HOW EXECUTIVES RELAX

The Choice: Slow Down or Blow Up

SINCE Theodore Roosevelt urged Americans to "work hard and play hard," the pace of U.S. business life has accelerated so furiously that most executives find it difficult to slow down under any circumstances. U.S. businessmen not only work harder than those of any other nation; medical records suggest that they also die oftener and younger from physical disorders caused by the trip-hammer pressures of competition. More than half the businessmen who come in for checkups at Boston's famed Lahey Clinic are so keyed up that they must be warned to slow down or face heart disease, ulcers, colitis and high blood pressure. Of 1,000 executives examined at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital in a two-year period, 30% were found to have "abnormal physical conditions," serious enough to affect their working efficiency and endanger their health.

"All of us are constantly running into situations that cause dozens of reactions which tend to shorten our lives," said Russell L. Moberly, director of Marquette University's Management Center, at a recent conference on executive health. There is but one remedy: "The art of relaxing."

Most U.S. executives, particularly since the President's heart attack, are uneasily aware of the mental and physical effects of overstrain. However, when they think of relaxation, the majority think in terms of strenuous, competitive recreation, such as golf. But the trouble with such sports is that businessmen tend to overexert and fret over their performance. And in recent years the golf course has become a kind of office with trees, where businessmen are as intent on arranging ways of raising their incomes as on lowering their scores. Says Norman Livermore Jr., California lumber-firm executive and onetime athlete: '"The great appeal of sports like golf, tennis and skeetshooting is that you can mark down your score on a card and have something to show for your time. But if you feel that way, you don't know too much about relaxation."

Lumberman Livermore unwinds on ski and pack trips in the Sierras each year, and, like him, the best-relaxed men turn to noncompetitive activities --fishing, swimming, horseback riding, birdwatching. Atlanta's Mayor William B. Hartsfield is a spare-time rockhound (amateur geologist). Delta Air Lines President C. E. Woolman raises $100-a-plant pedigreed orchids. World Publishing Co. President Benjamin D. Zevin finds lawn-mowing relaxing because "I know there's a hired man to do it if I don't want to."

Many executives find that fresh air helps them to relax. Chrysler Corp. President L. L. ("Tex") Colbert religiously takes a long (i 1/2-to 4-mile) walk every evening, says his mind is "anywhere but on business." Industrial Designer William Snaith of Manhattan's Raymond Loewy Associates, who sails a 47 1/2-ft. yawl in his spare time, says: "Any activity that reunites us with elemental natural forces brings back the living, breathing human being in us."

For many executives, however, the problem of relaxation is less a matter of physical exertion than the art of switching mental energy from office problems to equally absorbing outside diversions. "It's a question of substituting one set of problems for another," says Dr. Paul A. Krueger, development director for a St. Louis chemical company, who sloughs off business worries after hours as a city councilman in suburban Ferguson, Mo. More and more businessmen are finding painting an outlet for nervous energy. Eight Manhattan executives play in their own dance band. Across the U.S., businessmen's pastimes range from astronomy to zither playing, but they serve their purpose only when they consistently keep the mind away from moneymaking.

Businessmen are realizing also that relaxation cannot be limited to weekends and vacations, but must also extend to conscious conserving of energy on the job itself. CBS President Frank Stanton works a seven-day week, often ten hours a day, but he stays in top form by catnapping whenever he has a spare moment. Other executives get away from work during working hours by lunching alone, taking brief strolls, reading a chapter of a book.

The fact is, however, that U.S. businessmen who know how to relax, and are wise enough to do it in time, are in the minority. The problem of physical and mental erosion in the top executive levels of business has grown so serious that more and more U.S. companies have begun to subject executives to rigorous annual or semiannual checkups, let them take vacations every quarter instead of once a year. In the obituary columns, the insurance-company graphs, and in the companies' own performances, the results show: the most valuable and most successful men in U.S. business are the ones who have taught themselves to slow down before they blow up.

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