An Equitable Exchange of Human Energy

To set the scene, it’s a regular mid-morning summer day. Time has been marching on and I can’t help but continue to dig deep and unpack that nagging something that's been there my entire life. A sense that something in the ether just doesn’t feel right around me. 

At this moment I decide to lean in. Leaning into these nagging senses, they start to pulse and almost scream inside me. 

As I sit there, an un-numbing starts to unfold. I keep a steady focus. At this point, the “feeling” and nerve energy start to move into different areas of my body. It jumps around my body like little gentle supernovae. Then it emerges again, first in my neck, as something both piercing and diffuse. Soon it starts to stretch down as ribbon deep into my lungs and guts. 

During these moments of surrender, information and non-verbal communication I've already received through my 5 senses has already reached me and has been sitting there held in waiting. 

As I digest these feelings I get more and more present in time, more available with what is entering me in the now. During the digestion my consciousness zooms in on these sensations. Time slows. I start to get messages and information from them. 

This information is rich and vivid. This information is felt. It is much more than the cognitive meaning of words we can look up in the dictionary. It is information that’s deeper and of the natural and physical world. It’s the information characteristic of the here and now that touches us as we move through the waking world. 

As the information from my body reaches my conscious awareness, as I digest my experiences and move emotions through me, my consciousness becomes expanded.

It is now in this expanded state that my nervous system becomes a little more regulated. All the sudden I wonder: can I hold this stance? Can I keep this weight lifted? Can I increase my capacity to stay in an expanded state?

Sigh.

Can I hold myself like this? Can I help to hold others this way around me? Can we co-regulate and spread this strength like an island of coherence? How far can we reach? How much strength do we have? 

There’s a human design flaw in extractive organizational psychological structures of human capital

Systems of human capital optimize for output, efficiency, compliance, scalability, and return. The human body optimizes for regulation, meaning, relational safety, rest, creativity, and repair. In extractive systems, those optimization functions do not align.

The extractive system itself is in conflict with the organisms it depends on.

Modern extractive systems of human-capital are structurally conflicted because they require the human body to override its own regulatory needs in order to produce value for the system.

Institutional incentives (productivity, growth, control) can conflict with biological truths (nervous system limits, cycles, rhythms, embodiment, meaning-making).

The body already has an interest: staying whole, regulated, alive, creative.

The extractive system asks it to behave otherwise.

This is invisible because extractive organizational psychological structures of human capital treat bodies as resources, not stakeholders.

They do this by externalizing burnout, illness, trauma, and alienation as “personal issues”. They can end up rewarding dissociation, overdrive, and self-extraction as “professionalism”. Compliance is framed as a virtue and resistance as a weakness. The conflict of interest between extractive organizational psychological structures and the human body is thus normalized.

Normative people live in these structures, inheriting the neurological behavioral masks of civilization through the process of their human development. Similar to how young children over time and with consistent guidance are, for example, able to develop neurological behavioral masks to be able to wait to use the restroom, they also develop neurological behavioral relationships with authority.

We as children grow up and go out into the world and we find a place that fits our relational patterns and where we can carry out these learned developmental behaviors. Perhaps this shows up in how we bond with our managers at work. In another example, perhaps it’s how we bond with ‘God’ as the ultimate authority. 

A quiet violence happens when the extractive system pays you to ignore your body, promotes you for overriding your limits in a destructive manner, and penalizes rest, grief, caregiving, curiosity, or slowness. From this perspective, the system is functionally saying: “Your body’s interests are misaligned with value creation.”

That is the core ethical breach we are facing in extractive systems today. 

Information as power governs organizational psychological structures of human capital. 

Centralized power can create a lot of waste and suffering. I see this first hand when million or billion dollar scale publicly funded NASA missions are cancelled after sometimes decades of investment when the governing committee at the top re-allocates resources and changes priorities. 

