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.