Most of the causes for irregularities and scanty flows are due to your unhygienic methods of living and playing. Sleeping in rooms where fresh air only gets in through a crack, insufficient and improper food and too much tea and coffee, will soon cause irregularities and other menstrual troubles. Catching cold or getting wet feet, damp skirts flapping around thinly-clad ankles just before or during the time of your monthlies, will also bring you to some womb trouble. Then the influence of the mind upon all these matters plays a very important part in your health. Evil suggestions from girls or youths, seeing plays which you ought not to see, reading all that rotten stuff put out for young women and girls to read and dream over――I don’t mean the nasty ones, but all those which unduly excite the imagination and throw a false light upon life――the Duke, the Prince and Villain kind――the virtuous blonde maiden and the hard-working hero stuff, you all know what I mean. There is plenty of good literature, exciting stories, to be read without reading a lot of cheap tinsel and ready-made romances which have no more to do with real life than a mask has to do with the human features. You can over-exercise, become too much excited over contests in the gymnasium, use up force to such an extent that your growing womanly functions become weakened and sometimes dried up. No girl of a nervous temperament should go into any athletic contest, team or personal. Such a girl should not play basketball, attempt any stunts on horizontal bars or flying rings; nothing, in fact, which calls for a strain upon the nervous system. The function of the womb, as well as of all the sex organs, are directly affected by the nervous system. You can never be a strong woman, complete in all that belongs to a woman and her career, if you, as a young woman, over-strain the nervous system. Hundreds of girls who are playing contests of basketball, to see which team is to be the champion of the state or the town, are going to suffer from all this excitement. Your teachers do not take into serious consideration your growing sex organs. They do not seem to know what it means for a girl to get over-excited at any time during her development, that there is nothing except alcohol which will arouse dangerous impulses more than athletic excitement. So do be careful of your exercise. On the other hand, no exercise will also produce some disturbance of the menstrual period. If you do not take some form of useful exercise, poisons accumulate in your system. This causes unnatural fat to pile up around your ovaries and kidneys; in fact, it will bring you to a sad state in middle life if you have neglected to exercise in a careful and regular manner when you are growing.