HEALTH COLUMN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 76

HEALTH COLUMN.

THE UNWISDOM OF WORRY.

A WIDELY PREVALENT MODERN DISEASE—ITS CAUSES AND ITS REMEDIES. "

By Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D., author of "Studies in Human and Comparative Pathology," etc. It is a matter of official record that care kiLled a cat. And if the habit of excessive introspective reflection could work this dire and fatal havoo upon a feline's elastic and easy-going temperament and ninefold lease of life, what could it not do to a mere one-lived "human"? As Oscar Wilde cynically remarked: "Nothing survives being thought of too much"—not even, alas, the thinker! When we begin to carry our troubles to bed with _us at night, and think about them instead of going to sleep, then we want to look out for squalls. We have orossed the deadline between wholesome and necessary "taking thought for the morrow" and the worry that kills. A certain amount of thought is healthful, exhilarating, and the very secret of success; but there is also a form of mental exercise which we dignify by the name of thinking which simply goes round and round in a senseless circle, like a squirrel in a cage, or a herd of Texas long-horns "milling" in a storm-panic, which gets nowhere and simply grinds thei nerves of the thinker to rags and ribbons. It does no good t<- amy one, neither the thinker nor the thought of; yet we don't seem to be able to stop it. In fact, we often • proud of our achievements in this sort of self-punish-ment. This is another danger-signal. Whenever we reach a point where we can't let go, where a particular subject, like Banquo's ghost, "will not down,'' or where we just can't stop thinking about things, then we have lost what the physiologists call our power of inhibition. We may be sure that we are beginning to do our work to bad advantage, driving our intelligence with the maximum of friction and the minimum of speed, and that a "hot box" or breakdown of some sort is looming up ahead of us. So long as we are masters of our work, we do it well; when it masters us, we do it badly—and it's pretty sure to do us badly sooner or later! But there is a reason for everything — even for such an unreasonable thing as worry. "As the bird by wandering and the swallow by flying, so the curse, causeless, shall not come." Pecple do not worry out of sheer perversity or "pure oussednass." There is a cause somewhere for even this most irrational and wasteful of mental habits. Our dispositions, perverse and deceitful above all things as we have been taught to regard them, are a good deal like horses. They will not jib. or balk, or shy, or run away unless they have been ill treated, yt frightened, or overworked, or are diseased, though, if they have once started the habit, they may keep it up witlhout adequate cause. If we "humans" would treat our bodies as well and as considerately as a farmer does his horses, with regular hours for meals, with which no stress of work is allowed to interfere; regular sleep, regular grooming, , and plenty of all three, we should hear little of worry and sleeplessness and neurasthenia, and get just as 'much real work done. A few unfortunates tb<=.re are, both men and hors?s, who are born with "s'hipwrecky" nervous systems, and these furnish the worst illustration's of causeless worry, of persistent gioomv forebodings, or, with a slightly deeper decree of defect, of shiftlessness, perversity, and even crime. Though I would whisper it with bated breath, in New England, worry and overscientiousnp's at one end of the scale, and idleness and skifbiessness at the other, are usually symptoms of disease or of congenial dic.fect. They should be treated with sympathy and medicine, both of mind and of body* instead of scolding and reprobation, let alone punishment. .• Wori-y. in fact, is cftener a symptom of trouble than a cause. A iperfeotly healthy human animal, well fed, well rested, and worked within his strength, will not worry. It is only the disordered liver that "predicts damnation." A perfectly healthy mam does not know he has such a _ thing as digestion. A dyspeptio does not know that he l?*<s anything ©tee.

-The Normal Life is Happy.—

Life, as a whole, is composed of at least nine parts of happiness and sunshine to one of suffering and gloom. The healthy mind sees it in its normal proportions. When the 10 per cent, of discomfort begins to bulk larger in our consciousness than toe 90 per cent, of comfort, it is a sign, of disease, as well as a fruitful cause of more disease.

