Fatigue

“ When, after a day of great exertion and mountain climbing, one awakes on the following morning, the fatigue has passed away. One feels refreshed and invigorated, and satisfied with the test to which he has subjected himself ”

“ On labour and fatigue she nurses the generous mind,—enables it not only to subdue itself, but to attain the highest state—that of not feeling fatigue, or pain, when fatigue or pain must be undergone. In noble work fatigue is pleasure and not fatigue to itself, but in other than in such work or virtuous activity, it is not pleasure to itself, but intolerable fatigue. ”

“ In spite of my fatigue, the habit of my life and the strong coffee would have banished all thought of sleep for hours to come, if there had been no other cause, but the touch of a little hand had put more glad awakening life within me than all the stimulants of the world. ”

“ Here we have the complaints, or rather the gloomy predictions, of a tired-out, discouraged, and depressed man: the strongest of constitutions succumb to such moments of doubt, and experience these hours of despair: after great fatigue the body overrides the mind, the sheath tarnishes the blade. ”

“ He seemed made to run on for ever. His iron-like body ignored fatigue. And even after fatigue came, his heritage of endurance braced him to endless endeavour and enabled him to drive his complaining body onward. ”

“ All the bodily fatigue of the day, all the preoccupation of mind which the events of the evening had brought on, disappeared as they do at the first approach of sleep, when we are still sufficiently conscious to be aware of the coming of slumber. ”

“ We all fell several times in the sand, from pure exhaustion. No one can have an idea of the overpowering sensation of fatigue which we experienced. My head turned giddy--all the powers of life seemed failing--and I firmly believe that another mile would have ended all ”

“ The feeling of fatigue, however, gives no sure evidence that the capacity of the nervous system is reduced; the biological theory signally breaks down; not only can we work effectively, but we often do our best work, after we have begun to feel tired. We should take our cue to rest not from the feeling of fatigue, but rather from the impairment of our work, in quantity and quality, on the one hand, and from derangement of the great bodily functions, such as digestion and sleep, on the other. ”

“ The practical question is: how may we—the men and women of ordinary powers, away from the extraordinary stimulus of a crisis like the great war—attain our maximum and drop off the dreary mantle of fatigue which so often holds us back from our best efforts? It may be that the first step is simply getting a true conception of physical fatigue as something which needs to be feared only in case of a diseased body, and which is quite likely to disappear under a little judicious neglect. ”

“ Because of the prominent place occupied by fatigue in thus being responsible for our diminished output, we shall briefly consider its place in study. Everyone who has studied will agree that fatigue is an almost invariable attendant of continuous mental exertion. We shall lay down the proposition at the start, however, that the awareness of fatigue is not the same as the objective fatigue in the organs of the body. Fatigue should be regarded as a twofold thing—a state of mind, designated its subjective aspect, and a condition of various parts of the body, designated its objective aspect. ”

“ I think, however, that it will be found that what is subject to fatigue is merely the physical organism through which everything in us which manifests on this plane must pass. What we call mental fatigue is a parallel case. There is no such thing as fatigue in the mind; what we call by that name is only fatigue of the physical brain through which that mind has to express itself. ”

“ That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. ”

“ The fatigue element receives more emphasis than any other element of the general survey. We look for fatigue first, last, and all the time, but we record with it all the attending circumstances that we can observe or discover. ”

“ There are a hundred little individual ways that we can talk to ourselves, and turn ourselves toward rest, at the end of the day when the time comes to rest.
One way to begin, which is necessary to most of us, is to stop resisting the tired. Every complaint of fatigue, whether it is merely in our own minds, or is made to others, is full of resistance, and resistance to any sort of fatigue emphasizes it proportionately. ”

“ But by subtracting an hour a day from the present amount of purely intellectual fatigue, and inserting that quantum of bodily fatigue in its place, you begin an immediate change in your conditions of life. ”

“ This kind of "tire" is a chemical condition, but it is produced not by work but by an emotion. He who learns to take his fatigue philosophically, as a natural and harmless phenomenon which will soon disappear if ignored, is likely to find himself possessed of exceptional strength. We can stand almost any amount of work, provided we do not multiply it by worry. We can even stand a good deal of real anxiety provided it is not turned in on ourselves and directed toward our own health.
"Decent Hygienic Conditions." If fatigue products cannot pile up, why is extra rest ever needed? ”

“ Clearly, then, the mere sensation of fatigue does not necessarily indicate the need of rest, or sleep, or food. A man, especially if he has dined late and heavily, may awake in the morning, even though he has had a good spell of sleep in an ill-ventilated room, feeling tired. Yet that feeling of tiredness is removed, not by further dozing, but by exercise, fresh air, or often brain work. ”

“ The natural hour of repose is passing, and the fountain of energy begins to bubble up within you; you feel to be approaching the normal condition again. The fatigue now gives place to a feeling of unreality and stupidity ”

“ The study of the conditions of mental work seems to reveal, in brief, that the conditions of fatigue are essentially physical in character. Given adequate physical conditions, in particular guarding against eye-strain, over-excitement (which means distraction from the work in hand) , and loss of sleep, mental work is itself peculiarly unaffected by fatigue conditions. ”

“ The fatigue-rest rhythm, the alternation of fatigue and rest, I have already phrased by the metaphor of earning and spending. You can phrase it also by a metaphor very close to the physical facts as we know them, the metaphor of building up and tearing down. During the daytime, from the point of view of physiology and the workings of the body, we burn up tissue. In us oxidation processes are going on which are really burning, as really as if we saw the flame. Tissue is being destroyed, broken down, going off in the form of heat, energy, and life. ”

“ We have every reason to think that fatigue is everywhere and always one and the same state, that mental and muscular fatigue, for instance, are identical; if we are mentally fatigued, we get rest neither by a change of mental work nor by physical exertion. ”

