“So, to prevent fatigue and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.” ~ Dale Carnegie from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
Carnegie gives us a chapter-full of the benefits of using relaxation as a means to reduce worry—and the fact that preventing fatigue is a huge step toward preventing worry. He starts by making the point that it’s *impossible* to be totally relaxed and worried at the same time. Impossible. That alone is enough advice to solve most of our worry.
Stressed? Relax. TOTALLY relax.
The point is simple: you can prevent WORRY by preventing FATIGUE. How do you that? A lot of ways. But the smartest is to rest before you’re tired. Carnegie cites the U.S. Army, your heart, Winston Churchill, Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and many others to prove his point.
The U.S. Army? Rests its soldier ten minutes out of every hour they march. BEFORE they get tired. And they’re overall efficiency goes up.
Churchill? Worked 16 hours a day in his late sixties and early seventies during World War II. His secret? He worked from bed a *lot,* took naps and rested frequently.
Rockefeller (lived to 96) took a half-hour nap EVERY noon.
Edison attributed his enormous energy and endurance to his habit of sleeping whenever he wanted to.
And, how about the coolest example? Your heart. As Carnegie says: “Your heart pumps enough blood through your body every day to fill a railway tank car. It exerts enough energy every twenty-four hours to shovel twenty tons of coal onto a platform three feet high. It does this incredible amount of work for fifty, seventy, or maybe ninety years. How can it stand it? Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, explained it. He said “Most people have the idea that the heart is working all the time. As a matter of fact, there is a definite rest period after each contraction. When beating at a moderate rate of seventy pulses per minute, the heart is actually working only nine hours out of the twenty-four. In the aggregate its rest periods total a full fifteen hours per day.”
So, how about you? Are you taking enough rest? If you’re worried check in and see if you’re also fatigued. And then know that it’s *impossible* to be totally relaxed and worried. So get relaxed. :)
(Speaking of which, it’s time for my 9:30am meditation. Seriously. Hehe. brb. :)
... More on fatigue: “Psychiatrists declare that most of our fatigue derives from our mental and emotional attitudes... 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, worry--those are the emotional factors that exhaust the sitting worker, make him susceptible to colds, reduce his output, and send him home with a nervous headache. Yes, we get tired because our emotions produce nervous tensions in the body.”
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