Sleep, Health, and Mental Toil

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SLEEP, HEALTH, AND MENTAL TOIL.

One of the most transparent fallacies existing, is the notion that severe mental toil is the chief cause of the ill health of mercantile and professional men, the intellectual classes. It is commonly supposed that what is termed an overtasked brain, is the cause of premature death of many of those engaged in intellectual or mercantile pursuits. Whenever a prominent merchant dies, at any age under fifty, the newspapers contain long homilies upon the excessive mental toil of the class to which the deceased belonged, and upon the physical degeneracy which must ensue from the all-absorbing pursuit of the mighty dollar. If a laywer, clergyman, or editor dies, without living out more than half the full term of his natural life, the homily is repeated, with the variation that in this case, it was the too earnest pursuit of knowledge and prosecution of study, which hurried the deceased to the grave.

We do not believe that excessive or absorbing devotion to business or to study is responsible for half or a quarter of the mortality which is attributed to them. There are numberless examples of men, who have devoted every energy to the pursuit of wealth, and of others who have been the closest devotees at the shrine of knowledge, yet who have lived up to or beyond the ordinary limit of human existence. We do not believe, that eight or ten hours a day, (which is more than the generality of merchants devote to business, or professional men to their studies) spent in mental labors, taxes the constitution more than the same amount of time devoted to manual labor would. We do not believe that the brain is incapable of laboring quite as many hours as the hands are, without being any more injuriously affected. We are persuaded that if those who toil mentally would conform to the common sense laws of health to the same extent as mechanics in general do, their health would be quite good. The reason why generally intellectual laborers are shorter lived and less healthy than manual laborers, does not consist in the nature of their several tasks; it is that the intellectual classes eat more rapidly and sleep less regularly, than their brethren of the workshop. The injuries to the brain which abound among the former are attributable to want of sleep, and not to any undue strain on the mental faculties. If a man, starting with an ordinary constitution, will steadily insist on devoting one third, or even one fourth, of the twenty four hours to sleep, he never need fear any amount of mental exertion. If all our statesmen adopted Gen. Cass's invariable rule of retiring at ten p. m. punctually, they might all reasonably expect to attain to his octogenarianism.

The larger proportion of the classes who are supposed to injure themselves so greatly by severe mental exertion, are addicted to late hours. Many, perhaps most of them, patronise the opera and the theatres, together with occasional balls and late parites. And even the clergy and editors, whom of course we would not include in the above sweeping remark, are addicted to late hours in another shape—that of night meetings, anniversaries, and other milder forms of dissipation. It would not matter so much that the intellectual classes retire to rest some hours after the mechanic is folded in the arms of Somnus, were it not that they abridge their hours of sleep by rising at nearly the same time. The men who may be encountered in a meeting at 11 or 12 p. m., may be found punctually at their offices at from 7 to 8 next morning. There are many professional men who do not average six hours' sleep per diem; and these are precisely the ones whose premature death will assuredly be credited to their excessive mental toil. The fact is, there is no such excessive mental toil in this community as we would fain persuade ourselves; and it is stupid and disingenuous for us to attribute to this that which is in fact the inevitable penalty of our violation of the law of nature which dictates to us the necessity of regular and prolonged hours of sleep.