Chapter 23
Why am I writing a chapter on preventing fatigue in a book on preventing worry? That is simple: because fatigue often produces worry, or, at least, it makes you susceptible to worry. Any medical student will tell you that fatigue lowers physical resistance to the common cold and hundreds of other diseases and any psychiatrist will tell you that fatigue also lowers your resistance to the emotions of fear and worry. So preventing fatigue tends to prevent worry.
Did I say “tends to prevent worry”? That is putting it mildly. Dr. Edmund Jacobson goes much further.
Dr. Jacob Son has written two books on relaxation: Progressive Relaxation and You Must Relax’, and as director of the University of Chicago Laboratory for Clinical Physiology, he has spent years conducting investigations in using relaxation as a method in medical practice. He declares that any nervous or emotional state “fails to exist in the presence of complete relaxation”. That is another way of saying: You cannot continue to worry if you relax.
So, to prevent fatigue and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.
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 12½ 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 12½ 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 12½ 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.