The impact on the people is extreme psychologically. People lower on the chain of command likely don’t have transparency into the landscape and evolution of the decision making hierarchy. We aren’t able to measure the risk against our own personal risk tolerance at our own discretion or make informed decisions when the only true constant is change. We work in the extractive organization while we are veiled from what's happening with the authority behind the scenes. We must remain hopeful or take actions on educated guesses while we wait for limited information to reach us, sometimes at a time where it’s too late.

Real time decision making transparency, when going up the chain of command, that is truly detailed in nature and made available throughout the hierarchy, is a conflict of interest for extractive systems. It loosen the grip of top-down control on the human capital that “turns the crank” on our economy.

Startups such as Glean that focus on applying generative AI searching and summarizing to an employee's documents, emails, slack messages and meeting recordings have the power to create more harmony on how information flows throughout an organization.

Right now, the success of products and companies like these hinge on the promise of strict security and privacy controls, only allowing employees access to information that they would have already had permissions for before generative AI made more information easier to consume faster. 

The extra bells and whistles of their Generative AI trained company content allows them to work more quickly and easily with their own limited company information. This is a truly valuable service for employee efficiency.

At the top of the hierarchy, the authority now has the ability to access more company information faster than ever before. Although their permissions and reach aren’t changed at the top, their ability to process and to get information about employees actions and interactions goes far beyond what was ever possible before. This is encouraging when generative organizational cultures support rising leaders, address workplace bullying and implement novelty that stimulates neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus. 

With the power of Generative AI language models, and with the right permissions, it wouldn’t take much for employees lower in the food chain to get access to more organizational information about what is going on at the top than ever before. With this transparency, employees would be able to use this information to influence their actions.

With these technological advancements, the current structure of how information is used as power is starting to loosen and we are in a moment where mutuality and reciprocity in how we work is a real possibility. We can do this when we rebuild incentive structures so that what is in the employees best interest at the nervous system level is aligned with the best interests of the organization. 

Hierarchical decision-making structures are not inherently extractive but they become so when they lose accountability to the human bodies and lives they depend on. Healthy hierarchies exist to hold complexity, coordinate action, and protect the long-term viability of the whole, not to concentrate power or override biological limits.

When authority is treated as temporary stewardship rather than permanent status, when those with more power have true capacity to carry more responsibility and transparency, and when lived experience is allowed to inform decision-making, hierarchy can serve life rather than consume it.

Extraction begins when systems reward self-override, suppress dissent, and externalize burnout as a personal failure. Integrity returns when power is bounded, consent is real, exit is possible, and leadership is measured not by output alone, but by whether the system and the people within it remain whole.

A hierarchy becomes healthy not only by how it exercises power, but by how it lets people leave. True supported exit means that participation is never sustained through fear, shame, or economic coercion, and that choosing to step out does not trigger punishment, reputational harm, or loss of dignity.

In non-extractive systems, exit is treated as a form of information. It’s evidence that needs, cycles, or directions have changed. It’s not betrayal or weakness. When people can leave with their relationships intact, their contributions honored, and pathways into future work supported, consent remains alive. Hierarchy stops being a trap and becomes a container: one you can enter, contribute to, and depart from without having to fracture yourself in the process.

Grown-ups that are trapped in parent-child hierarchical professional relationships that are extractive and not generative in nature can experience developmental stunting through nervous system oppression. Oppression is chronic nervous system dysregulation that manifests as various diseases. This is hard to combat when it is normative or demanded that we spend more of our waking life with our work colleagues, managers and subordinates than we spend with our partners, children, family and community members. If we spend most of our waking life within an extractive system, we live in a state of consciousness where fear is used as a form of control.

Frameworks for psychological trauma healing have emerged within institutions and also outside of institutions within spiritual communities. These frameworks provide trauma healing tools that people are using to develop themselves out of these trapped states of consciousness - states like anxiety and depression. These people are gaining self sovereignty. I believe that a tipping point is on the horizon. 

