The Massachusetts-based writer and teacher Annie Payson Call began her 1905 health manual Freedom of Life with an anecdote so vivid it might send any burned-out employee in 2022 into a fit of bitter recognition:
“I am so tired I must give up work,” said a young woman with a very strained and tearful face; and it seemed to her a desperate state, for she was dependent upon work for her bread and butter. If she gave up work she gave up bread and butter, and that meant starvation.
Alas! This worker’s plight is as old as industrial capitalism itself. But who is to blame for her desperate state? Call, a nationally recognized teacher of “nerve training” who had developed sophisticated techniques for self-soothing, wrote in the idiom of a self-help guru; she was resistant to linking personal discomfort and systemic iniquities. “It is not the work that tires you at all,” she tells this anonymous woman, “it is the way you do it.”
If you, transported to the turn of the twentieth century, were to visit Call in her private office on Arlington Street in Boston with similar complaints of nervous strain, the advice she would offer might strike you as rather contemporary. Call told the overtaxed young woman to perform her job “the lazy way,” by tensing only the muscles directly engaged in the task at hand and relaxing those that weren’t. As an illustration, Call asks the reader to imagine the feeling of holding a pen “with much more force than is needful, tightening your throat and tongue at the same time.” By adopting a looser mode of gripping, she argues, “ten pages can be finished with the effort it formerly took to write one.” Anyone, she seems to suggest, can manage long hours of demoralizing labor if only they can learn to relax. She prescribed breathing exercises, mindfulness, and cognitive reframing for all sorts of ills. After weeks of following Call’s regimen, her patient still faced the same predicament but now met it “with a smiling face, better color, and a new and more quiet life in her eyes.”
The wide range of patients Call describes in her book fare well under her tutelage—not only the overworked but the agitated; the sleep deprived; the easily annoyed; those overcome by fear of the dentist; and even, in her later work, World War I soldiers returning from the trenches. One needn’t believe in the miraculous results of her case studies to find it notable how closely her recommendations parallel modern courses of treatment. Progressive relaxation, breathing exercises, cognitive reframing—the techniques she prescribed remain the most powerful tools we possess to combat anxiety (barring those, of course, that involve pharmaceuticals or the wholesale dismantling of our economic system). Call achieved celebrity in her time, and her work would go on to influence mind-body therapies and practitioners for decades to come, even as her name has all but vanished from history books.