Health Through Will Power. James Joseph Walsh
All sorts of symptoms usually due to insufficient exercise and air, inadequate diversion of mind and lack of interests are attributed to these conditions. Some time or other a physician or perhaps some one who is supposed to be a friend suggested them and they continue to hamper the will to be well by baseless worries founded on false notions for years afterwards. What is needed is a definite effort of the will to throw off these nightmares of disease that are so disturbing and live without them.
It is surprising how much vital energy may be wasted in connection with such dreads. Unfortunately, too, medicines of various kinds are taken to relieve the symptoms connected with them and the medicine does ever so much more harm than good. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared a generation ago that if all the medicines that had ever been taken by mankind were thrown into the sea it would be much better for mankind and much worse for the fishes. The expression still has a great truth in it, especially as regards that habit of self-drugging so common among the American people. In the course of lecture engagements, I stay with very intelligent friends on a good many occasions each year, and it is surprising how many of them have medicine bottles around, indicating that they are subject to dreads of various kinds with regard to themselves for which they feel medicine should be taken. These dreads unfortunately often serve to lessen resistive vitality to real affections when they occur and therefore become a source of real danger.
All these various dreads, then, have the definite effect of lessening the power of the will to enable people to do their work and remain well. They represent serious brakes upon the flow of nerve impulses from the spiritual side of man's nature to the physical. This is much more serious in its results than would usually be thought; and one of the things that a physician has to find out from a great many patients is what sources of dread they are laboring under so as to neutralize them or at least correct them as far as possible. It is surprising how much good can be accomplished by a deliberate quest after dreads and the direct discussion of them, for they are always much less significant when brought out of the purlieus of the mind directly into the open. Many a neurotic patient, particularly, will not be improved until his dreads are relieved. This form of psycho-analysis rather than the search for sex insults, as they are called, or sexual incidents of early life, is the hopeful phase of modern psychological contribution to therapeutics.
CHAPTER III
HABITS
"Why, will shall break it; will and nothing else."
Dreads are brakes on the will, inhibitions which prevent its exercise and make accomplishment very difficult and sometimes impossible. They represent mainly a state of mind, yet often they contain physical elements, and the disposition counts for much. Their counterpart in the opposite direction is represented by habits which are acquired facilities of action for good or for ill. Habits not only make activities easy but they even produce such a definite tendency to the performance of certain actions as to make it difficult not to do them. They may become so strong as to be tyrants for ill, though it must not be forgotten that properly directed they may master what is worst in us and help us up the hill of life. Acts that are entirely voluntary and very difficult at first may become by habit so natural that it is extremely difficult to do otherwise than follow the ingrained tendency. Nature's activities are imperative. Habitual actions may become equally so. When some one once remarked to the Duke of Wellington that habit was second nature, he replied:
"Oh, ever so much more than that! Habit may be ten times as strong as nature."
The function of the will in health is mainly to prevent the formation of bad habits or break those that have been formed, but above all, to bring about the formation of habits that will prevent as far as is possible the development of tendencies to disease in the body, Man probably faces no more difficult problem in life than the breaking of a bad habit. Usually it requires the exercise of all his will power applied to its fullest extent. If there is a more difficult problem than the breaking of a bad habit it is the formation of a good one late in life because of the persistency of advertence and effort that is required. It is comparatively easy to prevent the formation of bad habits and also easy to form good habits in the earlier years. The organism is then plastic and yields itself readily and thus becomes grooved to the habit or hardened against it by the performance of even a few acts.
All the psychologists insist that after the period of the exercise of instinct as the basis of life passes, habit becomes the great force for good or for ill. We become quite literally a bundle of habits, and the success of life largely depends on whether these habits are favorable or unfavorable to the accomplishment of what is best in us. More than anything else health depends on habit. We begin by doing things more or less casually, and after a time a tendency to do them is created; then almost before we know it, we find that we have a difficult task before us, if we try not to do them.
To begin with, the activity which becomes the subject of a habit may be distinctly unpleasant and require considerable effort to accomplish. Practically every one who has learned to smoke recalls more or less vividly the physical disturbance caused by the first attempt and how even succeeding smokes for some time, far from being pleasant, required distinct effort and no little self-control. After a time, the desire to smoke becomes so ingrained that a man is literally made quite miserable by the lack of it and finds himself almost incapable of doing anything else until he has had his smoke.
Even more of an effort is required to establish the habit of chewing tobacco, and it is even more difficult to break when once it has been formed. Any one who has seen the discomfort and even torments endured by a man who, after he had chewed tobacco for many years, tried to stop will appreciate fully what a firm hold the habit has obtained. I have known a serious business man who almost had to give up business, who lost his sleep and his appetite and went through a nervous crisis merely by trying to break the habit of chewing tobacco.
In the Orient they chew betel nut. It is an extremely hot material which burns the tongue and which a man can stand for only a very short time when he first tries it. After a while, however, he finds a pleasant stimulation of sensation in the constant presence of the biting betel nut in his mouth; he craves it and cannot do his work so well without it. He will ever advert to its use and will be restless without it. He continues to use it in spite of the fact that the intense irritation set up by the biting qualities of the substance causes cancer of the tongue to occur ten times as frequently among those who chew betel nut as among the rest of the population. Not all those who chew it get cancer, for some die from other causes before there is time for the cancer to develop, and some seem to possess immunity against the irritation. The betel nut chewer ignores all this, proceeds to form the habit, urged thereto by the force of example, and then lets himself drift along, hoping that it will have no bad effects.
The alcohol and drug habits are quite as significant in shortening life as betel nut and yet men take them up quite confident in the beginning that they will not fall victims, and then find themselves enmeshed. It is probable that the direct physical effects of none of these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease, all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in the formation of these habits.
Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own power, and then the habit can be broken. After all, it must never be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.
Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed