Health Through Will Power Part 4

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 compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion 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 a.s.sociated with compet.i.tion, 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 acc.u.mulates 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 appet.i.te 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 gra.s.s 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.

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Here is the defect in systems which promise to help people to train their wills by talking much about it, and by persuading them that it can be done, that all they have to do is to set about it. Unless one has some fine satisfying purpose in doing things, their doing is difficult and fails to accomplish as much good for the doer as would otherwise be the case. Conscious will activity requires, to use old-fashioned psychological terms, the exercise of two faculties at the same time, the consciousness and the will. This adds to the difficulty of willing. What is needed is a bait of interest held up before the will, constantly tempting it to further effort but without any continuing consciousness on the part of the individual that he must will it and keep on willing it. That must ever be a hampering factor in the case. Human nature does not like imperatives and writhes and wastes energy under them. On the contrary, optatives are pleasant and give encouragement without producing a contrary reaction; and it is this state of mind and will that is by far the best for the individual.

Above all, it is important that the person forming new habits should feel that there is nothing else to be done except the hard things {100} that have been outlined. If there is any mode of escape from the fulfillment of hard tasks, human nature will surely find it. If our young soldiers had felt that they did not have to perform their military duties and that there was some way to avoid them, the taking of the training would have proved extremely difficult. They just _had_ to take it; there was no way out, so they pushed themselves through the difficulties and then after a time they found that they were tapping unsuspected sources of energy in themselves. For when people _have_ to do things, they find that they can do ever so much more than they thought they could, and in the doing, instead of exhausting themselves, they actually find it easier to accomplish more and more with ever less difficulty. The will must by habit be made so prompt to obey that obedience will antic.i.p.ate thought in the matter and sometimes contravene what reason would dictate if it had a chance to act. The humorous story of the soldier who, carrying his dinner on a plate preparatory to eating it, was greeted by a wag with the word "Attention!" in martial tones, and dropped his dinner to a.s.sume the accustomed att.i.tude, is well known. Similar practical jokes are said to have been played, on a certain number {101} of occasions in this war, with the thoroughly trained young soldier.

The help of the will to the highest degree is obtained not by a series of resolutions but by doing whatever one wishes to do a number of times until it becomes easy and the effort to accomplish it is quite unconscious. Reason does not help conduct much, but a trained will is of the greatest possible service. It can only be secured, however, by will action. The will is very like the muscles. There is little use in showing people how to accomplish muscle feats; they must do them for themselves. The less consciousness there is involved in this, the better.

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CHAPTER VII

WHAT THE WILL CAN DO

"I can with ease translate it to my will."

_King John_.

It should be well understood from the beginning just what the will can do in the matter of the cure or, to use a much better word, the relief of disease, not forgetting that disease means etymologically and also literally discomfort rather than anything else. The will cannot cure organic disease in the ordinary sense of that term. It is just as absurd to say that the will can bring about the cure of Bright's disease as it is to suggest that one can by will power replace a finger that has been lost. When definite changes have taken place in tissues, above all when connective tissue cells have by inflammatory processes come to take the place of organic tissue cells, then it is idle to talk of bringing about a cure, though sometimes relief of symptoms may be secured; above all the compensatory powers of the body {103} may be called upon and will often bring relief, for a time, at least. What is true of kidney changes applies also to corresponding changes in other organs, and there can be no question of any amount of will power bringing about the redintegration of organs that have been seriously damaged by disease or replacing cells that have been destroyed.

There are however a great many organic diseases in which the will may serve an extremely useful purpose in the relief of symptoms and sometimes in producing such a release of vital energy previously hampered by discouragement as will enable the patient to react properly against the disease. This is typically exemplified in tuberculosis of the lungs. Nothing is so important in this disease, as we shall see, as the patient's att.i.tude of mind and his will to get well. Without that there is very little hope. With that strongly aroused, all sorts of remedies, many of them even harmful in themselves, have enabled patients to get better merely because the taking of them adds suggestion after suggestion of a.s.surance of cure.

The cells of the lungs that have been destroyed by the disease are not reborn, much less recreated, but nature walls off the diseased parts, and the rest of {104} the lungs learn to do their work in spite of the hampering effect of the diseased tissues. When fresh air and good food are readily available for the patient, then the will power is the one other thing absolutely necessary to bring about not only relief from symptoms, but such a betterment in the tissues as will prevent further development of the disease and enable the lungs to do their work. The disease is not cured, but, as physicians say, it is arrested, and the patient may and often does live for many years to do extremely useful work.

In a disease like pneumonia the will to get well, coupled with the confidence that should accompany this, will do more than anything else to carry the patient over the critical stage of the affection.

