Health Through Will Power

by James J. Walsh

This has to be done with regard to the activities that make for health. We have to form habits that render them easy, pleasant, and even necessary for our good feelings. This can be done, as has been suggested in the chapter on habits, but we have to avoid any such habit as that of consciously using the will. That is a bad habit that some people let themselves drop into but it should be corrected. Having set our activities to work we must, as far as possible, forget about them and let them go on for themselves. It is not only possible but even easy and above all almost [{90}] necessary that we should do this. Hence at the beginning people must not expect that they will find the use of their will easy in suppressing pain, lessening tiredness, and facilitating accomplishment, but they must look forward to the time quite confidently when it will be so. In the meantime the less attention paid to the process of training, the better and more easily will the needed habits be formed.

Failure to secure results is almost inevitable when conscious use of the will comes into the problem. As a rule a direct appeal should not be made to people to use their wills, but they should be aroused and stimulated in various ways and particularly by the force of example. What has made it so comparatively easy for our young soldiers to use their wills and train their bodies and get into a condition where they are capable of accomplishing what they would have thought quite impossible before, has been above all the influence of example. A lot of other young men of their own age are standing these things exemplarily. They are seen performing what is expected of them without complaint, or at least without refusal, and so every effort is put forth to do likewise without any time spent on reflection as to how [{91}] difficult it all is or how hard to bear or how much they are to be pitied. It is not long before what was hard at first becomes under repetition even easy and a source of fine satisfaction. Getting up at five in the morning and working for sixteen hours with only comparatively brief intervals for relaxation now and then, and often being burdened with additional duties of various kinds which must be worked in somehow or other, seems a very difficult matter until one has done it for a while. Then one finds everything gets done almost without conscious effort. Will power flows through the body and lends hitherto unexpected energy, but of this there is no consciousness; indeed, conscious reflection on it would hamper action. No wonder that as a result of the facility acquired, one comes to readily credit the assumption that the will is a spiritual power and that some source of energy apart from the material is supplying the initiative and the resources of vitality that have made accomplishment so much easier than would have been imagined beforehand. This is quite literally what training of the will means: training ourselves to use all our powers to the best advantage, not putting obstacles in their way nor brakes on their exertion, but [{92}] also not thinking very much about them or making resolutions. The way to do things is to do them, not think about them.

Professor James is, as always, particularly happy in his mode of expressing this great truth. He insists that the way to keep the will active is not by constantly thinking about it and supplying new motives and furbishing up old motives for its activity, but by cultivating the faculty of effort. His paragraph in this regard is of course well known, and yet it deserves to be repeated here because it represents the essence of what is needed to make the will ready to do its best work. He says:

"As a fine practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time and [{93}] possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."

To do things on one's will without very special interest is an extremely difficult matter. It can be done more readily when one is young and when certain secondary aims are in view besides the mere training of the will, but to do things merely for will training becomes so hard eventually that some excuse is found and the task is almost inevitably given up. Exercising for instance in a gymnasium just for the sake of taking exercise or keeping in condition becomes so deadly dull after a while that unless there is a trainer to keep a man up to the mark, his exercise dwindles from day to day until it amounts to very little. Men who are growing stout about middle life will take up the practice of a cold bath after ten minutes or more of morning exercises with a good deal of enthusiasm, but they will not keep it up long, or if they do continue for several months, any [{94}] change in the daily routine will provide an excuse to drop it. Companionship and above all competition in any way greatly helps, but it takes too much energy of the will to make the effort alone. Besides, when the novelty has worn off and routine has replaced whatever interest existed in the beginning in watching the effect of exercise on the muscles, the lack of interest makes the exercise of much less value than before. If there is not a glow of satisfaction with it, the circulation, especially to the periphery to the body, is not properly stimulated and some of the best effect of the exercise is lost. Athletes often say of solitary exercise that it leaves them cold, which is quite a literal description of the effect produced on them. The circulation of the surface is not stimulated as it is when there is interest in what is being done and so the same warmth is not produced at the surface of the body.

