If you are suffering from "nerves" and are able to be out of doors at all,—I mean if you are well enough to be out, and at least nine out of ten sufferers are,—get a basket ball and get some one to play with you. If at first you are poor at catching the ball you will with practice improve. Gradually toss the ball a little higher and a little higher until you have difficulty in catching it. Any woman or girl can stand this sort of open air exercise. If the weather is cold, no matter; wrap up and play anyway. But enter into the game with spirit. Playing the regular game of basket ball is too violent exercise for the nervous person. The victim of "nerves" should always keep in mind that it is mild outdoor exercise that will do him good.
Tennis is too violent an exercise for people who have had nervous trouble. Anyway, there is no use in one's doing anything that will make his heart beat like a trip-hammer. A women can toss a basket ball and laugh and get rosy cheeks and grow younger and prettier as easily as when playing tennis.
Golf is also good exercise, but a large number of people who work for a living and suffer from "nerves" would have little chance for exercise if golf were all that could be offered them. Furthermore golf is practically only a summer game, and an individual belonging to the pre-nervous class needs outdoor exercise every day in the year. But golf is excellent exercise, and there is nothing better if one has the time to give to it and has access to links.
Bicycling is splendid exercise for nervous people, but automobiles are so numerous that it is now considered almost dangerous to ride a wheel on any of our main traveled roads.
Mountain climbing, I believe, is not to be recommended for most people suffering from "nerves." I have known such people to go to Colorado and spend some time climbing mountains, and then come back much worse than when they went away. My advice to the nervous person who goes to the mountains is to be out of doors all the time he can, but to take things easy. It would be better for such a person to walk about slowly on the level ground through some of the towns or along the foothills.
Let leisure be your watchword in a hill country. I know I injured my nerves out in Colorado one summer because I was ill advised. Mountain air is good for you, but the mountains will do you more good if you simply look at them. If you think you must go to the top, take a burro. You will find that the burro will give you a lesson in how to do things in a leisurely way. Do not get out of patience with him and whip him. Remember that the burro is smarter than you are in regard to the business of mountain climbing. He has never had a nervous breakdown, and if you will let him have his own way he never will have. It will do you good to let him have his way; he affords a tremendous lesson in patience. Patience, that's just what we need, and we need it badly.
Walking slowly in the open air for two or three hours is the best exercise for man. Fortunately, like the water we drink, it is free to the poor as well as the rich.
For the nervous man who is able to do it, I know of nothing better to build up muscles and keep the liver and other internal organs in good shape than sawing wood. Don't scorn this sort of exercise because you have been told that the ex-Kaiser is taking it. That is not to be laid up against the wood or the exercise, for, quite fortunately, the wood does not care who saws it.
Get some wood, then, and a buck saw, and saw wood for your own benefit. You can do this morning and evening. Wood sawing brings into play every muscle in the body, and the exercise is just enough to make a man comfortably tired without doing him harm.
Many people who go to sanitariums for a cure pay from fifty to seventy-five dollars per week for the privilege of sawing wood, and you can take this exercise just as well and at considerably less expense at home, sawing your own wood instead of that of the sanitarium.