CHAPTER LV
TAKE A PLEASANT THOUGHT TO BED WITH YOU
Shut off your mental steam when you quit work. Lock up your business when you lock up your office or factory at night. Don't drag it into your home to mar your evening or to distress your sleep.
You can not afford to allow the enemies of your peace and happiness to etch their black pictures deeper and deeper into your consciousness.
Many people lie down to sleep as the camels lie down in the desert, with their packs still on their backs. They do not seem to know how to lay down their burdens, and their minds go on working a large part of the night. If you are inclined to worry during the night, to keep your mental faculties on the strain, taut, it will be a good plan for you to have a bow in your bedroom and unstring it every night as a reminder that you should also unstring your mind so that it will not lose its springing power. The Indian knows enough to unstring his bow just as soon as he uses it so that it will not lose its resilience.
If a man who works hard all day uses his brain a large part of the night, doing his work over and over again, he gets up in the morning weary, jaded. Instead of having a clear, vigorous brain capable of powerfully focusing his mind, he approaches his work with all his standards down, and with about as much chance of winning as a race horse who has been driven all night before a contest would have. Not even a man with the will of a Napoleon could win out under such conditions.
It is of the utmost importance to stop the grinding, rasping process in the brain at night and to keep from wearing life away and wasting one's precious vitality.
Many people become slaves to night worry. They get into a chronic habit of thinking after they retire—especially of contemplating their troubles and trials,—and it is a very difficult habit to break.
It is fundamental to sound health to make it a rule never to discuss business troubles and things that vex and irritate one at night, especially just before retiring, for whatever is dominant in the mind when one falls asleep continues its influence on the nervous structure long into the night.
Some people age more at night than during the daytime, when, it would appear, if they must worry at all, the reverse ought to be true. When hard at work during the day they do not have much time to think of their ailments, their business troubles, their misfortunes. But when they retire, the whole brood of troubling thoughts and worry ghosts fill the mind with horrors. They grow older instead of younger, as they would under the influence of sound, refreshing sleep.