Don’t scold yourself for worrying unnecessarily, or for wanting to cross 'bridges before you come to them, but look' sharply about to fund where you are ill-treating that faithful, devoted slave of yours, your body. You will usually find that you have given him good ground for revolt and for causing your imagination to play jaundiced tricks with you, by overwork, by underfeeding, by Jack of sleep, and not the Least frequently by lack of play, that literal RE-CREATION without an abundance of which no life can bo kept sound and sweet. We are not quite so sure as we once were of the colour of sin, but wie do know something about the chemistry of worry. For it is, at bottom, not simply a bad mental habit—though this has much to do with keeping it up—nor of sheer perversity, nor even a matter of the nervous system, but a question of the chemical composition of the blood; and, indeed, of half the tissues of the body. There- was a shrewd substratum of truth in the ancient quqp that whether life is worth living or not depends on the liver. The question of whether a thing which can be done only once shall be thought of but once, or reflected upon in advance 16 times with foreboding, and 32 times afterward with regret or misgiving, is largely determined by the extent to which the liver and lungs have failed to clear the blood of its fatiguepoisons. —Two Remedies —Rest and Change.— Fatigue is now known to be produced not by absolute exhaustion, but by the presence in the blood of more or less definite poisonous chemical products of the ■activities of our muscles and nerves. Worry is the result of a dilute chronic fatigue. It may even be chemically defined as the psychic reaction of somatic saturation with pairalactio 'acid and monosodio phosphate. The important practical bearing of this :s that in order to restore a fatigued muscle it is not necessary to build up anew its exhausted strength—to recharge its battery, as it were—but simply to wash its fatiguepoisons out of it. Let a frog’s muscle, for instance, be stimulated to the point of apparent exhaustion ; then simply flushing out its blood channels with salt .and water, through its tiny artery, will start : t contracting again briskly. Similarly with the brain that is suffering from nerve-fatigue or worry. It is not neoessary completely to rebuild and restore its energy, but simply to flush the fatigue-poisons out of it. For this there are two great agencies—rest and change of work! Sometimes we are tired out all over, and then the only ■’emedy is rest, preferably in the form of Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep! Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care. But more commonly our nervous system does not go to pieces all at once life the “One-Hoss Shay,” but in streaks and in sections. Fatigue is generally a local issue —like the tariff. Often, when w© worry, we are not tired at all in the greater part of our brain and oif our body, but simply sick and weary in some distant and insignificant corner of our mind from doing some monotonous little thing over and over and over again, until w© an? ready to shriek. Sometimes it is making balances come right; sometimes it is writing “your esteemed order received”: sometimes it is planning meals or washing dishes. Whatever it is, it is the deadly monotony of it, and the prospect of its going on to all eternity, which is racking your nerves to the shrieking point Whatever it may be, stop it! Stop it, just to show that you cam and to discover that the world will still keen on going round without it. Worry is waste. As a matter of physiological bookkeeping, it means that instead of' simply spending upon an action the exact amount of mental energy which is necessary to do that action properly, and then forgetting it, you are pouring out from three to five times this necessary minimum. Your excessive labour will have no useful effect whatever. On the contrary, it is certain to product- perplexity and confusion, making you do the thing aimed at rams instead of better. As Shakespeare puts it in regard to a similar emotion : Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Instead of being prudent and commendable, worry is the most extravagant and expensive habit in the world. It usually means either that you are trying to get 20 bora 9-power work out of a 12 horse-power machine, or that you are rasping and grinding some wretched little weak spot of a bearing or cog into a resistance which is throwing the whole machine out of gear. The inevitable result is the same in both cases—a breakdown, either sudden and fatal, which is rarest and most merciful, or, more commonly, a gradual chronic decay, a, growing old before your time. Work keeps us alive. Worry ages and kills. Everyone will admit, even the worrier himself, that it is unwise to worry. The remedy would appear to be childishly simple —just stop it! But there’s the rub; you try it and l find that you can’t. Like Mr Atkins, in Kipling’s ballad, you may bo never so firmly convinced that “it never did no good to me —but I can’t stop it if I tried.” It is practically useless to try to stop worrying by an effort of the will—you must remove the cause! If your jaundiced and bile-loaded blood floods your retina, making the sky appear green, and the faces of your friends a sickly yellow,, it is little use assuring yourself that the heavens are blue and the faces of your children rosy and fresh. To you they are green and livid, and will remain so until the bile 9 out of your system. —The Limit of a Man’s Working Power.— Of the two great causes of worry, it is hard to say which is the more potent. The most pitiful, and the most difficult to deal with, is the attempt to get more horse-power out of your engine than it was built to develop. Many good people cling to the delusion that a man can accomplish almost anything that he wills to, providing that he wills bard and persistently enourh. Pcghaps he can. in the

