How to Relax

Dr. Josephine L. Rathbone worries about people who worry. Dr. Rathbone, a stocky, cheerful little woman who rowed four years on the Wellesley crew and got three degrees in physiology, decided a few years ago that one of the chief troubles with modern men & women is that they do not know how to relax. So, at Columbia University's Teachers College, she started a relaxing clinic. Last week, announcing that in the spring she would give a course to teach people how to teach people how to relax, Dr. Rathbone reported some of her observations on what makes people tense, and what to do about it.

People who go to Dr. Rathbone to be relaxed usually complain of pains in their backs and legs, stiff necks, indigestion, insomnia. First thing she does is to have them thoroughly examined by a doctor. Then she massages and applies hot pads to their tensest muscles. Because relaxing is largely psychological, Dr. Rathbone puts her pupils through a course in learning how to control their muscles, cultivating the will to relax. When they go to bed, she advises them, they must repeat to themselves: "I will not permit the tensions that have beset me during the day to return."

Some Rathbone findings:

> Most afflicted by tension are patriots, close students of world affairs, Sunday drivers, businessmen, energetic and ambitious people generally.

>Moderately religious people are more relaxed than unbelievers or religious fanatics.

> Tense individuals should lie down and relax for five minutes, at frequent intervals.

> To relieve insomnia, go to bed an hour earlier than usual each night for two weeks, obliterate worries with pleasant thoughts of childhood.

One of Dr. Rathbone's tensest cases: a young woman who complained that she trembled, was stiff in the knees and neck, could not sleep. Dr. Rathbone found that the patient was 30, unmarried, that her fiance had lost his job, that she had been financially ruined by the Depression, that she had recently broken a leg. Dr. Rathbone's (and her patient's) conclusion: "Must overcome tenseness to regain health."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.