FATIGUE
Fatigue is of many sorts, some of which are a much graver obstacle to
happiness than others. Purely physical fatigue, provided it is not
excessive, tends if anything to be a cause of happiness; it leads to
sound sleep and a good appetite, and gives zest to the pleasures that
are possible on holidays. But when it is excessive it becomes a very
grave evil. Peasant women in all but the most advanced communities are
old at thirty, worn out with excessive toil. Children in the early days
of industrialism were stunted in their growth and frequently killed
by overwork in early years. The same thing still happens in China and
Japan, where industrialism is new; to some extent also in the Southern
States of America. Physical labour carried beyond a certain point is
atrocious torture, and it has very frequently been carried so far as to
make life all but unbearable. In the most advanced parts of the modern
world, however, physical fatigue has been much minimized through the
improvement of industrial conditions. The kind of fatigue that is most
serious in the present day in advanced communities is nervous fatigue.
This kind, oddly enough, is most pronounced among the well-to-do, and
tends to be much less among wage-earners than it is among business men
and brain-workers.
To escape from nervous fatigue in modern life is a very difficult
thing. In the first place, all through working hours, and still more in
the time spent between work and home, the urban worker is exposed to
noise, most of which, it is true, he learns not to hear consciously,
but which none the less wears him out, all the more owing to the
subconscious effort involved in not hearing it. Another thing which
causes fatigue without our being aware of it is the constant presence
of strangers. The natural instinct of man, as of other animals, is to
investigate every stranger of his species, with a view to deciding
whether to behave to him in a friendly or hostile manner. This instinct
has to be inhibited by those who travel in the underground in the rush
hour, and the result of inhibiting it is that they feel a general
diffused rage against all the strangers with whom they are brought
into this involuntary contact. Then there is the hurry to catch the
morning train, with the resulting dyspepsia. Consequently, by the time
the office is reached and the day’s work begins, the black-coated
worker already has frayed nerves and a tendency to view the human race
as a nuisance. His employer, arriving in the same mood, does nothing
to dissipate it in the employee. Fear of the sack compels respectful
behaviour, but this unnatural conduct only adds to the nervous strain.
If once a week employees were allowed to pull the employer’s nose
and otherwise indicate what they thought of him, the nervous tension
for them would be relieved, but for the employer, who also has his
troubles, this would not mend matters. What the fear of dismissal is
to the employee, the fear of bankruptcy is to the employer. Some,
it is true, are big enough to be above this fear, but to reach a
great position of this kind they have generally had to pass through
years of strenuous struggle, during which they had to be actively
aware of events in all parts of the world and constantly foiling the
machinations of their competitors. The result of all this is that when
sound success comes a man is already a nervous wreck, so accustomed to
anxiety that he cannot shake off the habit of it when the need for it
is past. There are, it is true, rich men’s sons, but they generally
succeed in manufacturing for themselves anxieties as similar as
possible to those that they would have suffered if they had not been
born rich. By betting and gambling, they incur the displeasure of their
fathers; by cutting short their sleep for the sake of their amusements,
they debilitate their physique; and by the time they settle down, they
have become as incapable of happiness as their fathers were before
them. Voluntarily or involuntarily, of choice or of necessity, most
moderns lead a nerve-racking life, and are continually too tired to be
capable of enjoyment without the help of alcohol.
Leaving on one side those rich men who are merely fools, let us
consider the commoner case of those whose fatigue is associated with
strenuous work for a living. To a great extent fatigue in such cases
is due to worry, and worry could be prevented by a better philosophy
of life and a little more mental discipline. Most men and women are
very deficient in control over their thoughts. I mean by this that they
cannot cease to think about worrying topics at times when no action
can be taken in regard to them. Men take their business worries to bed
with them, and in the hours of the night, when they should be gaining
fresh strength to cope with to-morrow’s troubles, they are going over
and over again in their minds problems about which at the moment
they can do nothing, thinking about them, not in a way to produce a
sound line of conduct on the morrow, but in that half-insane way that
characterizes the troubled meditations of insomnia. Something of the
midnight madness still clings about them in the morning, clouding their
judgment, spoiling their temper, and making every obstacle infuriating.
The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose
in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is
night, about nothing at all. I do not mean to suggest that at a great
crisis, for example, when ruin is imminent, or when a man has reason
to suspect that his wife is deceiving him, it is possible, except to a
few exceptionally disciplined minds, to shut out the trouble at moments
when nothing can be done about it. But it is quite possible to shut out
the ordinary troubles of ordinary days, except while they have to be
dealt with. It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can
be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about
a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all
times. When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon
as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and
make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless
some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as
indecision, and nothing is so futile.
