A CURE FOR NERVES.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 May 1928, Page 7

A CURE FOR NERVES.

Most of us have echoed the sentiments expressed in the jingle, “I wish I was a little rock, a-sitting on a hill, doing nothing all day long, but just a-sitting still”; but our sense of “duty” fo-rlbids even half an hour given to the delectable pastime of “just asitting still,” with the mind and body perfectly inactive.

If we could force ourselves to a condition of complete idleness, if only for thirty minutes each day, we should be a much more cheerful and nervously a much healthier sex than we are.

Men have learned the art of resting properly. If one could tot up the number of hours the average man spends each week just sitting idly with his pipe in his mouth it would mount to a pretty substantial total. As a consequence men are vastly less prone to nerves than are women, a fact usually put down to a normally more robust physique, but duo more or less to a natural habit of resting.

Observe the woman whose nerves are intermittently on the verge of snapping and it will be seen that she is usually of the type that never “lets up” for a moment, never takes a spell, rushes from one thing to another as though each moment were her last, and who regards it as a crime to spend half an hour “just a-sitting still” when a basket of mending shrieks aloud for attention.

She is the type who, when she goes for a ‘‘holiday,” lugs along a pile of sewing for “recreation,” and who returns to her home more weary than she was when she went away. The consciousness' that her sewing has not got behind may be a source of gratification to her, but her actual gain in fresh energy has been negligible. It seems like bad advice to urge housewives and other busy women to let the mending go hang once in a while—put it out of sight where it cannot act as a reproach—and “loaf” contentedly.

The mending will not suffer in the long run for the little bit of neglect, and the real rest will generate such a store of fresh energy and enthusiasm for work that it will be done in half the time and with less than half the fag.