re not many of us who are at small pains to
hide the fact that we "didn't sleep a wink last night," or that we
"can't stand" a ticking clock or a crowing rooster? We sometimes
consider it a mark of distinction to have a delicate appetite and to
have to choose our food with care. If we are frank with ourselves,
some of us will have to admit that our own ailments seem interesting,
while the other person's ills are "merely nervous" or imaginary or
abnormal. After all, a good many of us will have to plead guilty to
the charge of nervousness.

We have only to read the endless advertisements of cathartics and
"internal baths," or to check up the quantity of laxatives sold at any
drug store, to realize the wide-spread bondage to that great bugaboo
constipation. He who is constipated can hardly prove an alibi to
"nerves." Then there are the school-teachers and others who are worn
out at the end of each year's work, hardly able to hold on until
vacation; and the people who can't manage their tempers; and those who
are upset over trifles; and those who are dissatisfied with life. To a
certain degree, at least, all of these are nervous persons. The list
grows.

=Half-Power Engines.= These people are all supposed to be well. They
keep going--by fits and starts--and as they are used to running on
three cylinders, with frequent stops for repairs, they accept this
rate of living as a matter of course, never realizing that they might
be sixty horse-power engines, instead of their little thirty or forty.
For this large and neglected class of people psychotherapy has a
stimulating message, and for them many of the following pages have
been written.

=The Real Sufferers.= These so-called normal people are merely on the
fringe of nervousness, on the border line between normality and
disease. Beyond them there exists a great company of those whose lives
have been literally wrecked by "nerves." Their work interrupted or
given up for good, their minds harassed by doubts and fears, their
bodies incapacitated, they crowd the sanatoria and the health resorts
in a vain search for health. From New England to Florida they seek,
and on to Colorado and California, and 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 ne