Health Through Will Power

"Oh, ever so much more than that! Habit may be ten times as strong as nature."

The function of the will in health is mainly to prevent the formation of bad habits or break those that have been formed, but above all, to bring about the formation of habits that will prevent as far as is possible the development of tendencies to disease in the body, Man probably faces no more difficult problem in life than the breaking of a bad habit. Usually it requires the exercise of all his will power applied to its fullest extent. If there is a more difficult problem than the breaking of a bad habit it is the formation of a good one late in life because of the persistency of advertence and effort that is required. It is comparatively easy to prevent the formation of bad habits and also easy to form good habits in the earlier years. The organism is then plastic and yields itself readily and thus becomes grooved to the habit or hardened against it by the performance of even a few acts.

All the psychologists insist that after the period of the exercise of instinct as the basis of life passes, habit becomes the great force for good or for ill. We become quite literally a bundle of habits, and the success of life largely depends on whether these habits are favorable or unfavorable to the accomplishment of what is best in us. More than anything else health depends on habit. We begin by doing things more or less casually, and after a time a tendency to do them is created; then almost before we know it, we find that we have a difficult task before us, if we try not to do them.

To begin with, the activity which becomes the subject of a habit may be distinctly unpleasant and require considerable effort to accomplish. Practically every one who has learned to smoke recalls more or less vividly the physical disturbance caused by the first attempt and how even succeeding smokes for some time, far from being pleasant, required distinct effort and no little self-control. After a time, the desire to smoke becomes so ingrained that a man is literally made quite miserable by the lack of it and finds himself almost incapable of doing anything else until he has had his smoke.

Even more of an effort is required to establish the habit of chewing tobacco, and it is even more difficult to break when once it has been formed. Any one who has seen the discomfort and even torments endured by a man who, after he had chewed tobacco for many years, tried to stop will appreciate fully what a firm hold the habit has obtained. I have known a serious business man who almost had to give up business, who lost his sleep and his appetite and went through a nervous crisis merely by trying to break the habit of chewing tobacco.

In the Orient they chew betel nut. It is an extremely hot material which burns the tongue and which a man can stand for only a very short time when he first tries it. After a while, however, he finds a pleasant stimulation of sensation in the constant presence of the biting betel nut in his mouth; he craves it and cannot do his work so well without it. He will ever advert to its use and will be restless without it. He continues to use it in spite of the fact that the intense irritation set up by the biting qualities of the substance causes cancer of the tongue to occur ten times as frequently among those who chew betel nut as among the rest of the population. Not all those who chew it get cancer, for some die from other causes before there is time for the cancer to develop, and some seem to possess immunity against the irritation. The betel nut chewer ignores all this, proceeds to form the habit, urged thereto by the force of example, and then lets himself drift along, hoping that it will have no bad effects.

The alcohol and drug habits are quite as significant in shortening life as betel nut and yet men take them up quite confident in the beginning that they  will not fall victims, and then find themselves enmeshed. It is probable that the direct physical effects of none of these substances shorten life to a marked degree unless they are indulged in to very great excess, but the moral hazards which they produce, accidents, injuries of various kinds, exposure to disease, all these shorten life. Men know this very well, and yet persist in the formation of these habits.

Any habit, no matter how strong, can be broken if the individual really wishes to break it, provided the subject of it is not actually insane or on the way to the insane asylum. He need only get a motive strong enough to rouse his will, secure a consciousness of his own power, and then the habit can be broken. After all, it must never be forgotten that the only thing necessary in order to break a habit effectively is to refuse to perform a single act of it, the next time one is tempted. That breaks the habit and makes refusal easier and one need only continue the refusal until the temptation ceases.

Men who have not drawn a sober breath for years have sometimes come to the realization of the fools that they were making of themselves, the injury they were doing their relatives, or perhaps have been touched by a child's words or some religious motive, and after that they have never touched liquor again. Father Theobald Mathew's wonderful work in this regard among the Irish in the first half of the nineteenth century has been repeated by many temperance or total abstinence advocates in more recent generations. I have known a confirmed drunkard reason himself into a state of mind from which he was able to overcome his habit very successfully, though his reasoning consisted of nothing more than the recognition of the fact that suggestion was the root of his craving for alcohol. His father had been a drunkard and he had received so many warnings from all his older relatives and had himself so come to dwell on the possible danger of his own formation of the habit that he had suggested himself into the frame of mind in which he took to drink. I have known a physician on whom some half a dozen different morphine cures had been tried—always followed by a relapse—cure himself by an act of his own will and stay cured ever since because of an incident that stirred him deeply enough to arouse his will properly to activity. One day his little boy of about four was in his office when father prepared to give himself one of his usual injections of morphine. The little boy gave very close attention to all his father's manipulations, and as the doctor was hurrying to keep an appointment, he did not notice the intent eye witness of the proceedings. Just as the needle was pushed home and the piston shot down in the barrel, the little boy rushed over to his father and said, "Oh, Daddy, do that to me." Apparently this close childish observer had noted something of the look of satisfaction that came over his father's face as he felt the fluid sink into his tissues. It is almost needless to say that the shock the father received was enough to break his morphine habit for good and all. It simply released his will and then he found that if he really wanted to, he could accomplish what the various cures for the morphine habit only lead up to—and in his case unsuccessfully—the exercise of his own will power.

