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Nervous strain   /nˈərvəs streɪn/   Listen
Nervous strain

noun
1.
(psychology) nervousness resulting from mental stress.  Synonyms: mental strain, strain.  "The mental strain of staying alert hour after hour was too much for him"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Nervous strain" Quotes from Famous Books



... on the journey from which he and Madge had just returned. The old sailor was too deeply thankful to see his first charge safe on land. Poor Miss Jenny Ann could do nothing but lean over Madge and cry; the nervous strain of waiting while the girl was under the water had been too great. Indeed, even the people who, Madge knew, were not in the least interested in her, appeared dreadfully upset. Philip Holt's face was very pale and his eyes shifted uneasily from ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... women is to wait, and they do it under a pressure of nervous strain that makes it slow torture. No turn of fortune could have surprised Deena at this crisis, for her imagination ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... find some signs of his having received accidentally or otherwise a blow upon the head, but on examination he found no scar or wound. The condition he was in was frequently the result of concussion of the brain, sometimes of prolonged nervous strain or harrowing mental shock. Such cases occurred not infrequently. Quiet and entire freedom from excitement would do more for such a condition than anything else. If he was afraid of strangers, by all means keep them from him. Tembarom had been quite right in letting him think he would help him ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... leaves the old soldier a wreck. Why? Because as a man grows older he loses the ability to sleep soundly. He carries the nervous strain of one day over to the next. Life is a serious problem to a man over thirty. To a man under thirty it is simply a game. For my part, give me men who can ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... to the followers who support Base Ball. It is also unjust, in a small way, to the club which has to play two or more games on its opponent's field. Players when away from their home grounds, in a fall series, are more or less under a nervous strain. If there was confusion, inconvenience and difficulty in a local series as a result of a tie game, the folly of the arrangement must appear more absurd when towns like New York and Boston are involved. Dates should ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster

... nervous strain it is to control oneself so long," said Nora, joining Dr. Morgan. "I felt as though I must shriek and laugh, and there I had to sit and pretend to be overcome ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird

... deal in my life, but have always found that too large an amount of purely technico-musical work fatigued me and reacted unfavorably on my imagination. As a rule I only practice enough to keep my fingers in trim; the nervous strain is such that doing more is out of the question. And for a concert-violinist when on tour, playing every day, the technical question is not absorbing. Far more important is it for him to keep himself mentally and physically fresh and in the right mood for his work. For myself I have ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... me on the firing-line the irregular shots were loud and startling, and people were talking and calling all around. Golf, with its reverence for the man about to play, is mild compared to this. The nervous strain of firing is greater, the bodily shock is abrupt and jarring, you have no real chance to make up for a miss by later brilliance or by any luck. No, golf teaches patience and it requires poise, but—as played by the ordinary man—it is no such ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... now and then, and feigning to read a newspaper, which to me, however, appeared an unintelligible jumble of type. My brain was in a ferment. It felt as if pricked by a million needles at white heat. My whole body felt as though it would be torn apart by the terrific nervous strain ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... knowledge, and he went on singing, hymn after hymn, with the chaplain by his side. It was the chaplain who tired first. His voice cracked and his throat became parched. Sweat broke out on his forehead, because of the nervous strain. But the man who was going to die sang on in a clear, hard voice. A faint glimmer of coming dawn lightened the cottage window. There were not many minutes more. The two guards shifted their feet. "Now," said the man, "we'll sing ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... top, and to do so he had frequently to let her fall off dead before the mad white combers that leaped out of the dark. By and by his arms began to ache from the strain of the tiller, and his wet fingers grew stiff and claw-like. The nervous strain was also telling, but that could not be helped; he must keep the craft before the sea or go down with her. There was one consolation; she was traveling ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... cases do certain symptoms, common in childhood, persist into adult life or appear there for the first time, and then usually in persons who, if they are not actually insane, are at least suffering from intense nervous strain. We have already mentioned the symptom of negativism and noted its occasional occurrence as an accompaniment of mental disorder in adult life, and its frequency among children who are irritable or irritated. Similarly, we may cite the digestive neuroses ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... to be nine together—and then he has to wipe the ink off his hands and sigh dismally and say if this thing keeps up he'll be spending his old age at the poor farm, and so forth. It all went according to schedule, except that he seemed strangely eager and under a severe nervous strain. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... was long, and the nervous strain affected me, as it has often done since, in such a way that there was a singing in my ears and dark spots swam before my eyes. Wherever I looked there appeared to my horror a dark blot, and, full of anxiety, I thought that perhaps this was already ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie

... superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. But, after all, she was born in a languid tropical climate, and it is the nervous strain, the rush, the incessant occupation of London which seem to be telling upon her. She gave me two or three times a painful impression of fatigue on Friday—fatigue and something like depression. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... certain, from his own observation, that the mere excitement of opening and exploring the huge collections he had accumulated, during these twenty years, in the locked rooms of the house, had imposed a sharp nervous strain on a man now past seventy, who for all the latter part of his life had taken ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to be quite as dazed as he, and there was a moment of constraint before he went on up to the room that had been prepared for him. Once safely within the room I contrived a moment alone with him and removed his single spat, not too gently, I fear, for the nervous strain since his arrival had ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... New York to-morrow, and you are not to follow me," she said with a final effort at playfulness. "I have been at such a nervous strain over this wretched war that I must be frivolous and feminine for two whole weeks—and what so ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... Both destroyers were trying their best to sink us; we refused to go down. Suddenly the pin of number four gun dropped out and it was necessary to remove the breach block and find the pin. It was all done quietly, quickly, but the nervous strain was awful. We were now within five hundred yards of the Furor, firing; sometimes at her and sometimes at the Pluton. At this point the New York went speeding by and cheered us as she passed. Gradually the Pluton's guns became silent, and it was evident that she was in distress. She was making ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes

... nervous strain of being the Napoleon of Wall Street had had the effect of increasing to a marked extent the portentousness of Bailey's always portentous manner. Ruth rebelled against it. There was an insufferable suggestion of ripe old age and ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... together and followed as best he could. He was paying high, he felt, for the privilege of entertaining the Bartlesville Commercial Club with stories of his prowess. He doubted if he would get over the nervous strain in months, for, after all, Sprudell was fifty, and such experiences told. Never—never, he said to himself when a rolling rock started by his feet bounded from point to point to remind him how easily he could do the same, never would he take such chances again! ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... have been successfully made to enable the operators to form the habit of writing by touch rather than by sight. The operator who acquires the habit of locating the keys by touch writes much faster and with less nervous strain than the operator who ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... college and won success afterwards. Probably they would have done still better if entirely free from the habit. On the other hand, men and women of neurotic inheritance combined with the habit have suffered nervous collapse during college years; and it is scientific to assume that the additional nervous strain produced by masturbation was a contributing factor. Evidently, we dare make no definite prophecy as to what will happen to one who in early life forms the habit of masturbation. There is no excuse for excessive alarm in any ordinary case; but, as we have seen, there are good reasons ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... back to where Dorothy and Mrs. White were busy putting bows of bright ribbon on gifts, and sealing up parcels with the Merry Christmas stamps. Her cheeks were blazing and her eyes dancing from pent-up nervous strain. She grew more nervous each moment. Surely Dorothy would notice it, she thought. And then, too, Dorothy had told her Miss Brooks had asked to see her on Thursday. ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose

... could convict him of a mistake. He seemed to enjoy a storm, and knew nothing whatever of the constraints which with ordinary men prevent abusive and brutal language to those around them. Some of his clerks suffered greatly from him, and he almost broke down two or three from the constant nervous strain upon them produced by fear of his explosions. For my own part, although I came in for a full share of his temper, I at once made up my mind as soon as I discovered what he was, not to open my lips to him except under compulsion. My one object now was to get a living. ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford

... to the practice of her art was untiring, and only the most engrossing interest in it and an indomitable perseverance, supplemented and supported by a physically and morally healthful organization, could have sustained the nervous strain of her life from the day when she was first allowed to follow her vocation to the time when she placed herself in the front rank ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... held his gun trembled, not from fear, but from the nervous strain, and the knowledge that at any moment he might, for the first time in his life, be compelled in self-defence, and for the protection of his companions, to fire upon a party of savages, and so shed the blood of ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn



Words linked to "Nervous strain" :   tension, psychology, stress, strain, nervousness, nerves, mental strain, tenseness, psychological science



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