To keep placid when overworked to the limit of physical endurance requires a stolidity of soul and lack of nerves only known to the North American Indians, and perhaps the Japanese, and it matters not what the kind of overwork is, whether business, pleasure, or charity.
Nature’s Restoratives.—The proper division of the day is eight hours to be allotted to work, eight to sleep, and the remaining period of eight hours is to be divided among the various methods of refreshing body and mind—the toilet, eating, rest, and recreations.
Not only are rest, recreation, and sleep in proper proportions essential to the health of the body, but they are equally essential to the quantity and the quality of the output of work. From them result a feeling of physical well-being, an exuberance of animal spirits which go into the work. The perspective is more accurate, the judgment is clearer, and the creative power is greater. Work goes of itself with a swing. Happiness is an expansive quality, that makes itself felt throughout the entire body, but its effects are most manifest in the mental power.
The mother who so honestly works and plans for the good of her family as to give herself no time to rest after her physical efforts is in such an exhausted condition as only to be able to give them the tired and critical side of herself for daily association. There are few human achievements much finer than to make human beings happy, and this power woman is endowed with to a very large extent.
Rest, to be of value, must be systematically taken. Bearing in mind the shrinking in size of the nerve-cells after stimulation caused by work, and that they recovered their normal size in relatively less time if the shrinkage were less, it becomes obvious that, in order to accomplish the best work, whether purely mental, or of the more complex mental and physical work demanded of the mother who is at the same time the housewife, that a break in the day’s work will aid in securing the best results.
The exact time of the daily siesta must be adapted to the family régime, but a fixed hour should be set aside for this purpose, and this should be known as the mother’s hour, and nothing short of a catastrophe should be allowed to infringe on it.
The woman should retire to her bed-room, undress, and go to bed. The room should be darkened, and at the same time there must be an abundant supply of fresh air. One soon forms the habit of taking a short nap, of perhaps half an hour; one hour should be spent in bed. After this, she gets up, takes a shower or other bath, dresses, and is then ready to enjoy life and be a comfort to her family. In this way alone can absolute relaxation, rest of mind, and body be secured.
Avocation.—Second only to the physiologic necessity for a vocation in life, is the necessity for an avocation, and this must be in the nature of a recreation.
It is a well-known fact in farming that any one kind of crop will exhaust the very best soil, but few people recognize the necessity for a change of occupation and recreation in order to produce the best mental and physical results.
Joyless drudgery drains the springs of health. There is a mental starvation, due to the lack of recreation, as well as the physical, due to the lack of bread. The French aristocrats, noted for the gaiety of their pastimes, in spite of their dietetic and other sins, furnish a remarkable list of longevity. Persons of a cheerful disposition are generally long-lived, and anything tending to counteract the influence of worry and discontent directly contributes to the preservation of the health. Despair, which frequently results from years of overwork, can paralyze the energies of vital functions like a sudden poison, while hope fulfilled has cured many a disease.