(not) (this)
I can sleep in position.
(—-) (any)
The quieting effect is immediately perceptible.
Nor is the injurious effect of the explosive habit of speech limited to the person who indulges it. The other day a lady, apparently in no haste, sauntered into a station of the "Elevated" ahead of me, holding by the hand a small boy. The boy was enjoying himself immensely, gazing about him with the wide-awake, but calmly contemplative air peculiar to childhood. Suddenly the lady saw that a train was about to leave the station, and was seized by the not uncommon compulsion to take the last train instead of the next one. She hurried the boy across the platform only to meet the closed door of the departing train.
"Isn't that provoking!" she exclaimed. And the boy began to whimper.
Although the main object of this book is to call attention to the mental rather than the physical treatment of these states, I cannot forbear reminding the reader of certain routine measures which facilitate the desired improvement in mental attitude.
It is well to start the day with a quick plunge in cold water, that is, in water of the natural temperature excepting in the cold season, when the extreme chill may be taken off to advantage. A brisk rub with rough towels should follow. One should proceed immediately from the warm bed to the bath, and should not first "cool off." A few setting-up exercises (bending the trunk forward and back, sidewise, and with a twist) may precede the bath, and a few simple arm exercises follow it. A few deep breaths will inevitably accompany these procedures. When one returns to his room he no longer notices the chill in the air, and he has made a start toward accustoming himself to, and really enjoying, lower temperatures than he fancied he could stand at all.
Every healthy adult should walk at least two miles daily in the open. We have been forced to readjust our ideas as to the distance even an elderly person can walk without harm since a pedestrian of sixty-nine has, without apparent injury, covered over one thousand miles, over ordinary roads, at an average of fifty miles a day.
The day's work should be started with the resolution that every task shall be taken up in its turn, without doubts and without forebodings, that bridges shall not be crossed until they are reached, that the vagaries of others shall amuse and interest, not distress us, and that we will live in the present, not in the past or the future. We must avoid undertaking too much, and whatever we do undertake we must try not to worry as to whether we shall succeed. This only prevents our succeeding. We should devote all our efforts to the task itself, and remember that even failure under these circumstances may be better than success at the expense of prolonged nervous agitation.
"Rest must be complete when taken and must balance the effort in work—rest meaning often some form of recreation as well as the passive rest of sleep. Economy of effort should be gained through normal concentration—that is, the power of erasing all previous impressions and allowing a subject to hold and carry us, by dropping every thought or effort that interferes with it, in muscle, nerve, and mind." (Annie Payson Call, "Power Through Repose.")
The over-scrupulous and methodical individual who can neither sleep nor take a vacation until all the affairs of his life are arranged must remind himself that this happy consummation will not be attained in his lifetime. It behooves him, therefore, if he is ever to sleep, or if he is ever to take a vacation, to do it now, nor need he postpone indefinitely