Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 7

to health. All insomnia is dangerous
and is incompatible with health. Nervous insomnia leads to shattered
nerves and ultimately to insanity."
2 "Overwork leads to nervous breakdown. Fatigue accumulates from
day to day and necessitates a long rest for recuperation."
3 "A carefully planned diet is essential to health, especially for the
nervous person. A variety of food, eaten at the same time, is harmful.
Acid and milk--for example, oranges and milk--are difficult to digest.
Sour stomach is a sign of indigestion."
4 "Modern life is so strenuous that our nerves cannot stand the strain."
5 "Brain work is very fatiguing. It causes brain-fag and exhaustion."
6 "Constipation is at the root of most physical ailments and is caused
by eating the wrong kind of food."
Some of these misconceptions are household words and are so all but
universally believed that the thought that they can be challenged is
enough to bewilder one. However, it is ideas like this that furnish the
material out of which many a nervous trouble is made. Based on a
half-knowledge of the human body, on logical conclusions from faulty
premises, on hastily swallowed notions passed on from one person to
another, they tend by the very power of an idea to work themselves out
to fulfilment.

THE POWER BEHIND IDEAS
=Ideas Count.= Ideas are not the lifeless things they may appear. They
are not merely intellectual property that can be locked up and ignored
at will, nor are they playthings that can be taken up or discarded
according to the caprice of the moment. Ideas work themselves into the
very fiber of our being. They are part of us and they do things. If they
are true, in line with things as they are, they do things that are for our
good, but if they are false, we often discover that they have an
altogether unsuspected power for harm and are capable of astonishing
results, results which have no apparent relation to the ideas responsible
for them and which are, therefore, laid to physical causes. Thinking
straight, then, becomes a hygienic as well as a moral duty.
=Ideas and Emotions.= Ideas do not depend upon themselves for their
driving-power. Life is not a cold intellectual process; it is a vivid
experience, vibrant with feeling and emotion. It therefore happens that
the experiences of life tend to bring ideas and emotions together and
when an idea and an emotion get linked up together, they tend to stay
together, especially if the emotion be intense or the experience is often
repeated.
The word emotion means outgoing motion, discharging force. This
force is like live steam. An emotion is the driving part of an instinct. It
is the dynamic force, the electric current which supplies the power for
every thought and every action of a human life.
Man is not a passive creature. The words that describe him are not
passive words. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think about man at all
except in terms of desire, impulse, purpose, action, energy. There are
three things that may be done with energy: First, it may be frittered
away, allowed to leak, to escape. Secondly, it may be locked up; this
results usually in an explosion, a finding of destructive outlets. Finally,
it may be harnessed, controlled, used in beneficent ways. Health and
happiness depend upon which one of the three courses is taken.
CHARACTER AND HEALTH

Evidently, it is highly important to have a working knowledge of these
emotions and instincts; important to know enough about them and their
purpose to handle them rightly if they do not spontaneously work
together for our best character and health. The problems of character
and the problems of health so overlap that it is impossible to write a
book about nervous disorders which does not at the same time deal
with the principles of character-formation. The laws and mechanisms
which govern the everyday life of the normal person are the same laws
and mechanisms which make the nervous person ill. As Boris Sidis
puts it, "The pathological is the normal out of place." The person who
is master of himself, working together as a harmonious whole, is
stronger in every way than the person whose forces are divided. Given
a little self-knowledge, the nervous invalid often becomes one of the
most successful members of society,--to use the word successful in the
best sense.
=It Pays to Know.= To be educated is to have the right idea and the
right emotion in the right place. To be sure, some people have so well
learned the secret of poise that they do not have to study the why nor
the how. Intuition often far outruns knowledge. It would be foolish
indeed to suggest that only the person versed in psychological lore is
skilled in