It is comparatively easy to persuade men who need outdoor exercise to walk home from their offices in the afternoon when the distance is not too far, but it is difficult to get them to keep it up. The walk becomes so monotonous a routine after a time that all sorts of excuses serve to interrupt the habit, and then it is not long before it is done so irregularly as to lose [{95}] most of its value. Here as in all exercise, companionship which removes conscious attention from advertence to the will greatly aids. On the other hand, as has been so clearly demonstrated in recent years, it is very easy to induce men to go out and follow a little ball over the hills in the country, an ideal form of exercise, merely because they are interested in their score or in beating an opponent. Any kind of a game that involves competition makes people easily capable of taking all sorts of trouble. Instead of being tired by their occupation in this way and not wanting to repeat it, they become more and more interested and spend more and more time at it. The difference between gymnastics and sport in this regard is very marked.

In sport the extraneous interest adds to the value of the exercise and makes it ever so much easier to continue; when it sets every nerve tingling with the excitement of the game, it is doing all the more good. Gymnastics grow harder unless in some way associated with competition, or with the effort to outdo oneself, while indulgence in sport becomes ever easier. Many a young man would find it an intolerable bore and an increasingly difficult task if asked to give as much time and energy [{96}] to some form of hard work as he does to some sport. He feels tired after sport, but not exhausted, and becomes gradually able to stand more and more before he need give up, thus showing that he is constantly increasing his muscular capacity.

Conscious training of the will is then practically always a mistake. It is an extremely difficult thing to do, and the amount of inhibition which accumulates to oppose it serves after a time to neutralize the benefit to be derived. Good habits should be formed, but not merely for the sake of forming them. There should be some ulterior purpose and if possible some motive that lifts men up to the performance of duty, no matter how difficult it is.

Our young men who went to the camps demonstrated how much can be accomplished in this manner. They were asked to get up early in the morning, to work hard for many hours in the day, or take long walks, sometimes carrying heavy burdens, and were so occupied that they had but very little time to themselves. They were encouraged to take frequent cold baths, which implied further waste of heat energy, and then were very plainly fed, though of course with a good, rounded diet, [{97}] well-balanced, but without any frills and with very little in it that would tempt any appetite except that of a hungry man. They learned the precious lesson that hunger is the best sauce for food.

Most of these men were pushed so hard that only an army officer perfectly confident of what he was doing and well aware that all of his men had been thoroughly examined by a physician and had nothing organically wrong with them would have dared to do it. A good many of us had the chance to see how university men took the military regime. Long hours of drilling and of hard work in the open made them so tired that in the late afternoon they could just lie down anywhere and go to sleep. I have seen young fellows asleep on porches or in the late spring on the grass and once saw a number of them who found excellent protection from the sun in what to them seemed nice soft beds—at least they slept well in them—inside a series of large earthen-ware pipes that were about to be put down for a sewer. Some of them were pushed so hard, considering how little physical exercise they had taken before, that they fainted while on drill. Quite a few of them were in such a state of nervous tension that they fainted on [{98}] being vaccinated. Almost needless to say, had they been at home, any such effect would have been a signal for the prompt cessation of such work as they were doing, for the home people would have been quite sure that serious injury would be done to their boys. These young fellows themselves did not think so. Their physicians were confident that with no organic lesion present the faint was a neurotic derangement and not at all a symptom of exhaustion. The young soldiers would have felt ashamed if there had been any question of their stopping training. They felt that they could make good as well as their fellows. They would have resented sympathy and much more pity. They went on with their work because they were devoted to a great cause. After a time, it became comparatively easy for them to accomplish things that would hitherto have been quite impossible and for which they themselves had no idea that they possessed the energy. It was this high purpose that inspired them to let more and more of their internal energy loose without putting a brake on, until finally the habit of living up to this new maximum of accomplishment became second nature and therefore natural and easy of accomplishment.