In September 2025, I was on the TEDx Braga stage and, for the first time out loud, asked a room with more than 100 people this question:
How much does it cost you to be alive?
How much does it cost to be here, present, attentive, functional?
I wasn’t referring to money. I was referring to energy.
The equation nobody taught us in school
Over more than 25 years working with people, I realized there are three elements that determine this energy cost — and they repeat in all of us, without exception.
The first is gravity. The way we stand, how we coordinate our body in space, how we respond to the constant weight pulling us down. It’s not just a matter of posture. It’s a metaphor for what life asks of us: to keep ourselves upright when everything challenges us.
The second is breathing. We breathe about 20,000 times a day. That’s 20,000 opportunities to tell the nervous system that we are safe — or to confirm that we are on alert. The difference often lies in choosing to breathe through the nose or the mouth.
The third is nutrition. But I learned this is largely a byproduct of the other two. When we’re stressed, the body demands quick energy — sugar, fat, anything that gets us out of there fast. When we’re regulated, choices change on their own.
Gravity, breathing, nutrition. How much it costs us to manage these three elements is the formula of our sustainability.
The question that changes everything
This is the frequent question: “How much will it cost me to take care of myself?”
The gym, classes, time, energy — it all seems like another cost on a sometimes already too long list.
But the question I consider most significant today is another:
How much does it cost me not to take care of myself?
The cost of being in a meeting without focus after a bad night’s sleep.
The cost of an argument that didn’t go as expected because stress escalated at the first setback.
The cost of not being able to be with your children because your knees hurt and fatigue weighs you down — after a day of misaligned posture, mouth breathing, and a lunch that was anything but what your body needed to truly nourish itself.
That cost doesn’t appear on any bill. But it is paid every day.
Mário
At the talk, I finished with the story of a 12th grade student. I’ll call him Mário.
Mário wanted to be a doctor. In 11th grade, he had some injuries, then came the emotional issues resulting from the injury — and when exam time came, he knew the material, but stress blocked what he had to offer.
This doesn’t happen only with Mário — it is, from what I’ve realized over the years, a true pandemic.
Many students know the material, but then cannot demonstrate that knowledge at key moments like exams.
We worked for two months. Only on breathing. An audio to sleep better, a simple rule: always breathe through the nose, wherever you were.
On exam day, there was a difficult moment. And Mário remembered to breathe through his nose.
Weeks later, the exam was graded and Mário was accepted into medical school and realized his dream.
Written like this, it even sounds easy. But it demanded Mário’s dedication.
Like an athlete training for the Olympic Games, so the result is as close as possible to his real potential.
And that made him achieve something extraordinary — which was once in the drawer of dreams — at the same time very simple: regulating his breathing to the point that, in moments of stress, he knew how to return to it to regulate himself.
You realized that in moments of stress, it was in your hands to reverse the situation.
That’s it. It’s always that.
We may not be able to change situations, but we can choose what to do with them.
What Remained from the Stage
Being at TEDx was a strange and special experience.
Strange because speaking to many people about what is taught in silence — breathing, the body, presence — requires a translation that is not always easy.
Special because at the end of the talk I invited the room to do a coherent breath together. And a different silence happened. The kind of silence I recognize from classes that leads, with time and consistency, to transformation.
If you are curious to see what happened on that stage, here is the link:
Watch the TEDx Talk — From Urgency to Resilience
Best Practices
Lourenço de Azevedo