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."