oing the work has finally become a habit
which saves the effort of conscious attention. The details of your
routine work are directed by the subconscious. The habit will be energy
and time saving in proportion to the accuracy of your first conscious
efforts spent on the new undertaking. Thus, useful habit is the result
of active effort.

We can acquire habits of thinking and habits of feeling as well as
habits of doing.

But the other habits, the bad ones, are not acquired with effort. We
fall into them. Hazy thinking is easier than clear thinking. Suppose you
are by nature rather oversanguine or overdespondent, and you make no
genuine attempt to evolve that nature into poise. Directing _will_ to do
what _desire_ opposes is too difficult, and you go the way of least
resistance. So easily are the bad habits formed; but only with
tremendous effort of will and persistence in refusing their insistent
demands can they be broken or replaced by helpful ones.

But habits can be learned; and bad habits can be broken when an
overpowering emotion is aroused against them, possesses the mind, and
controls the will; or when reason weighs them in the balance and
judgment finds them wanting, and volition directs the mind to displace
them by others.

The nurse meets in her patients numberless habits which retard recovery
of body and make for an unwholesome mental attitude. Some patients have
the complaint habit, some the irritation habit, some the self-protection
habit, some the habit of impatience, some of reckless expression of
despair, some of loss of control, some of incessant self-attention. The
nurse who can arouse an incentive to habits of cheer expression when the
least cause of cheer appears, who can by reason, or if that is not
possible, by suggestion; by holding out incentives, or by making some
privilege depend upon control--this nurse can help her patient to
displace habits of an illness-accepting mind by habits of a
health-accepting one. Above all, let her beware of opening the way to
habits of invalidism. Some people acquire the "hospital habit" because
it is easier to give way to ill-feeling, however slight, and to be cared
for with comfort, than to encourage themselves to build up endurance by
giving little attention to minor ailments.

THE SAVING POWER OF WILL

It is not uncommon to hear a doctor say, "Nothing but his will pulled
him through that time." It does not mean quite what it says, for the
patient's w