Personal hygiene and physical training for women

by Anna M. Galbraith

Worry is a type of fear. It is a futile regret over past mistakes and the miserable forecasting of the future. It has been called the great shortener of life under civilization—of all forms the financial one is the most frequent and, for ordinary minds, the most distressing.

Anxiety and the anxious frame of mind is in readiness to take fright in connection with our most vulnerable points on all occasions of apprehension or uncertainty. As no one’s future can be clear throughout, there is never wanting the matter of anxiety to a mind susceptible of this state.

It is a significant fact that our asylums are recruited from the classes who spend their lives amid narrow monotonous surroundings; hence the large proportion of women, especially of farmers’ wives, whose lives are probably the most narrow and the most monotonous. From this result the fixed ideas, the obsessions, and all the absorbing egotism of insanity.

With a variety of valuable and permanent interests, the mind is well safeguarded against attacks of worry. The overworked woman should increase her recreations, leave home for short intervals, travel, and have entire rest and change of scene. With increased vigor of body will come increased power of the will and the capacity to abolish worry.

Anger floods the brain with blood, and if the arteries are brittle, as they are in old age, and the individual is just as old as her arteries, the rise in arterial tension may result in the rupture of a blood-vessel, and the subsequent hemorrhage into the brain may cause an attack of apoplexy, paralysis, or even death. Attacks of anger hasten the deterioration of the arteries; in this way anger has been known to cause death.

Every violent physical sensation will react on the lungs; every powerful normal emotion, whatever its cause, will also make its influence felt on the respiratory functions. An exercise which is performed with tranquil breathing if the mind is free from care, quickly produces respiratory disturbances if the mind is brooding and preoccupied. Those who have acted as seconds in a duel to men accustomed to the use of the sword know that they become breathless in the duel much more quickly than they do in the fencing school.

Depressing emotions make themselves felt in the respirations of animals as well as of man. A sensitive horse, which is badly used at its work, or even roughly spoken to, rapidly becomes breathless.

The dog is incomparably less swift than the hare, but is able to catch it; the fright of the hunted animal disturbs its breathing and robs it of much of its strength.

In fright the disorder of the respiratory movements destroys the regularity of the interchange of gases which takes place in the lungs, between the venous blood and the atmospheric air, and thus profoundly hinders the function of the aëration of the blood.

The more impressionable the subject, the more easily do the emotions influence his respiratory actions. Hence, the superiority in certain bodily exercises of men whose minds are calm and masters of themselves.