To work or not to work? That is the question. The answer for most people is not to work and the reason is EXHAUSTION. Exhaustion means feeling extremely tired or weak.

When you have been working for a long time on a job and you have been treated badly while working, you may feel that you cannot do it anymore. You are tired. Even the thought of doing certain things makes you tired. You try to increase your energy by drinking coffee and force your way along just a little bit further. But if you do that, you are not thinking correctly because the answer to exhaustion has little, if anything, to do with energy.

Exhaustion is a very important subject not only to a person working to earn his living, but also to the way he feels.

Scientology has found that a person becomes less capable when he cannot work.

The subject of exhaustion is also the subject of people who were stopped from working in some way. Take, for instance, injured soldiers and sailors who are sent to a hospital during war. It was found that after spending a few months in the military hospital, a soldier or sailor begins to feel sad and like he had no future. It can get so bad that the person might not even be able enough to go back to fighting for his country. This is not necessarily the result of his lowered abilities. It is the result of injury as well as his not being able to do anything. A soldier who is wounded and cared for in a field hospital—one that is set up close to where the fighting is happening—and is returned to duty the moment he can possibly carry out such duties will be found, to a large degree, to still be happy and confident in himself. Of course, the injury he received often makes him less able to do the things he was doing or to do the things he once thought were best. But even so, he is in better shape than a soldier who is sent to a hospital away from the battle itself. The soldier who is sent to the hospital away from the battle is being told, according to the way he thinks, that he is not particularly necessary to the war.

In Scientology, it was discovered that you do not become exhausted simply because you have worked too long or too hard. You become exhausted when you have worked so long that you have started to remember a past injury or pain or bad feelings that were caused by something in the past. When this happens too often, the person feels he is not able to do as much, as he is always exhausted. There is a point, however, which is below exhaustion. This is the point of not even knowing that you are tired. You can go on working and working and working, without even realizing that you are working at all, and you suddenly collapse from the tiredness you were not even feeling. When this happens to someone, he has failed to control things. Eventually, he is incapable of handling anything that looks like the tools he needs to do his job and so he is unable to work. The person can then have many nasty things said about him. He can be called “lazy,” he can be called “a bum,” he can be called “criminal.” But the truth of the matter is that he is no more able to straighten out and correct his own life by himself—without expert help—than he is capable of diving to the center of the Earth.

Fortunately, there are some ways to recover your energy and your excitement to work. They are quite simple and very easy to understand and do.