[Nerves and Common Sense by Annie Payson Call]@TWC D-Link book
Nerves and Common Sense

CHAPTER XXII
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Let her stop even twice a day, lift her chest off her stomach, see that the lifting of her chest takes her shoulders back, let her head gently fall back, take a long quiet breath in that attitude, then bring the head up slowly, take some long quiet breaths like gentle sighs, gradually let the lungs settle back into their habitual state of breathing, and then try the exercise again.
If this exercise is repeated three times in succession with quiet care, its effect will be very evident in the refreshment felt when a woman begins sewing again.
At the very most it can only take two minutes to go through the whole exercise and be ready to repeat it.
That will mean six minutes for the three successive times.
Six minutes can easily be made up by the renewed vigor that comes from the long breath and change of attitude.

Stopping for the exercise three times a day will only take eighteen--or at the most twenty-minutes out of the day's work and it will put much more than that into the work in new power.
Third--We must remember that we need not sew in a badly cramped position.

Of course the exercises will help us out of the habitually cramped attitude, but we cannot expect them to help us so much unless we make an effort while sewing to be as little cramped as possible.
The exercises give us a new standard of erectness, and that new standard will make us sensitive to the wrong attitude.
We will constantly notice when our chests get cramped and settled down on our stomachs and by expanding them and lifting them, even as we sew, the healthy attitude will get to be second nature.
Fourth--We must sew with our hands and our arms, not with our spines, the backs of our necks, or our legs.

The unnecessary strain she puts into her sewing makes a woman more tired than anything else.

To avoid this she must get sensitive to the strain, and every time she perceives it drop it; consciously, with a decided use of her will, until she has established the habit of working without strain.


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