Discouragement, which is after all by etymology only disheartenment, represents a serious effect upon the heart through depression. The fullest power of the heart is needed in pneumonia and discouragement puts a brake on it. As we shall see it is probably because whiskey took off this brake and lifted the scare that it acquired a reputation as a remedy in pneumonia and also in tuberculosis. In spite of what was probably an unfavorable physical effect, whiskey {105} actually benefited the patient by its production of a sense of well being and absence of regard for consequences. Hence its former reputation. This extended also to its use in a continued fever where the same disheartenment was likely to occur with unfortunate consequences on the general condition and above all with disturbance of appet.i.te and of sleep. Worry often made the patients much more restless than they would otherwise have been and they thus wasted vital energy needed to bring about the cure of the affection under which they were laboring.

In all of these cases solicitude led to surveillance of processes within the body and interfered with their proper performance. It is perfectly possible to hamper the lungs by watching their action, and the same thing may be done for the heart. Whenever involuntary activities in the body are watched, their proper functioning is almost sure to be disturbed. We have emphasized that in the chapter on "Avoidance of Conscious Use of the Will," and so it need not be dwelt on further here.

Even apart from over-consciousness there occur some natural dreads that may disturb nature's vital reactions, and these can be {106} overcome through the will. There is a whole series of inhibitions consequent upon fears of various kinds that sadly interfere with nature's reaction against disease. To secure the neutralization of these the will must be brought into action, and this is probably better secured by suggestion, that is, by placing some special motive before the individual, than by any direct appeal. Particularly is this true if patients have not been accustomed before this to use their wills strenuously, for they will probably be disturbed by such an appeal.

What will power when properly released can do above all is to bring the relief of discomfort. In a great many cases the greater part of the discomfort is due to over-sensitization and over-attention. Even in such severe organic diseases as cancer, the awakening of the will may accomplish very much to bring decided relief. This is why we have had so many "cancer cures" that have failed. They made the patient feel better at first, and they relieved pain to some extent and therefore were thought to be direct remedial agents for the cancer itself. The malignant condition however has progressed without remission, though sometimes, possibly as the result of the new courage given flowing as surplus vitality into {107} the tissues, perhaps the progress of the lesion has been r.e.t.a.r.ded. The patient sometimes has felt so much better as to proclaim himself cured. What is thus true of cancer will be found to occur in any very serious organic condition, such as severe injury, chronic disease involving important organs, and even such nutritional diseases as anemia or diabetes. The awakening in the patient of the feeling that there is hope and the maintenance of that hope in any way will always bring relief and usually some considerable remission in the disease.

It is in convalescence above all, however, that the will power manifests its greatest helpfulness. When patients are hopeful and anxious to get well they are tempted to eat properly, to get out into the air; they thus sleep better and recovery is rapid. Whenever they are disheartened, as for instance when husband and wife have been together in an injury, or both have contracted a disease and one of them dies, the survivor is likely to have a slow and lingering convalescence. The reason is obvious: there is literal lack of will power or at least unwillingness to face the new conditions of life, and vitality is spent in vain regret for the companionship that has been {108} lost. This depression can only be lifted by motives that appeal to the inner self and by such an awakening of the will for further interests in life as will set vital energies flowing freely again.

In convalescence from injuries received after middle life or from affections that have been accompanied by incapacity to use muscles there is particular need of the will. A great many older people refuse to go through the pain and discomfort, soreness and tenderness as the younger folk who are training their muscles call them, which must be borne in order to bring about redevelopment of muscles, after they have once become atrophic from disuse. The refusal to push through a period of what is often rather serious discomfort leads many people to foster disabilities and use their muscles in wrong ways sometimes even for years. Something occurs then to arouse their wills and they get better. Anything that will do this will cure them. Sometimes it is a new liniment, sometimes a new mode of manipulation or ma.s.sage, sometimes some supposed electrical or magnetic discovery and sometimes the touch of a presumed healer. Anything at all will be effective provided it wakens their wills into such activity {109} as will enable them to persist in the use of their muscles through the period of soreness and tenderness necessary to restore proper muscular functions.

It is quite surprising to see what can be accomplished in this way, and the quacks and charlatans of the world have made their fortunes out of such patients always, while their cure has been the greatest possible advertis.e.m.e.nt and has attracted ever so many other patients to these so-called healers. Nothing that can be done for these patients will have any good results unless their own wills are aroused, new hope given them and they themselves made to tap the layers of energy in them that can restore them to health. To tell them that they were to be cured by their own will, however, would probably inhibit utterly this energy that is needed, so that somehow they have to be brought to the state of mind in which they will accomplish the purpose demanded of them by indirection.

