The Causes of Depleted Energy
By Margaret Evans
If you are disposed to grumble at everything about you, if trials annoy you, and you become irritable and “out of sorts” when little things go wrong, you may be sure an enemy is at work in the system. Your energy is being exhausted in some way, and your vitality is at a low ebb. A greater amount of force is being expended than the system can generate, and you should at once search for the cause. It may be traceable to imprudence in eating or drinking, or it may be due to overwork or overstudy. Do not begin to dose with this or that remedy which has been advertised in the daily papers or recommended by a friend, but carefully scrutinize your habits, and ascertain the cause of the indisposition. When this has been discovered and removed, a speedy disappearance of the morbid symptoms will follow. Your first duty is to find and remove the cause, whatever it may be, or it will leave you a physical and mental wreck. No one can accomplish anything great in this world if any portion of the machinery of his body or mind is out of order. Immediate attention should be given to it if it is not working with that ease and perfection that a perfectly constructed and well-kept machine is capable of doing. Look well into the daily life, and find in what way the system is being robbed of its nourishment. No defective machine can turn out good work; and if some serious obstacle is clogging its wheels, the more one tries to use it, the greater will be the damage it suffers, and the more difficult to put it in proper repair. It may be that you are wearing yourself out with the excesses of fashionable dissipation, irregular habits of rest, late suppers, attendance at the theaters, evening parties, and the like. Your condition may proceed from excessive smoking, or the using of stimulants. Tea and coffee have much to do with the depraved condition into which the nervous system often settles. Pastry and knickknacks lay the foundation for disease, and are the direct cause of a large amount of dyspepsia. Ices, wines, confectionery, and other highly indigestible material, only produce impoverished blood, and are in the highest degree detrimental to health. Nature is long-suffering, and in every possible way tries to build a bulwark against disease, but sooner or later the stomach remonstrates at such transgressions, and you are called upon to pay the penalty by suffering the pangs of indigestion, and an utter unfitness for the performance of the duties of life. Perhaps your morbid condition is the result of improper habits of dress. Tight lacing is a most fruitful source of the numerous ills peculiar to women. Heavy, trailing skirts, suspended from the waist, pulling down on the hips, and dragging down the internal organs of the abdomen, are the direct cause of so many weak backs, side-aches, and various kinds of displacements. Perhaps your mental faculties are being overtaxed. You may be burning both ends of your candle, sitting up late at night, and expending nervous energy by overstudy or worry, when both mind and body require rest. Do not go through life handicapped by loss of sleep and consequent inertia. Perhaps you need more physical exercise. Take it regularly, systematically, and at proper intervals. Good muscular development is attended with good digestion and a well-balanced nervous system. Another means of undermining, the healthy tone of the system, which we have thought to be quite as important, is a guilty conscience. “So doth conscience make cowards of us all.” Distress of mind and remorse for guilt do not tend to make one physically well. Let us seek with Paul “to have always a conscience void of offense toward God, and toward men.”