What if we’re not broken, we’re just unplugged?
I’m going to advocate for something that feels out of character for me: plugging in, rather than unplugging.
The popularity of forest bathing, tech‑free retreats, and digital detoxes reflects a well‑established movement encouraging us to unplug from our screens and reconnect with nature, ourselves, and each other. This is good. I am for this.
But today I want to think about plugging in.
What if the underlying source of our cultural malaise — our widespread mental‑health crises, chronic illness, anxiety, burnout, and depression — is not that we’re too plugged in, but that we’re unplugged from the wrong things? What if we actually need to plug back in?
I’m not talking about reconnecting to our digital prosthetics. We already spend more than enough time — usually far too much — with our attention wired into phones, laptops, and game consoles.
I’m talking about plugging into the ultimate internet: the superhighway of information that underlies all life — energy, and more specifically bioelectricity, and even more specifically the human electrome.
Your body, writes James Oschman, depends on electricity. “In terms of vibrations, the human body can be compared to a symphony orchestra.” That orchestra is increasingly understood as the electrome, a term coined in 2016 by Dutch biologist Arnold de Loof to describe “the totality of all ionic currents of any living entity, from the cellular to the organismal level.”
Everything is made of energy in various forms and densities, perhaps even consciousness itself. We cannot be fully unplugged from bioelectricity or the electrome and still be alive. Bioelectricity is life force. “It is hard to overstate how wholly and utterly your every movement, perception, and thought are controlled by electrical signals,” science journalist Sally Adee writes in We Are Electric. I appreciate the accuracy of that statement, even as I cringe at its mechanistic framing. Are we really reducible to electrical signals?
If electrical signals are energy, and energy is consciousness (a juicy and still controversial topic we’ll unpack in a future post), then yes — we can be. And it’s not a reduction at all; it’s a return to what may be the ultimate truth: everything we are is an expression of consciousness. Neuroscientists, quantum physicists, and cellular biologists are beginning to connect important dots about the nature of life — and about energy as the language of consciousness.
We’ll dive deeper into this soon. For now, let’s focus on a smaller but still complex scale: the human body and its bioelectricity.
Scientists now posit that every single thing that happens within a living organism can be associated with measurable electrical activity. As Simon Winchester explains, “the electrome has no mass at all, nor any weight; it is simply the electricity that courses through your body and its 40 trillion cells.” When a cell loses its ability to conduct bioelectricity, disease — and eventually death — follows. Cancer, Adee notes, can be understood as cells losing their ability to conduct bioelectricity as healthy cells do. This is why a great deal of research is now devoted to emerging “electroceuticals.”
But working with the human energy system is nothing new; it may be as old as humanity itself. The globalization of Reiki is often an easy target for comic relief, but “healing hands” practices have existed across cultures for millennia. Reiki has been shown in multiple studies to reduce pain, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and increase parasympathetic activity — in other words, to regulate the nervous system. A calmer nervous system leads to improved health and wellbeing; a dysregulated one leads to worse outcomes and shorter life spans. In one study of 5,716 middle‑aged adults, those with the highest self‑regulation abilities were over 50 times more likely to be alive and without chronic disease 15 years later than those with the lowest scores.
Self‑regulation is, in essence, working with the nervous system — the superhighway of the human energy system — to restore healthy bioelectric flow.
Acupuncture is perhaps the most widely accepted form of working with the electrome in the U.S., backed by extensive medical research and thousands of years of practice. In acupuncture, health is understood as balance and open flow — qi, ki, life force — throughout the body. Illness arises from stagnation or imbalance. Western biology is beginning to understand this too: proper cellular and organ function depends on communication, and bioelectricity is the mechanism through which that communication occurs. Bioelectricity is the body’s first language — our energetic intelligence.
So it’s not a huge leap to wonder whether the root of our anxiety, depression, and chronic illness is actually a disconnection in our electrome; a short in our circuits. And of course, systemic factors make us more likely to blow a fuse: workaholism, disembodiment, mind/body separation, 24/7 overstimulation. In future posts, we’ll explore how we might individually and collectively repair these shorts and bring our energetic intelligence back online — and with it, our expanded consciousness, intuition, and capacity for joy.
What I’m advocating for here is a conscious plugging back in to our human energy systems, our electromes, and to the world around us. To tune into our innate energetic intelligence — because the energy that travels throughout our bodies and interacts with the world is intelligent — and to open our full capacity to run creative energy and life force through our powerful, highly intelligent bodies.
I want to turn on. I want you to turn on. Or more accurately: I want you to turn yourself on.
The more of us who remember how to consciously plug into the power of our energy systems, the more wellness, joy, peace, and ease we will experience. I know this because I’m doing it for myself. The more we plug back in and turn on, the more we will heal ourselves, each other, and the planet.
— Melissa Brough, PhD, RMT
May 2025
