In girls who find that in winter linen underwear is too cold, a thin silk vest may be worn over the linen. This will be found to constitute a thoroughly warm, comfortable and safe form of underwear.
Don’t try to keep awake either by mental effort or that injurious resort of drinking coffee. Sleepiness should not be overcome as a rule, as it is Nature’s signal to stop work. In fact, Nature has signals for almost all dangers, and when we can read these signals all goes well along the road of life.
If efforts are continued in spite of the fatigue, the quality of the work is poor and the exhaustion to your nervous system will be difficult to repair. High-school girls and college young women constantly make this error and then wonder why they become so nervous at times. All sorts of things are tried to keep awake in order to study or dance, when if they would go to bed and rest, they could accomplish far more in half the time in the morning with little or no fatigue. For remember, I am trying to tell you how to get a grip upon that will power.
Yet there are times when sleepiness and fatigue must be overcome without resort to stimulants which will surely weaken any will power you may have been cultivating. These times are when you have to watch by the bedside of an ill mother or someone dear to you. When so situated, go to an open window and take deep breathing exercises. This will burn up the fatigue poisons in your body, for remember these poisons are gathering in everyone’s body when real fatigue commences.
Morning is the time for all mental work if you are a high-school girl or college woman. The afternoon should be devoted to some form of mild exercise and for “low pressure” work.
Shouting, yelling and all extra efforts of the throat muscles will aid in exhausting your nervous powers, to say nothing about the unpleasant and unladylike attitude it places you in before the public. A low, sweet voice, even under excitement, is a sound pleasing to all men and a certain mark of good birth.
I need not repeat the facts about the advertised “remedies” for this trouble or that pain, for I have already warned you to let all drugs and “cures” alone as you would snakes. But there are some drinks that you should be warned against. Never take those soda water fountain’s stuff advertised as “nerve tonics.” Don’t believe the young man or boy at the fountain when he says that “Dopie” or “Bromo Tonic,” “Phosphate for your Nerves,” or “Dockine” and other similar rotten stuff will do you good and that they contain no drugs or injurious materials. Don’t believe a word of all these misleading statements. The boy or young man is there to sell, not to understand or care about your condition.