sense that he is not likely to, will for the seventieth time unless at least one of the previous 69 efforts has yielded him some measure of success. The intensity and endurance of a man’s determination are, roughly, in proportion to the results he is getting. , . ~ In the main, it has basin proved a thousand times that the vast majority of men and women —like engines, or horses—'have certain limits of achievement, or endurance, beyond which they cannot be pushed, except for temporary spurts, without aisaster. But what we will accept for the mass and the average, we flatly decline to apply to ourselves. We arc eager to believe with Professor James that there may be somewhere, on some undisc-'vered peak of Olympus, “higher levels of energy.” which may be tapped if we strain ourselves to the utmost limits of endurance, and then a little beyond. If such levels or reservoirs exist, they are as yet uncharted, and their existence entirely unsuspected by science. But leaving this question out of court entirely, the important practical fact remains that, “whatever our individual possibilities, we are not getting the best out of them by overdriving ourselves.” Purely commercial bodies that handle a large number of horses, such as transportation and express companies, discovered years ago that, just as a matter of cold cash, and profit and loss, it pays not merely to feed horses well and give them plenty of rest, but to work them well under their full strength. In that way eight or 10 years’ service can be got out of a team that would otherwise break down and be sold to the pedler in five or six years. Similarly, manufacturing companies, especially those who have regard for a steady product of uniform quality, and sustaining a high reputation in the market, have found that it pays in -actual dividends not merely to provide for the proper housing and sanitation of their workers, and to pay them good wages, but to shorten their hours of work and provide gardens, parks, theatres, playgrounds, and clubs for their proper recreation and healthful amusement. Therefore, if you find that you are overdriving yourself, that you are taking your work home with you, that you can’t get your mind off it, that you begin to doubt your ability to get through with it, pull yourself together and take stock! If the work in its entirety is too much for you, try to change to some other field of activity better adapted to your powers, or get back to the soil. If you’re a misfit—-a round peg in a square hole, don’t be too proud to recognise your mistake. A change, and work that fits your hand, may make all the difference between constant friction and ultimate failure, on the one hand, and everinoroasing efficiency and success on the other. —The Wlastefulnese of Overwork. — If, as will oftener be the case, you have got into a bad or wasteful way of doing your work, think over the situation. Get a short vacation, if you can, to change the taste in your mouth, no matter where you go; then plan your day so as to get plenty of time for your meals and digestion afterward, and plenty of sleep. Observe your holidays as holidays, as religiously as you do your work-days; let nothing interfere with your play and your hours in the country. In short, plan to put and keep yourself in condition to do the largest amount of work of which you are capable in the shortest practicable time. The beauty of this method of work is that your capacity, instead of diminishing under it, is steadily increasing, and your task becomes easier for you instead of harder, not merely up to 40 years of age, but up to 60 or 65. If, on the other hand, as much oftener happens, your worry is a sign not of “allover” weariness, but of local or partial fatigue, then the remedy is easier. There was a world of wisdom in Mulvaney’s remark to the raw recruit: “An’ remimber, me son, a soljer on the marxch is no betther than his feet.” The breakdown of a. single oog in our body mechanism, from deadly and relentless overstrain, will throw the entire machine out of gear just as completely as a broken piston. In most lives it is the deadly monotony, the everlasting daily doing of little things, that wears ,and kills, rather than over-rush or overstrain. We often speak if worry and of insanity as if thay vore modem diseases, utterly forgetful of the fact that two-thirds of the superstitions of earlier times and of lower religions were pure products of worry and baseless fear; and that to-day farmers’ wives among women, and day Labourers among men, contribute the highest percentage of their numbers to the wards of our insane asylums. It is really appalling, when we come to consider it broadly, the narrowness, the monotony, the everlasting repetition of average workaday life; the prospect "of performing the same petty duties day after day, month after month,' year after year, with nothing to end it short of the great sleep. 'Variety is not merely the spice of life, but its salt, the very essence of • ts continuance. Intelligent recreation, interests- outside of the daily grind, changes of econo —these .re not merely luxuries, they are necesarises of life. Not only will no child grow up healthy without play, but no grown-up will remain so without it. If one section of your powers has become self-poisoned and narcotised from overwork, and another paralysed from utter lack of use, what wonder that you are half dead, and begin to worry about the probable demise of the other half! Kill' two birds with one stone by giving the unused side of you a romp and 1 a chance to keep alive, while at the same time you are flushing the fatigue-poisons which make -all the handwritings on the wall spell disaster out of the overused side of you. —A Plea tor the Housewife. — I think that few men adequately realise the deadly monotony and endless trivial repetition of much of the life of their wives and sisters and daughters. They themselves have their business interests, their daily contact with all sorts and conditions of men, their trips to purchase goods and raw material, to visit customers, to attend their national and State associations. The town or section of the oity in which they live lias been selected as the best or most available place for the prosecution of their business, but it may be anything but ideal as a place to moke a home, or to find congenial society and 1 healthful companionships end surroundings for their wives and children. " The average American man is devotedly kind and even generous to his wife and

family, but he often fails _ to understand how a homo which to him is a delightful pllaee to rest and' refresh himself for the* real struggle of life outside may become a place of deadly monotony to be tied up in all day long by an unceasing round of duties; the n?it result and highest achievement of yea.rs of unceasing work beingsi m ply to keep the household fed, the clothes .nendbd and clean, and the carpets and curtains respectable. Particularly is this the case in families where the brood has been reared and the children successfully started for themselves in life. The man's business and woirk still occupy and interest him. He is still making plans for the futuire and enjoying the successes of the past. His wife, on, fcho other hand, is apt to feel, after the strain of motherhood and iihe responsibilities of the training of the family are oveir, thai; the keenest of her life-interests has, for a time at least, gone out. The Toutino of household existence begins to pall upon her; she begins to worry, to brood., to lose her appetite, to develop symptoms of illness, real or imaginary. She needs a chance to get out of the ha;rn,siss for a few months; to see something of the great world outside of her own, to get a. fresh grip on life, Which will enable her to transfer to the world at large the interests and the care which have been concentrated upon her children. Whenever your wife begins to worry, buy the tickets and tell her to pack un for a trip to the great city, to the country, to Europe, to the south, to the opera season, to some art exhibition or convention —any of these is better than a sanatorium, and may save months of drugging and dosing at home. The best and only cure for worry is to live an active, inte'rested, vigorous, cheerful life, with plentv of interests outside "6f your daily work a.rod ; n other perjnle as well as yourself and with full 'recognition of the gospel of play. Keep up your initenests. your work, and your hobbies, and you will seldom worry, and will never realise that you're old—until you're dead.—Munsey's.