The will is particularly capable of removing obstacles to nutrition that have often hampered the activities and sometimes seriously impaired the health of patients. Many people are not eating enough for one reason or another and need to have their diet regulated, not in {110} the direction of a limitation or selection of food, though this appeals to so many people under the term dieting, but so that they shall eat enough and of the proper variety to maintain their health and bodily functions. A great many nervous diseases are dependent on lack of sufficient food. Eating in those who lead sedentary lives much indoors is ever so much more a matter of will than of appet.i.te. When people say that they eat all they want to, what they mean, as a rule, is that they eat all that they have formed the habit of eating. Other habits can readily be formed and will often do them good. For a great many of the less serious symptoms which make people valetudinarians, nervous indigestion, insomnia, tendencies to headache, queer feelings in the head, constipation, the proper habit secured by will power, of eating so as to secure sufficient food, is the most important single factor. This the will must be trained to accomplish.

Now that disease prevention has become even more important than cure, the will is an extremely efficient element. Air, food, exercise are important factors for healthy living. A great many people are neglecting them and then seem surprised that they should suffer from various symptoms of impaired {111} functioning of bodily organs. Many men and a still greater number of women are staying in the house so much that their oxidation within the body is at a low ebb, and it is no wonder that vital processes are not carried on to the best advantage. Our generation has eliminated exercise from life to a great extent, and now that the auto and the trolley car limit walking, not only the feet of mankind suffer severely, but all the organs in the body work at a disadvantage for lack of the exercise that they should have. No wonder that under the circ.u.mstances appet.i.te is impaired and other functions of the body suffer. Instead of simple foods various artificial stimulants are employed--such as alcohol, spices, and the like--to provoke appet.i.te, often with serious consequences for the digestive organs. The will to be well includes the willing of the means proper to that purpose, and particularly regular exercise, several hours a day in the air, good simple food taken in sufficient quant.i.ty at three regular intervals and the avoidance of such sources of worry as will disturb physical functions.

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CHAPTER VIII

PAIN AND THE WILL

"That the will is infinite and the execution confined."

_Troilus and Cressida_.

The symptom of disease that humanity dreads the most is pain.

Fortunately, it is also the symptom which is most under the control of the will, and which can be greatly relieved by being bravely faced and, to as great an extent as possible, ignored. It requires courage and usually persistent training to succeed in the relief of severe pain in this way, but men have done it, and women too, and men and women _can_ do it, if they really want to, though unfortunately all of the trend of modern life has been in the opposite direction, of avoiding pain at whatever cost instead of bravely facing it. The American Indian, trained from his youth to stand severe pain, scoffed at even the almost ingeniously diabolical tortures of his enemy captors. After they had pushed slivers beneath his nails or {113} slowly crushed the end of a finger, or put salt in long, superficial wounds that had bared a whole series of sensitive cutaneous nerves, he has been known to laugh at them, and ask them proudly, without giving a sign of the pain that he was enduring, whether that was all that they could do. It was just a question of the human will overcoming even the worst sensations that the body could send up to the brain and deliberately refusing to permit any reactions that would reveal the reflex torment that was actually taking place.

The war has done much to bring back the recognition of that diminution--to a great extent at least--or even almost entire suppression of pain which may occur, indeed almost constantly does occur, as a consequence of a man facing it bravely. We have been accustomed to think of the early martyrs as probably divinely helped in their power to withstand pain. Whatever of celestial aid they had, we know that martyrs for all sorts of causes, some of them certainly not divine, have exhibited some degree of this same steadfastness.

Their behavior makes it reasonably clear that as the result of making up their minds to stand the pain involved, they have actually suffered so little that it was not {114} difficult to suppress external manifestations of their sufferings. It is not merely a suppression of the reflexes that has occurred but a minimizing to a very striking degree of the actual sensations felt. We have many stories of the older time before the modern use of anaesthetics, which tell how bravely men endured pain and at the same time retained their power to do things. Indeed, some of them accomplished purposes in the midst of what would seem like supreme agony which made it very clear that pain alone has nothing like the prostrating effect that it is often supposed to have.

For we have well authenticated tales of physicians performing amputations on themselves at times when no other a.s.sistance was available, and accomplishing the task so well that they recovered without complications. A blacksmith in the distant West, whose leg had been crushed by the fall of a huge beam, actually had himself carried into his shop and amputated his own limb above the knee, searing the blood vessels with hot irons as he proceeded. Such a manifestation of will power is, of course, exceptional to a degree, and yet it ill.u.s.trates what men can do in the face of conditions that are usually supposed {115} to be overwhelming. Many a man in lumber camps or in distant island fisheries or on board fishing vessels, far beyond the hope of reaching a physician in time for him to be of service, has done things of this kind. We can be quite sure that the will to accomplish for himself what seemed necessary to save his life lessened his pain, made it ever so much more bearable and generally proved the power of the human will over even these physical manifestations in the body that are commonly supposed to be quite beyond any interference from the psychical part of nature. The spirit can still dominate the flesh, even in matters of pain, and dictate how much it shall be affected. It is a hard lesson to learn, but it is one that can be learned by proper persistence.

