"For goodness' sake, don't tell that to Alice," a young fellow said
of his sister. "She will have fits first, and then indigestion and
insomnia for six weeks." The lad was not a nerve specialist; neither
was he interested in nerves--except to get away from them; but he
spoke truly from common sense and his own experience with his
sister.
The point is, to drop the emotions and face the facts. If nervous
women would see the necessity for that, and would practice it, it
would be surprising to see how their nerves would improve.
I once knew a woman who discovered that her emotions were running
away with her and making her nervously ill. She at once went to work
with a will, and every time something happened to rouse this great
emotional wave she would deliberately force herself to relax and
relax until the wave had passed over her and she could see things in
a sensible light. When she was unable to go off by herself and lie
down to relax, she would walk with her mind bent on making her feet
feel heavy. When you drop the tension of the emotion, the emotion
has nothing to hold on to and it must go.
I knew another woman who did not know how to relax; so, to get free
from this emotional excitement, she would turn her attention at once
to figures, to her personal accounts or even to saying the
multiplication table. The steady concentration of her mind on dry
figures and on "getting her sums right" left the rest of her brain
free to drop its excitement and get into a normal state again.
Again it is sometimes owing to the pleasant emotions which some
women indulge in to such an extreme that they are made ill. How many
times have we heard of women who were "worn to a shred" by the
delight of an opera, or a concert, or an exciting play? If these
women only knew it, their pleasure would be far keener if they would
let the enjoyment pass through them, instead of tightening up in
their nerves and trying to hold on to it.
Nature in us always tends toward health, and toward pleasant
sensations. If we relax out of painful emotions we find good
judgment and happy instincts behind them. If we relax so that
pleasant emotions can pass over our nerves they leave a deposit of
happy sensation behind, which only adds to the store that Nature has
provided for us.
To sum up: The two main reasons why women are nervous are that they
do not take intelligent care of their bodies, and that they do not
govern their emotions; but back of these reasons is the fact that
they want their own way altogether too much. Even if a woman's own
way is right, she has no business to push for it selfishly. If any
woman thinks, "I could take intelligent care of my own body if I did
not have to work so hard, or have this or that interference," let
her go to work with her mind well armed to do what she can, and she
will soon find that there are many ways in which she can improve in
the normal care of her body, in spite of all the work and all the
interferences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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