THE MEANING OF THE SECOND WIND

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 148, 25 June 1938, Page 27

THE MEANING OF THE SECOND WIND

"It is a common experience. We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the second wind; You are working at something—never mind at what task —and you begin to feel tired. You keep on and it makes you still more tired. Still you keep on, and then the 1 transformation comes. Maybe gradually, maybe suddenly, your fatigue is gone." Just as the athlete in running the five-mile race is glad to get his second wind, so Mr. Milton Wright considers the average man should do all he can to get this in making a success of his life. Writing in his book, "Managing Yourself," he says, after the statement I quoted above:— "You find yourself working more jsmoothly, more easily, more quickly, and more effectively than when you ! began to work. The task becomes a pleasure. You do not tire so quickly. It is a characteristic of this second level of energy that it is more abundant than the first superficial level of energy on which ypu started out. Just as my friend found that her first tired feeling came only a mile from home and her second not until four miles from home, so you will find that you may run on at least three times as long on this second level of energy as you did on the first. "When you do reach the end of your second wind, you may still keep on. There is yet a third level of energy i that is longer and more abundant ' still. There is even a fourth level.

Why, then, should you be so weak,as to give up at the first sign of feeling tired? It is quite: unnecessary. "You.need have no fear that pushing on past the first level of fatigue and into the second or third energy level is a dangerous thing to do. These deeper wells of energy* are not merely reservoirs to be used for emergencies only. To bore into them is not to approach exhaustion, to draw on resources which cannot be replaced. These energies are repaired, destroyed, and refreshed by precisely the same means as are the more superficial energies to whose sagging you were going to succumb at the first sign of fatigue. "As William James has put it: " 'It is evident that our organism has stored up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but that I may be called upon; deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosible material, discontinuous!/ arranged, but ready for use by anyone who probes so deep, and repairing themselves by rest as well as do the superficial strata. Most of us continue living unnecessarily near the surface.'" Mr. Milton Wright is of opinion that even in affairs of the mind it is possible to get that "second wind." "There is very little direct mental fatigue," he says. "Most of it is an illusion. What seems to be fatigue is, most of the time, some other emotion, sensation, or sentiment masquerading as a tired feeling."