The word "habit" suggests nearly always, unfortunately, the thought of bad habits, just as the word "passion" implies, with many people, evil tendencies. But it must not be forgotten that there are good passions and good habits that are as helpful for the accomplishment of what is best in life as bad passions and bad habits are harmful. A repetition of acts is needed for the formation of good habits just as for the establishment of customs of evil. Usually, however, and this must not be forgotten, the beginning of a good habit is easier than the beginning of a bad habit. Once formed, the good habits are even more beneficial than the bad habits are harmful. It is almost as hard to break a good habit as a bad one, provided that it has been continued for a sufficient length of time to make that groove in the nervous system which underlies all habit. We cannot avoid forming habits and the question is, shall we form good or bad habits? Good habits preserve health, make life easier and happier; bad habits have the opposite effect, though there is some countervailing personal element that tempts to their formation and persistence.

Every failure to do what we should has its unfortunate effect upon us. We get into a state in which it is extremely difficult for us to do the right things. We have to overcome not only the original inertia of nature, but also a contrary habit. If we do not follow our good impulses, the worse ones get the upper hand. As Professor James said, for we must always recur to him when we want to have the clear expression of many of these ideas:

"Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain processes at all and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law."

It must not be forgotten that we mold not alone what we call character, but that we manifestly produce effects upon our tissues that are lasting. Indeed it is these that count the most, for health at least. It is the physical basis of will and intellect that is grooved by what we call habit. As Doctor Carpenter says:

"Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterwards into the same identical fold."

Permitting exceptions to occur when we are forming a habit is almost necessarily disturbing. The classical figure is that it is like letting fall a ball of string which we have been winding. It undoes in a moment all that we have accomplished in a long while. As Professor Bain has said it so much better than I could, I prefer to quote him:

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition under any circumstances."

This means training the will by a series of difficult acts, accomplished in spite of the effort they require, but which gradually become easier from repeated performance until habit replaces nature and dominates the situation.

Serious thinkers who faced humanity's problems squarely and devoted themselves to finding solutions for them had worked out this formula of the need of will training long ago, and it was indeed a principal characteristic of medieval education. The old monastic schools were founded on the idea that training of the will and the formation of good habits was ever so much more important than the accumulation of information. They frankly called the human will the highest faculty of mankind and felt that to neglect it would be a serious defect in education. The will can only be trained by the accomplishment of difficult things day after day until its energies are aroused and the man becomes conscious of his own powers and the ability to use them whenever he really wishes. There was a time not so long since, and there are still voices raised to that purport, when it was the custom to scoff at the will training of the older time and above all the old-fashioned suggestion that mortifications of various kinds—that is, the doing of unpleasant things just for the sake of doing them—should be practiced because of the added will power thus acquired. The failure of our modern education which neglected this special attention to the will is now so patent as to make everyone feel that there must be a recurrence to old time ideas once more.

The formation of proper habits should, then, be the main occupation of the early years. This will assure health as well as happiness, barring the accidents that may come to any human being. Good habits make proper living easy and after a time even pleasant, though there may have been considerable difficulty in the performance of the acts associated with them at the beginning. Indeed, the organism becomes so accustomed to their performance after a time that it becomes actually something of a trial to omit them, and they are missed.

Education consists much more in such training of the will than in storing the intellect with knowledge, though the latter idea has been unfortunately the almost exclusive policy in our education in recent generations. We are waking up to the fact that diminution of power has been brought about by striving for information instead of for the increase of will energy.

Professor Conklin of Princeton, in his volume on "Heredity and Environment", emphasized the fact that "Will is indeed the supreme human faculty, the whole mind in action, the internal stimulus which may call forth all the capacities and powers." He had said just before this: "It is one of the most serious indictments against modern systems of education that they devote so much attention to the training of the memory and intellect and so little attention to the training of the will, upon the proper development of which so much depends."

Nor must it be thought that the idea behind this training of the will is in any sense medievally ascetic and old-fashioned and that it does not apply to our modern conditions and modes of thinking. Professor Huxley would surely be the one man above all whom any one in our times would be least likely to think of as mystical in his ways or medieval in his tendencies. In his address on "A Liberal Education and Where to Find It", delivered before the South London Workingmen's College some forty years ago, in emphasizing what he thought was the real purpose of education, he dwelt particularly on the training of the will. He defined a liberal education not as so many people might think of it in terms of the intellect, but rather in terms of the will. He said that a liberal education was one "which has not only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the rewards which nature scatters with as free a hand as her penalties." And then he added:

"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order, ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who is no stunted ascetic but who is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

"Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, completely as a man can be, in harmony with nature."

This is the liberal education in habits of order and power that every one must strive for, so that all possible energies may be available for the rewards of good health. Details of the habits that mean much for health must be reserved for subsequent chapters, but it must be appreciated in any consideration of the relation of the will to health that good habits formed as early as possible in life and maintained conservatively as the years advance are the mainstay of health and the power to do work.