ESSAY: What Makes You Tired-and What You Can Do About It
Here is an astounding and significant fact: Mental work alone can't make you tired. Sounds absurd.
But a few years ago, scientists tried to find out how long the human brain could labour without reaching "a diminished capacity for work", the scientific definition of fatigue. To the amazement of these scientists, they discovered that blood passing through the brain, when it is active, shows no fatigue at all! If you took blood from the veins of a day labourer while he was working, you would find it full of "fatigue toxins" and fatigue products. But if you took a drop of blood from the brain of an Albert Einstein, it would show no fatigue toxins whatever at the end of the day.
So far as the brain is concerned, it can work "as well and as swiftly at the end of eight or even twelve hours of effort as at the beginning". The brain is utterly tireless. ... So what makes you tired?
Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes. One of
England's most distinguished psychiatrists, J.A. Hadfield, says in his book The Psychology of Power:
"the greater part of the fatigue from which we suffer is of mental origin; in fact exhaustion of purely physical origin is rare."
One of America's most distinguished psychiatrists, Dr. A.A. Brill, goes even further. He declares:
"One hundred per cent of the fatigue of the sedentary worker in good health is due to psychological factors, by which we mean emotional factors."
What kinds of emotional factors tire the sedentary (or sitting) worker? Joy? Contentment? No! Never!
Boredom, resentment, a feeling of not being appreciated, a feeling of futility, hurry, anxiety, worrythose are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous