But work is never responsible for this sense of discomfort.  Only an over-sensitiveness to feelings or a false emotionalism can produce a pain of this kind, unless it should happen to be caused by some poison circulating in the blood.  The trouble is not with the nerves or with the spine, despite the fad about misplaced vertebrae.  When a doctor examines a sensitive spine, marking the sore spots with a blue pencil, and a few minutes later repeats the process, he finds almost invariably that the spots have shifted.  They are not true physical pains and they rarely remain long in the same place.

Pain in the spine and neck is an example of exaggerated sensibility or over-awareness.  Since all messages from every part of trunk and limb must go through the spinal cord, and since very many of them enter the cord in the region of the neck and shoulder blades, it is only natural that an over-feeling of these messages should be especially noticed in this zone.

Sometimes a false emotionalism adds to the discomfort by tensing the whole muscular system and making the messages more intense.  When a social worker or a business man gets tense over his work or ties himself into knots over a committee meeting, he not only foolishly wastes his energy but makes his nerves carry messages that are more urgent than usual.  Then if he is on the look-out for sensations, he all the more easily becomes aware of the central station in the spine where the messages are received.  By centering his attention on this station and tightening up his back-muscles, he increases this over-awareness and easily gets himself into the clutch of a vicious habit.

Sometimes a tenseness of the body is the result, not of a false attitude toward one’s work, but of a lack of satisfaction in other directions.  If the love-force is not getting what it wants, it may keep the body in a state of tension, with all the undesirable results of such tension.  The person who keeps himself tense, whether because of his work or because of tension in other directions, has not really learned how to throw himself into his job and to forget himself, his emotions, and his body.

=Various Pains.= Tender spots may appear in almost any part of the body.  There was the girl with the sore scalp, who was frequently so sensitive that she could not bear to have a single hair touched at its farthermost end, and who could not think of brushing her hair at such a time.  There was the man whose wrists and ankles were so painful that the slightest touch was excruciating; the woman with the false sciatica; the man with the so-called appendicitis pains; and the man with the false neuritis, who always wore jersey coats several sizes too large.  Each one of these false pains was removed by the process of re-education.