Nerves and Common Sense

by Annie Payson Call

It would be wrong to take vigorous physical exercise after great brain or body fatigue, but entire change of attention and gentle exercise is just what is needed, although care should always be taken not to keep at it too long. Any readers who make up their minds to try this process of resting will soon prove its happy effect.

A quotation from a recent daily paper reads, "'Rest while you work,' says Annie Payson Call,"—and then the editor adds, "and get fired," and although the opportunity for the joke was probably thought too good to lose, it was a natural misinterpretation of a very practical truth.

I can easily imagine a woman—especially a tired out and bitter woman—reading directions telling how to work restfully and exclaiming with all the vehemence of her bitterness: "That is all very well to write about. It sounds well, but let any one take hold of my work and try to do it restfully.

"If my employer should come along and see me working in a lazy way like that, he would very soon discharge me. No, no. I am tired out; I must keep at it as long as I can, and when I cannot keep at it any longer, I will die—and there is the end."

"It is nothing but drudge, drudge for your bread and butter—and what does your bread and butter amount to when you get it?"

There are thousands of women working to-day with bodies and minds so steeped in their fatigue that they cannot or will not take an idea outside of their rut of work. The rut has grown so deep, and they have sunken in so far that they cannot look over the edge.

It is true that it is easier to do good hard work in the lines to which one has been accustomed than to do easy work which is strange. Nerves will go on in old accustomed habits—even habits of tiresome strain—more easily than they will be changed into new habits of working without strain.

The mind, too, gets saturated with a sense of fatigue until the fatigue seems normal, and to feel well rested would—at first—seem abnormal. This being a fact, it is a logical result that an habitually tired and strained mind will indignantly refuse the idea that it can do more work and do it better without the strain.

There is a sharp corner to be turned to learn to work without strain, when one has had the habit of working with it. After the corner is turned, it requires steady, careful study to understand the new normal habit of working restfully, and to get the new habit established.

When once it is established, this normal habit of work develops its own requirements, and the working without strain becomes to us an essential part of the work itself.