فصل 24

Part Seven - Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue And Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High

Chapter 24 - What Makes You Tired and What You Can Do About It

Here is an astounding and significant fact: Mental work alone can’t make you tired. Sounds absurd. But a few years ago, scientists tried to find out how long the human brain could labor without reaching “a diminished capacity for work”, the scientific definition of fatigue. To the amazement of these scientists, they discovered that blood passing through the brain, when it is active, shows no fatigue at all! If you took blood from the veins of a day laborer while he was working, you would find it full of “fatigue toxins” and fatigue products. But if you took a drop of blood from the brain of an Albert Einstein, it would show no fatigue toxins whatever at the end of the day.

So far as the brain is concerned, it can work “as well and as swiftly at the end of eight or even twelve hours of effort as at the beginning”. The brain is utterly tireless. So what makes you tired?

Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes. One of England’s most distinguished psychiatrists, J.A. Hadfield, says in his book The Psychology of Power: “the greater part of the fatigue from which we suffer is of mental origin; in fact exhaustion of purely physical origin is rare.”

One of America’s most distinguished psychiatrists, Dr. A.A. Brill, goes even further. He declares: “One hundred percent of the fatigue of the sedentary worker in good health is due to psychological factors, by which we mean emotional factors.”

What kinds of emotional factors tire the sedentary (or sitting) worker? Joy? Contentment? No! Never! Boredom, resentment, a feeling of not being appreciated, a feeling of futility, hurry, anxiety, worry, those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous headache. Yes, we get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company pointed that out in a leaflet on fatigue: “Hard work by itself,” says this great life, insurance company, “seldom causes fatigue which cannot be cured by a good sleep or rest. Worry, tenseness, and emotional upsets are three of the biggest causes of fatigue. Often they are to blame when physical or mental work seems to be the cause. Remember that a tense muscle is a working muscle. Ease up! Save energy for important duties.”

Stop now, right where you are, and give yourself a check, up. As you read these lines, are you scowling at the book? Do you feel a strain between the eyes? Are you sitting relaxed in your chair? Or are you hunching up your shoulders? Are the muscles of your face tense? Unless your entire body is as limp and relaxed as an old rag doll, you are at this very moment producing nervous tensions and muscular tensions. You are producing nervous tensions and nervous fatigue!

Why do we produce these unnecessary tensions in doing mental work? Josselyn says: “I find that the chief obstacle is the almost universal belief that hard work requires a feeling of effort, else it is not well done.” So we scowl when we concentrate. We hunch up our shoulders. We call on our muscles to make the motion of effort, which in no way assists our brain in its work.

Here is an astonishing and tragic truth: millions of people who wouldn’t dream of wasting dollars go right on wasting and squandering their energy with the recklessness of seven drunken sailors in Singapore.

What is the answer to this nervous fatigue? Relax! Relax! Relax! Learn to relax while you are doing your work!

Easy? No. You will probably have to reverse the habits of a lifetime. But it is worth the effort, for it may revolutionize your life! William James said, in his essay “The Gospel of Relaxation”: “The American over, tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are bad habits, nothing more or less.” Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. And bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.

How do you relax? Do you start with your mind, or do you start with your nerves? You don’t start with either. You always begin to relax with your muscles!

Let’s give it a try. To show how it is done, suppose we start with your eyes. Read this paragraph through, and when you’ve reached the end, lean back, close your eyes, and say to your eyes silently: “Let go. Let go. Stop straining, stop frowning. Let go. Let go.” Repeat that over and over very slowly for a minute.

Didn’t you notice that after a few seconds the muscles of the eyes began to obey? Didn’t you feel as though some hand had wiped away the tension? Well, incredible as it seems, you have sampled in that one minute the whole key and secret to the art of relaxing. You can do the same thing with the jaw, with the muscles of the face, with the neck, with the shoulders, the whole of the body. But the most important organ of all is the eye. Dr. Edmund Jacobson of the University of Chicago has gone so far as to say that if you can completely relax the muscles of the eyes, you can forget all your troubles! The reason the eyes are so important in relieving nervous tension is that they burn up one, fourth of all the nervous energies consumed by the body. That is also why so many people with perfectly sound vision suffer from “eyestrain”. They are tensing the eyes.

Vicki Baum, the famous novelist, says that when she was a child, she met an old man who taught her one of the most important lessons she ever learned. She had fallen down and cut her knees and hurt her wrist. The old man picked her up; he had once been a circus clown; and, as he brushed her off, he said: “The reason you injured yourself was because you don’t know how to relax. You have to pretend you are as limp as a sock, as an old crumpled sock. Come, I’ll show you how to do it.”

That old man taught Vicki Baum and the other children how to fall, how to do flip, flops, and how to turn somersaults. And always he insisted: “Think of yourself as an old crumpled sock. Then you’ve got to relax!”

You can relax in odd moments, almost anywhere you are. Only don’t make an effort to relax. Relaxation is the absence of all tension and effort. Think ease and relaxation. Begin by thinking relaxation of the muscles of your eyes and your face, saying over and over: “Let go…let go…let go and relax.” Feel the energy flowing out of your facial muscles to the centre of your body. Think of yourself as free from tension as a baby.

That is what Galli, Curci, the great soprano, used to do. Helen Jepson told me that she used to see Galli, Curci before a performance, sitting in a chair with all her muscles relaxed and her lower jaw so limp it actually sagged. An excellent practice, it kept her from becoming too nervous before her stage entrance; it prevented fatigue. Here are five suggestions that will help you learn to relax:

1. Read one of the best books ever written on this subject: Release from Nervous Tension by Dr. David Harold Fink.
2. Relax in odd moments. Let your body go limp like an old sock. I keep an old, maroon, colored sock on my desk as I work, keep it there as a reminder of how limp I ought to be. If you haven’t got a sock, a cat will do. Did you ever pick up a kitten sleeping in the sunshine? If so, both ends sagged like a wet newspaper. Even the yogis in India say that if you want to master the art of relaxation, study the cat. I never saw a tired cat, a cat with a nervous breakdown, or a cat suffering from insomnia, worry, or stomach ulcers. You will probably avoid these disasters if you learn to relax as the cat does.
3. Work, as much as possible, in a comfortable position. Remember that tensions in the body produce aching shoulders and nervous fatigue.

Check yourself four or five times a day, and say to yourself: “Am I making my work harder than it actually is? Am I using muscles that have nothing to do with the work I am doing?” This will help you form the habit of relaxing, and as Dr. David Harold Fink says: “Among those who know psychology best, it is habits two to one.”

Test yourself again at the end of the day, by asking yourself: “Just how tired am I? If I am tired, it is not because of the mental work I have done but because of the way I have done it.” “I measure my accomplishments,” says Daniel W. Josselyn, “not by how tired I am at the end of the day, but how tired I am not.” He says: “When I feel particularly tired at the end of the day, or when irritability proves that my nerves are tired, I know beyond question that it has been an inefficient day both as to quantity and quality.” If every business man would learn that same lesson, the death rate from “hypertension” diseases would drop overnight. And we would stop filling up our sanatoriums and asylums with men who have been broken by fatigue and worry.