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance
of the matter which is causing the anxiety. I have done in my time
a considerable amount of public speaking; at first every audience
terrified me, and nervousness made me speak very badly; I dreaded the
ordeal so much that I always hoped I might break my leg before I had to
make a speech, and when it was over I was exhausted from the nervous
strain. Gradually I taught myself to feel that it did not matter
whether I spoke well or ill, the universe would remain much the same
in either case. I found that the less I cared whether I spoke well
or badly, the less badly I spoke, and gradually the nervous strain
diminished almost to vanishing point. A great deal of nervous fatigue
can be dealt with in this way. Our doings are not so important as we
naturally suppose; our successes and failures do not after all matter
very much. Even great sorrows can be survived; troubles which seem as
if they must put an end to happiness for life fade with the lapse of
time until it becomes almost impossible to remember their poignancy.
But over and above these self-centred considerations is the fact that
one’s ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can centre
his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a
certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to
the pure egoist.
What might be called hygiene of the nerves has been much too little
studied. Industrial psychology, it is true, has made elaborate
investigations into fatigue, and has proved by careful statistics
that if you go on doing something for a sufficiently long time you
will ultimately get rather tired--a result which might have been
guessed without so much parade of science. The study of fatigue by
psychologists is mainly concerned with muscular fatigue, although there
are also a certain number of studies of fatigue in school children.
None of these, however, touch upon the important problem. The important
kind of fatigue is always emotional in modern life; purely intellectual
fatigue, like purely muscular fatigue, produces its own remedy in
sleep. Any person who has a great deal of intellectual work devoid of
emotion to do--say, for example, elaborate computations--will sleep off
at the end of each day the fatigue that that day has brought. The harm
that is attributed to overwork is hardly ever due to that cause, but to
some kind of worry or anxiety. The trouble with emotional fatigue is
that it interferes with rest. The more tired a man becomes, the more
impossible he finds it to stop. One of the symptoms of approaching
nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important,
and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I
were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who
considered his work important. The nervous break-down which appears to
be produced by the work is, in fact, in every case that I have ever
known of personally, produced by some emotional trouble from which the
patient attempts to escape by means of his work. He is loath to give
up his work because, if he does so, he will no longer have anything
to distract him from the thoughts of his misfortune, whatever it may
be. Of course, the trouble may be fear of bankruptcy, and in that case
his work is directly connected with his worry, but even then worry is
likely to lead him to work so long that his judgment becomes clouded
and bankruptcy comes sooner than if he worked less. In every case it is
the emotional trouble, not the work, that causes the breakdown.
The psychology of worry is by no means simple. I have spoken already of
mental discipline, namely the habit of thinking of things at the right
time. This has its importance, first because it makes it possible to
get through the day’s work with less expenditure of thought, secondly
because it affords a cure for insomnia, and thirdly because it
promotes efficiency and wisdom in decisions. But methods of this kind
do not touch the subconscious or the unconscious, and when a trouble is
grave no method is of much avail unless it penetrates below the level
of consciousness. There has been a great deal of study by psychologists
of the operation of the unconscious upon the conscious, but much less
of the operation of the conscious upon the unconscious. Yet the latter
is of vast importance in the subject of mental hygiene, and must be
understood if rational convictions are ever to operate in the realm of
the unconscious. This applies in particular in the matter of worry. It
is easy enough to tell oneself that such and such a misfortune would
not be so very terrible if it happened, but so long as this remains
merely a conscious conviction it will not operate in the watches of the
night, or prevent the occurrence of nightmares. My own belief is that a
conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient
amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious
consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which
have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying
deliberately, and in this way the unconscious can be led to do a lot of
useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon
some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with
very great intensity--the greatest intensity of which I am capable--for
a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to
speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I
return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.
Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening
months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the
solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months
were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits. A process
in many ways analogous can be adopted with regard to anxieties. When
some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is
the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible
misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that
after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons
always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has
any cosmic importance. When you have looked for some time steadily at
the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction,
“Well, after all, that would not matter so very much”, you will find
that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent. It may be
necessary to repeat the process a few times, but in the end, if you
have shirked nothing in facing the worst possible issue, you will find
that your worry disappears altogether, and is replaced by a kind of
exhilaration.
This is part of a more general technique for the avoidance of fear.
Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man
who has learnt not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life
enormously diminished. Now fear, in its most harmful form, arises where
there is some danger which we are unwilling to face. At odd moments
horrible thoughts dart into our minds; what they are depends upon
the person, but almost everybody has some kind of lurking fear. With
one man it is cancer, with another financial ruin, with a third the
discovery of some disgraceful secret, a fourth is tormented by jealous
suspicions, a fifth is haunted at night by the thought that perhaps the
tales of hell-fire told him when he was young may be true. Probably all
these people employ the wrong technique for dealing with their fear;
whenever it comes into their mind, they try to think of something else;
they distract their thoughts with amusement or work, or what not. Now
every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at. The effort of
turning away one’s thoughts is a tribute to the horribleness of the
spectre from which one is averting one’s gaze; the proper course with
every kind of fear is to think about it rationally and calmly, but with
great concentration, until it has become completely familiar. In the
end familiarity will blunt its terrors; the whole subject will become
boring, and our thoughts will turn away from it, not, as formerly, by
an effort of will, but through mere lack of interest in the topic. When
you find yourself inclined to brood on anything, no matter what, the
best plan always is to think about it even more than you naturally
would, until at last its morbid fascination is worn off.
One of the matters in which modern morality is most defective is this
question of fear. It is true that physical courage, especially in
war, is expected of men, but other forms of courage are not expected
of them, and no form of courage is expected of women. A woman who is
courageous has to conceal the fact if she wishes men to like her.
The man who is courageous in any matter except physical danger is
also thought ill of. Indifference to public opinion, for example, is
regarded as a challenge, and the public does what it can to punish
the man who dares to flout its authority. All this is quite opposite
to what it should be. Every form of courage, whether in men or women,
should be admired as much as physical courage is admired in a soldier.
The commonness of physical courage among young men is a proof that
courage can be produced in response to a public opinion that demands
it. Given more courage there would be less worry, and therefore less
fatigue; for a very large proportion of the nervous fatigues from
which men and women suffer at present are due to fears, conscious or
unconscious.
A very frequent source of fatigue is love of excitement. If a man could
spend his leisure in sleep, he would keep fit, but his working hours
are dreary, and he feels the need of pleasure during his hours of
freedom. The trouble is that the pleasures which are easiest to obtain
and most superficially attractive are mostly of a sort to wear out the
nerves. Desire for excitement, when it goes beyond a point, is a sign
either of a twisted disposition or of some instinctive dissatisfaction.
In the early days of a happy marriage most men feel no need of
excitement, but in the modern world marriage often has to be postponed
for such a long time that when at last it becomes financially possible
excitement has become a habit which can only be kept at bay for a short
time. If public opinion allowed men to marry at twenty-one without
incurring the financial burdens at present involved in matrimony, many
men would never get into the way of demanding pleasures as fatiguing
as their work. To suggest that this should be made possible is,
however, immoral, as may be seen from the fate of Judge Lindsey, who
has suffered obloquy, in spite of a long and honourable career, for the
sole crime of wishing to save young people from the misfortunes that
they incur as a result of their elders’ bigotry. I shall not, however,
pursue this topic any further at present, since it comes under the
heading of Envy, with which we shall be concerned in a later chapter.
For the private individual, who cannot alter the laws and institutions
under which he lives, it is difficult to cope with the situation that
oppressive moralists created and perpetuate. It is, however, worth
while to realize that exciting pleasures are not a road to happiness,
although so long as more satisfying joys remain unattainable a man
may find it hardly possible to endure life except by the help of
excitement. In such a situation the only thing that a prudent man
can do is to ration himself, and not to allow himself such an amount
of fatiguing pleasure as will undermine his health or interfere with
his work. The radical cure for the troubles of the young lies in a
change of public morals. In the meantime a young man does well to
reflect that he will ultimately be in a position to marry, and that he
will be unwise if he lives in such a way as to make a happy marriage
impossible, which may easily happen through frayed nerves and an
acquired incapacity for the gentler pleasures.
One of the worst features of nervous fatigue is that it acts as a
sort of screen between a man and the outside world. Impressions reach
him, as it were, muffled and muted; he no longer notices people
except to be irritated by small tricks or mannerisms; he derives no
pleasure from his meals or from the sunshine, but tends to become
tensely concentrated upon a few objects and indifferent to all the
rest. This state of affairs makes it impossible to rest, so that
fatigue continually increases until it reaches a point where medical
treatment is required. All this is at bottom a penalty for having lost
that contact with Earth of which we spoke in the preceding chapter.
But how such contact is to be preserved in our great modern urban
agglomerations of population, it is by no means easy to see. However,
here again we find ourselves upon the fringe of large social questions
with which in this volume it is not my intention to deal.