Why is that so important? Because fatigue accumulates with astonishing rapidity. The United States Army has discovered by repeated tests that even young men-men toughened by years of Army training-can march better, and hold up longer, if they throw down their packs and rest ten minutes out of every hour. So the Army forces them to do just that. Your heart is just as smart as the U.S. Army. Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car. It exerts enough energy every twenty-four hours to shovel twenty tons of coal on to a platform three feet high. It does this incredible amount of work for fifty, seventy, or maybe ninety years. How can it stand it? Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, explains it. He says: “Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time. As a matter of fact, there is a definite rest period after each contraction. When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day.”
During World War II, Winston Churchill, in his late sixties and early seventies, was able to work sixteen hours a day, year after year, directing the war efforts of the British Empire. A phenomenal record. His secret? He worked in bed each morning until eleven o’clock, reading papers, dictating orders, making telephone calls, and holding important conferences. After lunch he went to bed once more and slept for an hour. In the evening he went to bed once more and slept for two hours before having dinner at eight. He didn’t cure fatigue. He didn’t have to cure it. He prevented it. Because he rested frequently, he was able to work on, fresh and fit, until long past midnight.
The original John D. Rockefeller made two extraordinary records. He accumulated the greatest fortune the world had ever seen up to that time and he also lived to be ninety-eight. How did he do it? The chief reason, of course, was because he had inherited a tendency to live long. Another reason was his habit of taking a half-hour nap in his office every noon. He would lie down on his office couch-and not even the President of the United States could get John D. on the phone while he was having his snooze!
In his excellent book. Why Be Tired, Daniel W. Josselyn observes: “Rest is not a matter of doing absolutely nothing. Rest is repair.” There is so much repair power in a short period of rest that even a five-minute nap will help to forestall fatigue! Connie Mack, the grand old man of baseball, told me that if he doesn’t take an afternoon nap before a game, he is all tuckered out at around the fifth inning. But if he does go to sleep, if for only five minutes, he can last throughout an entire double-header without feeling tired.
When I asked Eleanor Roosevelt how she was able to carry such an exhausting schedule during the twelve years she was in the White House, she said that before meeting a crowd or making a speech, she would often sit in a chair or davenport, close her eyes, and relax for twenty minutes.
I recently interviewed Gene Autry in his dressing-room at Madison Square Garden, where he was the star attraction at the world’s championship rodeo. I noticed an army cot in his dressing-room. “I lie down there every afternoon,” Gene Autry said, “and get an hour’s nap between performances. When I am making pictures in Hollywood,” he continued, “I often relax in a big easy chair and get two or three ten-minute naps a day. They buck me up tremendously.”
Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever he wanted to.
I interviewed Henry Ford shortly before his eightieth birthday. I was surprised to see how fresh and fine he looked. I asked him the secret. He said: “I never stand up when I can sit down; and I never sit down when I can lie down.”
Horace Mann, “the father of modern education”, did the same thing as he grew older. When he was president of Antioch College, he used to stretch out on a couch while interviewing students.
I persuaded a motion-picture director in Hollywood to try a similar technique. He confessed that it worked miracles. I refer to Jack Chertock, who is now one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s top directors. When he came to see me a few years ago, he was then head of the short-feature department of M-G-M. Worn out and exhausted, he had tried everything: tonics, vitamins, medicine. Nothing helped much. I suggested that he take a vacation every day. How? By stretching out in his office and relaxing while holding conferences with his staff writers.
When I saw him again, two years later, he said: “A miracle has happened. That is what my own physicians call it. I used to sit up in my chair, tense and taut, while discussing ideas for our short features. Now I stretch out on the office couch during these conferences. I feel better than I have felt in twenty years. Work two hours a day longer, yet I rarely get tired.”
How does all this apply to you? If you are a stenographer, you can’t take naps in the office as Edison did, and as Sam Goldwyn does; and if you are an accountant, you can’t stretch out on the couch while discussing a financial statement with the boss. But if you live in a small city and go home for lunch, you may be able to take a ten-minute nap after lunch. That is what General George C. Marshall used to do. He felt he was so busy directing the U.S. Army in wartime that he had to rest at noon. If you are over fifty and feel you are too rushed to do it, then buy immediately all the life insurance you can get. Funerals come high-and suddenly-these days; and the little woman may want to take your insurance money and marry a younger man!
If you can’t take a nap at noon, you can at least try to lie down for an hour before the evening meal. It is cheaper than a highball; and, over a long stretch, it is 5,467 times more effective. If you can sleep for an hour around five, six, or seven o’clock, you can add one hour a day to your waking life. Why? How? Because an hour’s nap before the evening meal plus six hours’ sleep at night-a total of seven hours-will do you more good than eight hours of unbroken sleep.
A physical worker can do more work if he takes more time out for rest. Frederick Taylor demonstrated that while working as a scientific management engineer with the Bethlehem Steel Company. He observed that labouring men were loading approximately 12 1/2 tons of pig-iron per man each day on freight cars and that they were exhausted at noon. He made a scientific study of all the fatigue factors involved, and declared that these men should be loading not 12 1/2 tons of pig-iron per day, but forty-seven tons per day! He figured that they ought to do almost four times as much as they were doing, and not be exhausted. But prove it!
Taylor selected a Mr. Schmidt who was required to work by the stop-watch. Schmidt was told by the man who stood over him with a watch: “Now pick up a ‘pig’ and walk. … Now sit down and rest. … Now walk. … Now rest.”
What happened? Schmidt carried forty-seven tons of pig-iron each day while the other men carried only 12 1/2 tons per man. And he practically never failed to work at this pace during the three years that Frederick Taylor was at Bethlehem. Schmidt was able to do this because he rested before he got tired. He worked approximately 26 minutes out of the hour and rested 34 minutes. He rested more than he worked-yet he did almost four times as much work as the others! Is this mere hearsay? No, you can read the record yourself in Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Let me repeat: do what the Army does-take frequent rests. Do what your heart does-rest before you get tired, and you will add one hour a day to your waking life.
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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 labour 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 labourer 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 per cent 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 revolutionise 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.