Confidential Chats with Girls

by William Lee Howard

[CHAPTER VI]
HOW TO GET WILL POWER

But just what must one do to get this power?

I have told you something about the body’s poisons, how they accumulate in the body and cause illness and nervousness. The first thing to do is to see that your body is free and kept free from these poisons, for if not kept free, the nerve cells become affected and then a perfect will power cannot be developed.

Here are a few practical things to do and not to do to keep the nerve cells so you can develop them. Sleep always alone. Sleeping with another person is unsanitary. The skin needs to get rid of its natural poisons and not take up any from another person. You would not think of breathing the air coming from another person’s lungs. Well, when you are under the sheets and blankets with another person, you can breathe through your skin the poisons coming from this companion. If you have to sleep in a room with another person, you must have your own little bed. Sleep with as little covering over you as is possible with comfort; window, of course, as I have warned you, wide open at the top. You can become accustomed to lighter clothing by gradual methods of reducing the number of blankets.

No underclothing of a material to absorb and retain perspiration should ever be worn. If you keep over your skin any clothing which has become moist through perspiration it will injure your chances of keeping a good nervous force. Take off such clothing before it becomes soggy and cold. Then take a sponge bath and put on dry clothing.

Personally, I believe that porous linen underwear is the best for all growing girls—yes, and for all women. It allows a free evaporation of perspiration, and so prevents a more or less sodden garment from remaining in contact with the skin, which so frequently happens with those who wear woolen underclothing. There is another harmful effect that woolen underclothing is apt to have; the beginning of a rheumatic condition which later on in life becomes a painful chronic rheumatism.

In girls who find that in winter linen underwear is too cold, a thin silk vest may be worn over the linen. This will be found to constitute a thoroughly warm, comfortable and safe form of underwear.

Don’t try to keep awake either by mental effort or that injurious resort of drinking coffee. Sleepiness should not be overcome as a rule, as it is Nature’s signal to stop work. In fact, Nature has signals for almost all dangers, and when we can read these signals all goes well along the road of life.

If efforts are continued in spite of the fatigue, the quality of the work is poor and the exhaustion to your nervous system will be difficult to repair. High-school girls and college young women constantly make this error and then wonder why they become so nervous at times. All sorts of things are tried to keep awake in order to study or dance, when if they would go to bed and rest, they could accomplish far more in half the time in the morning with little or no fatigue. For remember, I am trying to tell you how to get a grip upon that will power.

Yet there are times when sleepiness and fatigue must be overcome without resort to stimulants which will surely weaken any will power you may have been cultivating. These times are when you have to watch by the bedside of an ill mother or someone dear to you. When so situated, go to an open window and take deep breathing exercises. This will burn up the fatigue poisons in your body, for remember these poisons are gathering in everyone’s body when real fatigue commences.