WAR DANGER STIMULUS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 June 1941, Page 5

WAR DANGER STIMULUS

EFFECT ON STANDARDS OF FITNESS. It can be said with assurance that the standard of fitness in Britain is higher than when the war began, writes a medical correspondent of “The Times." Nor does this apply only to the young men and women; older men and women have rediscovered health in the numberless activities which have been forced upon them. That is another way of saying we have been deprived of the accustomed opportunity to think about ourselves, our advancing years, and the ailments which are attending them. The moral is clear enough; there is nothing quite so depressing as one's own troubles or anticipated troubles. None of us carries within himself enough resistance to throw trouble to the winds. Some call from without, some enthusiasm, is necessary to keep the wolf from the door. Some danger too. perhaps. Man does not seem to have been designed by his Creator for an entirely safe life, and if he happens to get it tends to fall into melancholy. Danger, on the contrary, awakens resistance and the awakening is nearly always joyous. There is a physical basis for all this. The human body, like the bodies of animals, is so constituted that its ordering depends upon stimuli received from the outside world. Every stimulus demands its appropriate reaction if it is not to exert a harmful effect, and by these reactions the creature lives and works and maintains its strength. Absence of. stimuli means, therefore, absence of reaction; and that means a lower level of vigour.