more of the sense that something is wrong.  And, because your brain generates moments equal to the intensity at which the Learned Distress is stored, your negative moments feel more intense.

For example, let’s say that someone absorbed the sense that “there’s never enough for me” early in life.  As she grows up, this Learned Distress generates the condition of not having enough money.   At age 20, she might be bouncing checks.  By the age of 50, the intensity has risen to such a level that she’s in bankruptcy.

How you feel this rising intensity depends on your Sensory Quotient pattern. (You can find out your SQ pattern for free by completing this test.)  If your pattern is like the one that Mimi called the Defeatist, you feel worse and situations keep getting worse, despite everything you do to the contrary.  If your pattern is the Idealist, you may still feel that life can be good, but it gets harder and harder to make that happen.  Or, maybe you used to be able to make it all work, but lately, your efforts just don’t seem to produce the same results.  In each case, the intensity of Learned Distress has risen to such a level that you are feeling it or experiencing its power.

I know this isn’t terribly uplifting, but renewable energy is just half the story with this law.  Next time, I’ll talk about the huge breakthrough that the non-renewable part of the law gave Mimi, which allowed her to create the Quanta Change Process.