79.3 million people experience or witness workplace bullying in the U.S., and that’s just the people who are aware they are being bullied. The total number of people facing workplace bullying is likely much higher. These organizational systems require these behaviors when fully formed grown up bodies are arguably forced to participate in these developmentally stunting systems of control. 

Many researchers and thought leaders argue that verbal, emotional, and social forms of bullying such as humiliation, chronic criticism, ostracism, or gaslighting are not “just psychological.”

They trigger the same biological stress pathways as physical violence.

People who are not permitted to speak and express their ideas and thoughts at work due to social hierarchies can become oppressed, numb, fearful and angry - collapsed. And they can stay that way long after (repression).  This is moral trauma.

In these collapsed states, bodies can’t always access their own memories and tacit knowledge to be creative with. 

In this moment in history we have the chance to liberate human capital trapped and dormant in the minds and bodies of people that may be stuck doing work that they wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

At the same time, we can unlock the stress cycle and complete social emotional cycles. We can improve our physiological health while advancing civilization.

A nervous system lens on diversity, health, and collective flourishing

Most systems that govern modern life such as markets, workplaces, and institutions are built on the idea of exchange. This shows up as money for labor, time for output, and attention for influence.

Yet beneath every transaction lies a quieter, more fundamental exchange: human energy moving between nervous systems.

This exchange is rarely named, even more rarely designed for equity. And when it goes unacknowledged, it becomes one of the primary sources of burnout, exclusion, illness, and social fracture.

Human energy is not abstract, it is physiological

Every interaction is mediated through the body. Before we think, decide, or speak, our nervous system is already asking:

• Am I safe here?

• Am I seen?

• Am I allowed to exist as I am?

These questions shape how much energy we can offer, receive, or metabolize in any environment. When systems demand output without attending to regulation, they create extractive exchanges. These are exchanges that pull more energy from certain bodies than they return.

Over time, this imbalance shows up as:

• chronic stress and inflammation

• anxiety, depression, or shutdown

• interpersonal conflict and mis-attunement

• cultural silencing and systemic inequity

An inequitable exchange of human energy is not just a moral issue. It is a public health issue.

Felt sense: where consciousness meets the body

A felt sense, or interoception, is the pre-verbal embodied knowing of what is happening inside us. It is the interface between consciousness and physiology. It is also how meaning arrives before language.

Equitable systems honor this felt sense. Extractive systems override it.

When felt sense is ignored:

• people disconnect from bodily cues

• intuition dulls

• boundaries erode

• health deteriorates

When felt sense is welcomed:

• nervous systems co-regulate

• trust becomes possible

• creativity and insight increase

• bodies repair and restore

This is not soft science. It is how humans have coordinated safely for millennia.

Equity is not sameness, it is nervous system justice

An equitable exchange of human energy does not mean everyone gives the same amount, the same way, at the same pace. It means:

• Energy given is met with energy returned through rest, recognition, choice, or care

• Consent exists at the level of the body

• Power is aware of its physiological impact on others

In equitable systems, people leave interactions with more coherence, not less. Their bodies feel clearer, steadier, more alive.

Health emerges from exchange between regulated nervous systems

Bodily health is not only about diet, exercise, or sleep. It is deeply shaped by

• how often we feel safe while contributing

• whether our signals are received accurately

• how much self-suppression is required to belong

Chronic inequitable exchange keeps the body in survival mode. Equitable exchange allows the body to return to repair.

Designing for a future that can be felt

If we want communities, organizations, and cultures that can sustain flourishing human life and not just extract from it, we must design for nervous systems.

That begins with a simple shift in question:

How much energy does this system require from different bodies and how does it give energy back?

When we ask that honestly, new possibilities emerge:

• leadership that stabilizes rather than dominates

• economies that circulate vitality, not exhaustion

Equitable exchange is not a theory. It is a felt experience and when we get it right, our bodies know.