Every tradition I read had a word for what this habit spends. None of them agreed on the physiology. All of them agreed on the direction. Told as tradition, not as biology.
Basis
Draws on tradition
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This page is marked tradition on purpose. What follows is what several old vocabularies say about restraint and vitality, from four parts of the world that never met. I am not claiming their physiology. I am telling you the stories, because the stories are useful, and because every one of them describes something I recognised from the inside.
Four traditions, four vocabularies, one direction: restraint keeps something, and indulgence spends it.
My own view is that they were describing attention and self-command in the only vocabulary they had. The modern evidence, which the research-tier pages cite, is about attention: what cheap constant reward does to it, and what earned reward does instead. Nobody has measured a fluid. Nobody needs to. You do not have to believe in ojas to notice that the weeks you kept the reserve, you could read, and work, and look people in the eye, and the weeks you spent it, you could not.
Use whichever picture holds you. A reserve. Two horses. A bird on the shoulder. The good over the pleasant. The picture's job is not to be true in a laboratory. Its job is to be true at one in the morning.