“ The early dawn found me struggling still in this mental anguish, calling up my recollections, examining in a childish way the most minute circumstances that might tend to confirm or to banish my suspicions. Excess of fatigue, brought on at last two hours of prostration, from which I emerged with a better command of my reason. ”

“ Fatigue, weakness, hysterics, and extreme depression follow. They leave the heated ball-room, when the morning has far advanced, to breathe the bitterly cold and frequently damp air of a winter’s night, and what is the result? Hundreds die of consumption who might otherwise have lived. ”

“ Beyond these limits it stunts the body, dulls the brain, overstrains the heart, and spoils the appetite. How are we going to tell when these limits are being reached? Nature has provided a danger signal—fatigue, or "tiredness."
Fatigue is due, not to complete exhaustion, but to poisoning of the muscle, or nerve, by its own waste substances. If the fatigue is general, or "all over," it is from these waste substances piling up in the blood faster than the lungs, skin, and kidneys can get rid of them. In other words, fatigue is a form of self-poisoning. ”

“ Why this mental method of curing physical ailments is better than yielding to the feeling of tired, and taking a respite from labor, is because it is the science of being, that Spirit should control matter; action or sensation belongs not to matter, independent of mind, and when you conquer through mind, the next occasion for fatigue will find you less apt to feel it, and you will not suffer from fatigue as you did before; the belief that body has a sense of fatigue independent of what mind says, is error, that the opposite Truth of being will destroy. ”

“ A person nearly dead with some fatal disease does not appear more powerless than a typical neurasthenic.
If it he true that accumulation of fatigue is promptly fatal, what shall we say of the woman who says that she is still exhausted from the labor of a year ago,—or of ten years ago? ”

“ It would doubtless be incorrect to attempt to account for all the increased strength and tireless endurance, which may be experienced in periods of great excitement, on the basis of abundant supplies provided then for muscular contraction, and a special secretion for avoiding or abolishing the depressive influences of fatigue. ”

“ They will not give him the hardness of limb, the enduring breath, the endurance of fatigue so necessary for the man who would grapple with the difficulties of Swiss mountains and passes as one to the manner born. ”

“ Though fatigue is thus so much like an emotion that it fits under our definition, it is not called an emotion, but a sensation or complex of sensations. After hard muscular work, the state of the muscles makes itself felt by "fatigue sensations", and the sum total of these, coming from many different muscles, makes up the complex sensation of fatigue. After prolonged mental work, there may be fatigue sensations from the eyes and perhaps from the neck, which is often fixed rigidly during strenuous mental activity ”

“ The state of fatigue has only been systematically studied during the past thirty years. Even to-day it is not wholly understood. We do know, however, several things about it, that may explain what we see in the emerging group. We know that fatigue is marked by a decrease in power to work, a decrease in pleasure taken in work, and a decrease in the enjoyment of the hours spent away from work. ”

“ Probably on account of such an influence upon the vaso-motor nerves, the blood vessels, and, consequently, the processes of nutrition, the evolution of emotions is attended with much greater fatigue than is that of thought. The fatigue that may follow a prolonged intellectual operation is, moreover, distinctly localized in the head, and exists in various degrees, from simple inability for further attention, to decided sensation of weariness, or even pain. ”

“ How human nature supported the fatigue, I know not. We scarcely allowed ourselves a moment’s pause to take the sustenance our bodies required. At last, one of the markers, who had been in the room with us the whole time, declared that he could hold out no longer, and that sleep he must. ”

“ The psychologists and physiologists who have measured fatigue rely almost solely upon output as the unit of measurement. Decrease in output in a comparable unit of time, and all other working conditions remaining the same, is taken as indicative of being the result of fatigue. ”

“ It is remarkable, also, that while you continue working you do not feel the fatigue so much, but as soon as you sit down you are assailed with increased weariness; you feel powerless and exhausted and have no strength or energy left. ”

“ A sense of fatigue is unknown to me. I seem to be as one apart from the normal life of men, untrammelled by human necessities and unconscious even of mental effort. Perhaps the subsequent collapse is the more absolute when it comes. ”

“ This view, however, presupposes that the organic nervous centres, instead of sharing in the exhaustion incident to labor, put forth increased power after fatigue, an idea incompatible with all we know of the natural functions. ”

“ So far from the mind being weakened by total rest, or the energies diminished, both wake after a time fully recovered, and repossessed of the old readiness to exert themselves to fatigue. 'I am tired,' says the cured man to himself, 'of doing nothing'—that is, he has recovered the power to do things easily, which is the mark of mental health. ”

“ Worthwhile, permanent fatigue elimination goes at the fundamentals of the work itself, and studies these in relation to the fatigue. What has been done is worth while when we know how it has been done, and why it has been done. ”

“ I have repeatedly published that the only time the eve is at rest is when one has or imagines perfect sight. The nor-mal eye when it is at rest is all the time moving. Fatigue is relieved by a universal swing and the relief is instantaneous, demonstrating quite decidedly that fatigue is a mental symptom. ”

“ The influence of practice and the persistence of the effects of practice, the influence of fatigue and the capacity for recovery from fatigue, the depth of sleep and the capacity for concentration and deviation of attention are among the conditions which have been investigated, and a scheme is given by which many of these points may be tested in a large number of individuals. ”

“ It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest. ”

“ In all these cases, stimulants upon the mind seem to act rather by taking off the attention from the bodily fatigue, than by really and truly counteracting it. If the energy of my mind had really counteracted the fatigue of my body, why should I feel tired the next morning? if the stimulus of the hounds had as completely overcome the fatigue of the journey in reality, as it did in appearance, why should the horse be tired sooner than if he had not gone the forty miles? ”