In the four weeks since the Power Trip paperback came out I’ve been traveling to different cities once or twice a week, helping burn tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel en route to speaking events. It’s fun but—like most of our frequent-flyer lifestyles-- exhausting. Even more exhausting is returning home between 24-hr trips and chasing around my two-year-old, rushing to catch up on deadlines, cooking, cleaning, playgroups, appointments, emails, tweets, etc.

Which is to say, I’ve been drinking lots of coffee.

Not just coffee-- power bars, power foods, EmergenC, wheatgrass, black tea, Diet Coke, and whatever other forms of legal non-prescription human jet fuel I can get my hands on. I’m averaging about 6 hours of sleep a night and trying (often in vain) to make time for meditation, running, even standing on my head to maximize production of adrenaline, seratonin, endorphins and whatever chemicals course through our brains and make us feel energized.

It’s a strange irony: Here I am trying to help Americans understand our national energy crisis while gorging on stimulants like machines devour fuel. Its made me wonder whether Americans are grappling with an internal energy crisis, as we struggle to overcome our industrial energy crisis. Here we are watching our power grid buckle under growing electricity demands—aren’t our bodies also overloaded by the increasing energy demands of our daily lives? As we develop sustainable energy plans for our industries, shouldn’t we also devise sustainable energy plans in our diets, our sleeping patterns, our exercise habits, and perhaps for some Americans our rituals of faith?

I’m coming to believe that in order to understand energy in the macrocosm – what powers America and the industrialized world -- we also need to understand energy in the microcosm -- what powers people, what makes us feel awake and alive.