In the early part of the war particularly many a young man had to face even serious operations without an anaesthetic. The awful carnage of the first six weeks of the war had not been antic.i.p.ated and therefore there were not sufficient stores of anaesthetics available to permit of their use in every case. Besides, many operations had to be performed so close to the front and under such circ.u.mstances that there could not be anaesthetics for all of them; and it was a never-ending source of {116} surprise to those who witnessed the details to see how bravely and uncomplainingly the young men took their enforced suffering. Many a one, when his turn came to be operated on, quietly asked for a cigarette and then bore unflinchingly painful manipulations that the surgeon was extremely sorry to have to inflict. Over and over again, when there was question of the regular succession of patients, young soldiers in severe pain suggested that some one else who seemed in worse condition than they, or who perhaps was not quite so well able to stand pain and control himself, should be attended to before they were. There is no doubt at all that this very power of self-control lessened their pain and made it ever so much easier to bear and less of a torment than it would have been otherwise.

Any great diversion of mind that turns the attention completely to something else will lessen even severe pain so much as to make it quite negligible for the moment. Headaches disappear promptly when there is an alarm of fire, and toothaches have been known to vanish, for the time at least, as the result of a burglar scare. Much less than this is needed, however, and there are many familiar examples {117} which ill.u.s.trate the fact that the turning of the attention to something else will greatly diminish or even abolish pain.

The well known story of the French surgeon about to set a dislocation is a typical demonstration. His patient was a woman of the n.o.bility, her dislocation was of the shoulder and it was necessary for him to inflict very severe pain in order to replace it. Besides, as the result of the reflex of that pain, he was certain to meet with great resistance from spasm in the surrounding muscles. It was before the days of anaesthetics, which relieve all of these inconveniences, and above all, relax the muscles. The surgeon got ready to do the ultimate manipulation that would replace the joint in its proper relation, and necessarily inflicted no little pain in his preparations. The lady complained very much, so he turned on her angrily, told her that she must stand it, slapped her in the face, and before she had recovered from the shock, the dislocation had been restored to the normal condition. It was rather heroic treatment, and it is to be hoped that she understood it, but it is easy to understand how much the procedure lessened her physical pain.

When the mind is very much preoccupied {118} and the will intent on accomplishing some immediate purpose, even severe pain will not be felt at all. Instances of this are not rare, and men who are advancing in a charge on a battlefield will often be wounded rather severely, and yet continue to advance without knowing anything about their wounds until a friend calls attention to their bleeding, or they themselves notice it; or perhaps even loss of blood may make them faint. The late President Roosevelt furnished a magnificent ill.u.s.tration of this principle when he was wounded some years ago in the midst of a political campaign. A crank shot at him, in one of the Western cities, and though the bullet penetrated four inches of muscle on his chest wall, and then flattened itself against a rib, he did not know that he was wounded. The flattening of the bullet must have represented at least as much force as would be exerted by a heavy blow on the chest, and yet the Colonel never felt it. His friends congratulated him on his escape from injury until it was noted that blood was oozing through a hole that had been made in his coat. The intense will activity of the President simply kept him from noticing either the shock or the pain.

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Not long before the war a striking example was given of how a man may stand suffering in spite of long years of the refining influences of a sedentary scholarly life, most of it spent indoors. The second last General of the Jesuits developed a sarcoma on his upper arm and was advised to submit to an amputation of the arm at the shoulder joint.

He was a man well on in the sixties and the operation presented an extremely serious problem. The surgeons suggested that he should be ready for the anaesthetic at a given hour the next morning and then they would proceed to operate. He replied that he would be ready for the operation at the time suggested, but that he would not take an anaesthetic. They argued with him that it would be quite impossible for him to stand unanaesthetized the extensive cutting and dissection necessary to complete an operation of this kind in an extremely important part of the body, where large nerves and arteries would have to be cut through and where the slightest disturbance on the part of the patient might easily lead to serious or even fatal results. Above all, he could not hope to stand it in tissues that had been rendered more sensitive than before by the enlarged circulation to the part, due to {120} the growth of the tumor, and the consequent hyperaemic condition of most of the tissues through which the cutting would have to be done and which were thus hypersensitized.

He insisted, however, that he would not take an anaesthetic, for surely here seemed a chance to welcome suffering voluntarily as his Lord and Master had done. I believe that the head surgeon said at first that he would not operate. He felt sure that the operation would have to be interrupted after it had been begun, because the patient would not be able to stand the pain and there would then be the danger from bleeding as well as from infection which might occur. The General of the Jesuits, however, was so calm and firm that at last it was determined to permit him to try at least to stand it, though most of the surgeons were sure that he would probably have to give up and allow himself to be anaesthetized before they were through.