Archive Gallery: A Vintage Guide to Summer Vacation

In today's busy society, it can be hard to justify taking a vacation from work. But according to Dr. C. Ward Crampton, summer getaways are imperative to overall productivity. Using blood pressure as the standard for vitality, Crampton devised a method of measuring how much energy we expend doing various activities. By comparing blood pressure and pulse rates before and after a task, he said, we can calculate how much energy that task cost our body. Doing work between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon costs us ten percent of our overall energy, but even a full night of sleep only recovers about seven percent. As a consequence, we lose three percent of our energy per day so that by Friday, we are far less efficient at work than we were on Monday. Nor are Saturday and Sunday enough to compensate for what we've lost. The only way to prevent exhaustion is to take a break. Crampton's findings on vitality also stated that laughter is worth an hour of sleep as the act of laughing "stimulates the splanchnic veins," which in turn revitalizes our liver and abdominal veins "by a natural massage."

Read the full story in "Why You Need a Summer Vacation"

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