Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

The influence of the will upon the emotions is a matter of the highest importance in regard to the direction of the current of thought and the determination of actions. Control your passions; govern your temper. We can no more avoid feeling mentally hurt than we can feeling physical hurt, but we have exactly the same power of the withdrawal of the attention from the mental hurt as from the bodily pain, by determinately fixing it upon some other object.

“I am, I ought, I can, I will,” are, as has been well said, the only firm foundation-stones upon which we can base our attempts to climb into a higher sphere of existence. The first implies a faculty of introspection, the second a moral judgment, the third a consciousness of freedom to act, the fourth a determination to exercise that power.

The influence of the will on the conduct is first automatic, through previously acquired habits; second, through the emotional state, and third, by our notions of right and wrong. In the fundamental principles of living must be included a genuine consideration of the right of others. The memory is an automatic reproduction of ideas, the mechanism of recording processes.

The education of the will, the power of breasting the current of the desires, and doing for long periods of time what is distasteful and painful, all tend to increase the power of inhibition and strength of the will. Nothing that is learned in youth is really so valuable as the power and habit of self-restraint, of self-sacrifice, of energetic, continuous, and concentrated effort.

Seneca claims that difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body. Plato said, that “self-conquest is the greatest of all the victories.”

Character lies preëminently in the sphere of the will, and anything which weakens the will saps the worth of life at all points. The strength of will bears not only on character, but on happiness and influence as well. The leader must show reserved power, and make it plain that she has herself well in hand, to secure confidence. “Will makes men giants.”

The Effect of Mental Attitude on the Physical Health.—The ordinary operations of the mind have little effect on the physical condition, but such emotions as fear, worry, anxiety, grief, despair, anger, hatred, and the like depressing emotions act directly upon the muscular and nervous mechanisms, profoundly affecting the secretions and the excretions, and stamp themselves upon the very tissues of the organism.

Of all the mental attributes the emotions are the most exhausting. A woman can spend more of her strength in five minutes of unnatural excitement than in a day of calm, steady brain work.

A perfect temper is not only a prime requisite for a club president, but for every man and woman in this hard workaday world, with its fierce competitions, its petty jealousies, and the stiletto practices of the cowardly, and it is one of the greatest preventives of indigestion, insomnia, and nervous prostration.

Forget your grievances. Every time that one repeats them to herself or to a friend she lives them over again, and the original trouble was but the merest moiety of suffering compared to a wound torn open afresh every day. To cherish a vindictive spirit does a vast amount of injury to the possessor of that spirit. In view of the facts of the beneficial effects of fighting upon small boys, and that the combative propensities of the Irish peasant commonly evaporates with his shillelagh, it would seem commendable to introduce boxing matches among women as a way to settle their differences.