How Can Your Youth and Beauty Last?

Practice athletic games. Expose yourself to air and sun. Follow a fixed dietary regimen. Avoid worry, grief, and emotional upsets...

The lady who was called to the witness stand in court was beautiful, but she had passed the age of youth. So the judge said: 'Let her begin by stating her age, and then take the oath.'

This is one jest among the dozens with which woman is teased on account of her age; but it points, in reality, to woman's dread of parting with the age of youth, and of admitting that parting, even if her features and her identity card bear witness to it.

For youth, in woman's eyes, is radiant beauty, overpowering charm, and overflowing health — all of them elements dear to woman's heart, and companions of the years of girlhood as blossom and fragrance are companions of the season of spring. And how should a woman admit to middle age, to say nothing of old age, when both are a diminution of her femininity, her beauty, and her dominion over hearts!

There is no doubt that woman has a claim upon nature to furnish her with a fresh youth, brimming with femininity; but youth itself has a claim upon woman: that she preserve it, care for it, and keep it for the longest possible stretch of life.

The means of this prolonging of the years of youth are many. Among them: the practice of wholesome athletic games; judicious exposure to the air and the rays of the sun; and the following of a dietary regimen suited to the body's nature and its inclination toward stoutness or thinness. Yet there is another means without which these avail nothing: the avoidance of worry, grief, and emotional upsets. Nothing is more dangerous than these to youth, nor more potent in disfiguring the features of bodily and spiritual beauty at one and the same time. When you see a lady whose walk has grown sluggish, whose brow is furrowed, from whose face the water of beauty has ebbed, and whom gray hairs have flecked while she is still in the prime of life — then accuse the abiding worry, or the gnawing grief, or the killing jealousy, or the bitter rancor, or some other of those insistent, agitating emotions that keep the nervous system in a perpetual state of anxiety and tension.

Here is a young mother who never ceases raging at her children and complaining of their mischief and their rebellion against the laws of the household, which only grown-ups understand.

And here is a housewife who remains in continual fits of fury over the doings of her servants, however trifling they may be. And here is a wife overcome by her jealousy, forever in a haunting doubt about her husband's conduct, though he be among the best of men...

And here is a girl vexed that her companion has secured the smart dress and the new shoes — did she but know what envy robs of her youth and her health, she would gladly ransom them with the dress and the shoes!

And here is a lady of delicate sensibility who remains in perpetual pain, because she attaches great weight to the conventions of society and forgives no slight that comes to her from these conventions, however small it may be.

All of these commit the worst of crimes against their own youth; they collaborate with time in hurrying old age upon themselves, and they expose their health and their spirits to all manner of ills. For tests have proved that the violent emotions, one and all — above all grief, worry, and anger — pave the way for the appearance of hysteria, neurasthenia, melancholia, insanity, shaking palsy, palpitation of the heart, angina pectoris, enlargement of the thyroid gland, stomach ulcer, diabetes, and others; just as they wreck the youth of mind and spirit, transforming a woman from an active, intelligent, cheerful lady into a feeble, gloomy, despairing one.

We should like to list the chief physiological disturbances that accompany a fit of anger or a state of grief and fear.

First: the digestive apparatus stops its movement.

Second: the secretion of the digestive juices is cut off.

Third: the blood pressure rises.

Fourth: the heartbeats quicken.

Fifth: the spleen contracts and releases its store of red corpuscles into the blood.

Sixth: the two adrenal (or suprarenal) glands secrete the substance adrenaline.

Seventh: the amount of sugar in the blood rises.

Eighth: the skin streams with sweat.

Ninth: the bladder and the bowels sometimes empty themselves.

Anger in particular is a matter of importance in man, because it awakens the sympathetic nerve so as to put the muscular and organic forces under its control on the alert to defend the body; yet it is accompanied by a host of violent disturbances — some connected with the blood vessels, such as fainting and the paling and flushing of the face; some with the heart, such as palpitation and tightness of the chest; some with breathing, such as asthma; some with the stomach and bowels, such as loss of appetite and intestinal colic; and some with the distribution of water and salts in the tissues, such as headache and disturbance of the urine.

People's occupations and worries have multiplied with the multiplying of the burdens and costs of living, and the proportion of nervous and mental illnesses in this age has become greater than it was in past ages, when life was easy and lenient, with no hardship in it and no exhaustion. Yet however toilsome and exhausting life may seem to people, and however little rest its daily incidents may leave the nervous system, most of these incidents and events can be avoided, or their weight lightened, with a measure of forbearance, patience, and breadth of understanding.

It is certain that the cheerful and hopeful, who look upon life with the eye of hope and optimism, who do not allow their emotions to swerve them from the path of moderation and good sense, and who do not cower before misfortunes, are sounder of body, longer of life, and fresher in youth and beauty than the complainers and mourners, who magnify petty worries until they fancy them a mountain of griefs.

So be, madam, ever cheerful and hopeful, that your youth — and its dominion over hearts — may endure.