Bad Habits.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 20, 15 May 1902, Page 20

Bad Habits.

If you ever find yourself getting into the habit of blinking your eyes rapidly without any ciuse, stamp the inclination out at once or it will grow into an incurable habit that will make your eyesight fail long before it ought. Natural blinking is necessary to clear and moisten the eye, and the average number of natural blinks per minute is about 20. These are necessary, and you do them unconsciously. But a nervous 'blinker' will, says a writer in Ansi'cers, get in something like a couple of hundred in a minute in bad cube?, and the result of this is a big development of the eyelid rau«cles, and a counter-irritation that acts on the optio nerve, and renders the si^ht daily more weak and irritable. Once contract this habit, and you will find you cannot bear a strong light or read small typ<*, and you will get worse and worse. The cure consists in keeping the eyes shut for at least ten minutes an hour, and bathing the lids in warm water. Do you ever feel inclined to breathe through your mouth ? If 80 you had better make up your mind at once to keep that habit iv memory and never give it a chance to increase. If you let it grow on you, you will let the lower half of your lungs fall almost entirely into disuse, for they are not filled if you do breathe through your tnnuth ; the lun«s will be weakened, and left an easy prey to maladies of the chest, and your system will only be fed by about half the oxymn it requires. Thousands of people contract this dangerous habit, which really is a certain lite-Bhortener. Even if you sleep with your mouth open — still more people do this — you will get about half the Benefit from a night's rebt you ought to, and this is the main cause of ' that tired feeling ' on waking in the morning, And if there is an epidemic floating about, you double your chances of catching it, and also halve your chances of recovering, as you weaken the lungs. Another bad habit for the health, though not quite so dangerous, is the common trick of moistening the lips with the tongue. If you make a confirmed habit of this, you will make your lipa drier and elrier, and render the nerves of them terribly sensitive. Eveuti«ally you will contract permanently cracked lips, which, besides being paintul and annoying, dispose you seriously to the danger of cancer. Do you pick your teeth ? If so, don't. It will make a difference of ytars in the life of your ' ivories,' and send you to the dentiht before your time. This habit, even after meals, will sooner or later start the enamel of your teeth and give decay its chance to creep in at the brtach, which it ceitainly will do. Besides this tome people contract, a p rp tual habit of picking their teeth when they have nothing else to no, mh! this will put a good sound set of te th on the road to decay at lea^t six or seven years before they ought to go. You will lose jmir sleep, pay half a dozen dentist's bills, and then wish you had left toothpicks alone. Brush your teeth instead with carbolic powder after evety meal if possible A rather absurd, but quite common, habit, and &v uncommonly bad one, is that of scratching one's head when perplexed. Tliis is often done facetiously at first, and in absent-minded people bfcomea a porfeot mania. It is nearly always done in the same place — over the ear — ancK by breaking up the fibres of the hair and imtating the roots, will eventually thin out the hair on that spot into almost a bald patch, which will spread. Numberg of people have this patch without even realising how they cause it.