What are the main causes of fatigue?

When Dr. edward thorndike of Columbia University conducted some experiments on fatigue, he kept young people awake for almost a week in a way that kept them interested. After many investigations, Dr. Thorndike said that "the only real reason for the decrease in work energy is boredom".

What can we learn from it? In other words, our fatigue is usually not caused by work, but by anxiety, tension and unhappiness.

While writing this chapter, I spent time watching the reruns of Jerome Kern's musical comedy The Performing Boat. Captain Andy, the protagonist in the play, said with a philosophical sentence: "The luckiest person is the one who can do what he likes." Such people are lucky because they are more energetic, happier and less anxious and tired than others. Your interest lies in your ability. Walking ten blocks with your nagging wife must be much more tiring than walking ten miles with your beloved.

One of the main reasons for fatigue is boredom. I can give you an example. Take Alice, a typing girl who lives near me.

Alice is an employee of a company. One day, she came home looking exhausted. She's really exhausted-headache, backache, and she doesn't want to eat. She just wants to sleep. Alice couldn't stand her mother's repeated requests before she sat down at the table ... Suddenly, the phone rang and her boyfriend invited her to dance! At this moment, Alice's eyes suddenly lit up and the whole person became radiant. She rushed upstairs, changed her clothes and went out until 3 am. She doesn't look tired at all, but she is too excited to sleep.

Alice's two completely different performances in an instant are enough to illustrate a problem. Is Alice really as tired as she looks in eight hours? Of course, because she is tired of work or life. There may be thousands of Alice in our world, and you may be one of them. Emotional attitude is more exhausting than manual labor. A few years ago, Dr. Joseph Bamak published an experimental report in Archives of Psychology, explaining how burnout leads to fatigue. Dr. Bamak asked several students to pass a series of boring experiments. As a result, all the students feel impatient and sleepy, and complain about headaches, eye fatigue, fidgeting, and some even feel sick. Are these all "imaginary"? Of course not. These students also did metabolic tests, and the results showed that when people were bored, their blood pressure and oxygen consumption decreased significantly. When work is more interesting and attractive, metabolism accelerates.

Even physical activities, such as climbing mountains, don't necessarily make you feel tired as easily as boredom. Mr. S·H· Jin Man, President of Minneapolis Agricultural and Industrial Savings Bank, told me one thing, which just illustrated this fact:1In July, 943, the Canadian government asked the Canadian Alpine Mountaineering Club to assist the Welsh army in mountaineering training, and Mr. Jin Man was one of the coaches selected to train these soldiers. He told me that he and other coaches-people ranging in age from 42 to 59-took young soldiers on foot through many glaciers and snow, and then climbed a 40-foot cliff with ropes and some small mountaineering equipment. They climbed Mi Feng Peak, Vice President Peak and many other nameless peaks in the Xiaoyue Valley of the Canadian Rockies. After 15 hours of mountaineering activities, those very strong young people are completely exhausted.

Do they feel tired because their muscles are not well exercised during military training? Anyone who has received strict military training will certainly scoff at such absurd questions. No, they are too tired, because they are tired of climbing mountains. Many of them were so tired that they fell asleep without waiting for dinner. But is the coach-two or three times older than the soldier-tired? Not bad, but not exhausted. After dinner, the coaches sat there chatting for hours about their day. They are not exhausted, because they are interested in it.

Colombian doctor Edward Thorndike conducted an experiment about fatigue.

Catenborn, a famous radio news analyst, told me that when he was 22 years old, he worked on a transatlantic cattle carrier, responsible for feeding cattle with feed and water. He first completed a long bike trip in England and then arrived in Paris. Hungry and penniless, he pawned his camera for 5 francs and published a job advertisement in the New York Herald in Paris. Later, he got a job selling three-dimensional slide projectors. I still remember those old stereoscopes, which can be used to look at two identical pictures at the same time. Because the two lenses of the stereo mirror reflect two pictures to the other lens at the same time, the two pictures have a stereoscopic effect. If viewed from a distance, the stereoscopic perspective effect is even more amazing.

A female stenographer works in an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She always has to deal with boring things for a few days every month, such as filling out lease forms and sorting out statistics. These jobs are so boring that she has to make them more interesting in another way. She competes with herself every day, first calculating how many forms to fill out in the morning, then trying to exceed this number in the afternoon, then calculating the daily workload, and then trying to do better the next day. And the result? She can do it faster than any stenographer. What did she get from it? Like? I can't. Thank you? No. A promotion? No. A raise? Not exactly. But this way really helped her not to feel tired because she was bored with her work, and it really inspired her. Because after all, she tries her best to make a boring job interesting, and she is full of energy, more interested in work, and can get happiness and enjoyment at comfortable moments.

As I just said, Caton Born started selling this kind of observation glasses door to door in Paris. He doesn't speak French. But in the first year, he earned a commission of $5,000 and made himself the highest-paid salesman in France that year. H.V. Catenborn told me that this experience improved his ability to succeed, much more than his one-year study at Harvard University. What about the impact on his self-confidence? He told me himself that after that experience, he even thought he could sell the Record of Congress to French housewives.

This experience gave him a very deep understanding of French life, which made him particularly valuable in analyzing radio news, especially when talking about European events.

He can't speak French, how can he become a sales expert? He first asked his boss to write down what he should say in pure French and then memorize it. After he rang the doorbell, a housewife would open the door, so Kaltenborn began to recite his sales pitch. His American accent is very strong, which sounds very funny. Then he handed the photos to the housewife. If the other person asks a question, he shrugs and says "American …", then he takes off his hat and points to the speech written in French in his hat. The housewife will swell up, he will laugh with them, and then let the other person see more photos. When Catenborn told me these things, he frankly admitted that the job was really not easy to do. He told me that he only survived with a little faith: he was determined to make his work interesting. Every morning before going out, he would look in the mirror and say to himself, "Catomborn, if you want to eat, you must eat." Since you have to do it-why not have fun? Why don't you pretend to be an actor every time you ring the bell, and there are many viewers watching you standing on the stage? Because what you are doing now is as funny as a play on the stage, so why not have fun and be enthusiastic? "

I asked Mr Kaltenborn what he had to say to young people who are eager to succeed. He replied, "Yes, I might as well talk to myself every morning. We often say that physical exercise is so important that we get up and take a walk before waking up. However, what we need more is spiritual and mental exercise to urge us to put it into action. So, you might as well say something encouraging to yourself every day. "

This sounds ridiculous and superficial. Still naive? Not at all. On the contrary, this is absolutely correct in psychology. 18th century ago, Kyle Aurelias had such a sentence in Meditations: "Life is made up of thoughts." This sentence still holds true today.

-Quoted from The Complete Works of the Advantages of Human Nature by Yanbian People's Publishing House.