Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 3

perhaps to Hawaii and the Orient,
thinking by rest and change to pull themselves together and become
whole again. There are thousands of these people--lawyers, preachers,
teachers, mothers, social workers, business and professional folk of all
sorts, the kind of persons the world needs most--laid off for months or
years of treatment, on account of some kind of nervous disorder.
=Various Types of Nervousness.= The psychoneuroses are of many
forms.[3] To some people "nerves" means nervous prostration,
breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or
unsteady heart,--all signs of so-called neurasthenia or nerve-weakness.
To others the word "nerves" calls up memories of strange, emotional
storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to sweep the sky clear of
everything else, and to pass as they came, leaving the victim and the
family equally mystified as to their meaning. These strange alterations
of personality are but one manifestation of hysteria, that myriad-faced
disorder which is able to mimic so successfully the symptoms of almost
every known disease, from tumors and fevers to paralysis and
blindness.
[Footnote 3: The technical term for nervousness is
_psycho-neurosis_--disease of the psyche. There are certain "real

neuroses" such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an
organic impairment of nerve-tissue. However, as this book deals only
with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term neuroses
and _psycho-neuroses_ indiscriminately, to denote nervous or
functional disorders.]
To still other people nervous trouble means fear,--just terrible fear
without object or meaning or reason (anxiety neuroses); or a definite
fear of some harmless object (phobia); or a strange, persistent, recurrent
idea, quite foreign to the personality and beyond the reach of reason
(obsession); or an insistent desire to perform some absurd act
(compulsion); or perhaps, a deadly and pall-like depression (the blues).
As a matter of fact, the neuroses include all these varieties, and various
shades and combinations of each. There are, however, certain mental
characteristics which recur with surprising regularity in most of the
various phases--dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of being
alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry,
self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism, fixed
belief in one's powerlessness, along whatever line it may be.
Underneath all these differing forms of nervousness are the same
mechanisms and the same kind of difficulty. To understand one is to
understand all, and to understand normal people as well; for in the last
analysis we are one and all built on the same lines and governed by the
same laws. The only difference is, that, as Jung says, "the nervous
person falls ill of the conflicts with which the well person battles
successfully."
SUMMARY
Since at least seventy-five per cent. of all the people who apply to
physicians for help are nervous patients; and since these thousands of
patients are not among the mental incompetents, but are as a rule
among the highly organized, conscientious folk who have most to
contribute to the leadership of the world, it is obviously of vital
importance to society that its citizens should be taught how to solve
their inner conflicts and keep well. In this strategic period of

reconstruction, the world that is being remodeled cannot afford to lose
one leader because of an unnecessary breakdown.
There is greater need than ever for people who can keep at their tasks
without long enforced rests; people who can think deeply and
continuously without brain-fag; people who can concentrate all their
powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on
unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the
top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep,
well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a state
of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of knowing how,
will appear more clearly in later chapters.
CHAPTER II
_In which we learn what "nerves" are not, and get a hint of what they
are_
THE DRAMA OF NERVES
AN EXPLODED THEORY
="Nerves" not Nerves.= Pick up any newspaper, turn over a few pages,
and you will be sure to come to an advertisement something like this:
Tired man, your nerves are sick! They need rest and a tonic to restore
their worn-out depleted cells!
No wonder people have believed this kind of thing. It has been dinned
into their ears for many years. They have read it with their breakfast
coffee and gazed at it in the street cars and even heard it from their
family physicians, until it has become part and parcel of their thinking;
yet all the time the fundamental idea has been false, and now, at last,
the theory is exploded.
So far as the modern laboratory can discover, the nerves of the most
confirmed neurotic are perfectly healthy. They are not starved, nor
depleted, nor exhausted;