Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

In these facts lies the cause for so many nervous wrecks in young women and wives. Nature gives the nervous system of all growing girls constant and concentrating work to do. It has to take care of all the new organs of secretions, see that the breasts are fully supplied with cells ready to do their work when motherhood approaches, fit its tiny but powerful nerve endings to the womb and ovaries, develop the brain and instincts along proper and healthful lines, furnish power to the million cells of the scalp and skin, watch that the stomach pours out a proper amount of digestive fluid at a time when the girl has a craving for strange “eatables” such as slate pencils or gum arabic. The hard and enduring efforts of the nervous system to keep the girl well balanced in her thoughts all the time she is undergoing these necessary changes, should never be overlooked.

No girl between fourteen and twenty years of age should ever train for physical contests or any form of athletic competition. A girl should train for her future work—motherhood—and for this wonderful and glorious contest for bringing onto the earth the best possible men and women, she must have the highest form of nervous development, with all that this implies.

The best way to help all this effort of Nature to give you a nervous system which will stay by you when the worries and trials of life come, is never to over-exercise at any time, and not to exercise at all for a few days before and a few days after your periods. This is the time when your body needs all the reserve power for one purpose.

How can I tell when I need rest instead of exercise?

The best sign is when you think that you ought to exercise but don’t feel like making the effort. Many, many a girl has become a nervous wreck because someone forced her to exercise when she needed to be quiet and at rest.

Never exercise unless the anticipation of the play or game is a pleasure to you. When you get into that state of mind such as, “Oh, I don’t feel like making the effort; I’d rather sit here and read, or talk”—if you feel like that, if you have to make up your mind that you must exercise, but it is difficult to find any pleasure in the thing you are thinking of doing; don’t try to do it.

If you make determined efforts to do any physical work that is distasteful to you, if you work by the clock, then you are injuring yourself every minute you are at it. You are drawing upon your nervous capital, not upon the interest. This is the secret of all exercise, brain or muscle: work must be done upon saved-up interest, not upon the capital. If you use the capital, it only means for the body what it would mean for the purse—bankruptcy—sure and certain failure.

Any physical effort which leaves you feeling worse than when you started, is injuring you. This does not mean a good physically tired feeling, one in which your cheeks are aglow, when you feel elated at what you have done, when a cold shower bath feels good instead of making you shiver and covered with “gooseflesh,” but that feeling of complete exhaustion, pale cheeks, a feeling of shivering if cold baths are mentioned and a longing for something to drink that will brace you up. When this latter state is yours, you have over-exercised or else exercised at a time when your nervous motor needed a rest, not disturbance.

You sometimes hear it said, “Why, she is the last girl in the world I thought would ever get nervous troubles. She is the best girl on the team—Oh! you ought to see her muscles.”