HEARTS OVERWORKED

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 20, 1879

HEARTS OVERWORKED.

It is not by overwork so much as by worry and anxiety that our hearts are disorganized. “Laborious mental exercise is healthy, unless it be made anxious by necessary or unnecessary difficulties. Regular mental labor is best carried on by introducing into it some variety. New work gives time for repair better than an attempt at complete rest, since the active mind finds it impossible to evade its particular work unless its activity be diverted into some new channel.” Business and professional men wear out their hearts by acquiring habits of express-train haste, which a little attention to method would render unnecessary.

We speak now of the heart-breaking effect of passion; and first of anger. A man is said to be “red” or “white” with rage. In using these expressions we are physiologically speaking of the nervous condition of the minute circulation of the man's blood. “Red” rage means partial paralysis of minute blood-vessels, and “white” rage means temporary suspension of the action of the prime mover of the circulation itself. But such disturbances cannot often be produced without the occurrence of permanent organic evils of the vital organs, especially of the heart and brain.

Envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness, exercise almost as destructive an influence on a man's physical nature, and particularly upon the heart, as they do upon his moral character. To say that “sorrows grieve the heart” is more than a metaphor. Cromwell hears that his son is dead, and “it went clean to my heart, that did,” is his physiologically correct description of his experience. Whenever, from undue excitement of any kind, the passions are permitted to overrule the reason, the result is disease; the heart empties itself into the brain; the brain is stricken, and both are ruined.—Chambers' Journal.